The German overclocker Roman Hartung aka der8auer has put his hands on Intel’s X299 platform. According to the video uploaded on his Youtube channel, most of the motherboards around have poor MOSFETs/VRM heatsinks. Overclocking a CPU up to 4.6GHz he has been hitting dangerously high VRM temperatures.



During his tests, der8auer measured the VRM temperatures on several motherboards hitting high values. On the front and the on the back of his Gigabyte AORUS X299 Gaming 3 motherboard, the temperatures read 84°C and 106°C, respectively. According to him, the heatsinks simply aren’t capable enough to keep the MOSFETs reasonable temperatures. He also mentioned that there are motherboards, like the ASUS X299 Prime, that achieve even worse temperatures. For testing purposes Prime95 was run for 15 minutes without AVX load. Would he have enabled AVX then the temperatures were even higher.

According to der8auer most of the current motherboards are poorly designed for overclocking. Skylake-X CPUs draw a lot of power and he suggests to not overclock the CPU if you are using a motherboard with a single 8-pin PSU connector. According to him, motherboards with only one 8-pin connector, will make the single EPS-12V cable hit temperatures around 65°C, which is again dangerously high. However this fact is also linked to the quality and design of the power supply itself. In that sense it would be interesting to see test with different power supplies keeping the rest of the testing conditions the same.

Finally Roman “der8auer” Hartung concludes that no matter which motherboard you’re going to use for overclocking, it must have two 8-pin EPS-12V connectors to be on a safe side.

If you want to watch the video yourself you can find it right below here:



Source: Youtube