Question Asrock A520M-ITX/AC board behavior (100w limited)


Junior Member
Feb 6, 2022
I have an Asrock A520M-ITX/AC board, with a 3800X installed in it.

Being an A520 chipset, there's limited settings for setting the clocks on the CPU. There is just ECO mode ON/OFF.

With ECO mode on (setting the CPU to a 65w TDP), Ryzen Master lists 87w PPT, 60A TDC, 90A EDC (typical stock 65w Ryzen numbers) and it will hit those numbers during a Cinebench23 run.

With ECO mode off (setting the CPU to the default 105w TDP), Ryzen Master lists 142w PPT, 95A TDC, 140A EDC.

This is all normal.

However, when I run a multi-core run in Cinebench with ECO mode off, I get this:

The PPT is limited, initially, to about 110w, and it settles in at 100w after a bit, long before it thermal throttles.

Is this an A520 chipset thing? Is it a "feature" of this specific motherboard? Do I need to look for another issue, perhaps? I have an 4+4-pin EPS connector plugged into the motherboard. Is it possible that one of the 4-pin EPS connectors is non-functional? Previously, this computer was using an Asus P8H61-I board with an i5-2500 (non-K), with just a 4-pin EPS, so one of my EPS connector or cables might be bad.

Note: This is actually advantageous to me, because the Thermalright AXP90-X53 cooler I'm using isn't going to be up to the task of cooling a CPU pulling the full 142w that a 105w TDP Ryzen will pull (the previous high of 86.5C was the previous run), so I'm ok with this. It's not an issue that needs to get resolved, more of a question of why this is happening.

I'm just curious if this is expected behavior, either with this specific board or with A520 boards in general.
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