AMD Ryzen (Zen 1+2 only)

Strictly technical: Matisse (Not really) - Overclock.net - An Overclocking Community

First and foremost, a word of warning. When reading ANY of the AMD Ryzen 3000-series "Matisse" launch-day reviews, the first thing you should do is navigate to the page which lists the hardware setups.
AMD supplied four different motherboards to the media, one from ASRock, ASUS, GIGABYTE and MSI. In case of the ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero Wi-Fi motherboard, the media was instructed to use 0066 bios build,
which had been vetted and approved by AMD. However, newer bios builds were available and ASUS has also (allegedly) told the media to use those versions. What exactly has transpired here is still under investigation,
but regardless of the actual reasons behind it, the consequences might be rather significant. In practical terms, all reviews which were done on ASUS Crosshair VIII Formula or Hero motherboards using other than 0066 bios build must
be considered invalid, at least partially. Reviews using other ASUS motherboard models (not provided by AMD) are under suspicion as well.

Few days ago, I noticed certain anomalies, while measuring the power consumption of the different Matisse SKUs. Inspection of the power management parameters revealed no issues, which could have explained those anomalies.
The external power measurements (VRM DCR) revealed that the CPU was consuming significantly more power, than its power management should have allowed it to. I initially suspected that this was AMDs own doing, in an effort trying
to boost the performance of the new CPUs even further, but further investigation indicated otherwise.

AMD had no part in it, and the actions by ASUS are the sole reason behind it. The investigation revealed that ASUS is altering one or more power
management parameters of the CPU, causing it believe it consumes less power than it actually does. As a result, the frequencies will be higher than the actual power budget would normally allow to. Tricks like this are pretty much a common (mal)practice these
days however, there is a good reason why this must be considered worse than the others: this "thing" is completely undetectable without external measurements and rather deep knowledge, but also there is no way to disable it either.
Even a person such as myself, who can control most things on these platforms cannot disable this "thing". As you may notice, at the moment I call this issue the "thing", since I'm giving ASUS the benefit of a doubt.

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