MSI MAG B850 Tomahawk Max WiFi Motherboard Review

In recent years the alure of overclocking has somewhat lost its luster.  Performance enhancers such as boost and multi core processors has removed the need to overclock on a daily basis and yet, hardware makers still include those controls for us crazy enough to flip some switches and turn some knobs.

As with all of our reviews, we pit the default speed system against the overclocked one in a head-to-head byte match.  The effective overclock for these tests is.. Nothing?.

By nothing I am speaking to the overall clockspeed of the system.  By enabling PBO we are tweaking the power limits of the CPU so instead of throttling sooner it will allow the CPU to trigger higher boost levels.

I have mentioned this several times in my reviews recanting the lack of “usable” performance.  For instance, manually tweaking the CPU required considerably more effort to adjust the individual cores and enable higher power targets.  These resulted in notably higher scores in certain benchmarks and system crashes in others.  Since my overclocking tests rely on an entire suite I needed to toss those runs.

With the PBO Enable setting I was surprised at the overall performance gain for very little effort.  As with most modern overclocks this depends largely on the quality of your CPU and cooling system along with memory settings and even the ambient temperature.  While I am celebrating higher scores, my gut is telling me that most of it is from the memory profile and that didn't change much.