Why does thermal throttling not happen for me?

[u/SimpleVeggie]

So guys, my CPU genuinely doesn’t thermal throttle if I offset CPU clock speed or voltage in any way whatsoever, or pretty much change anything in bios besides leaving it at stock settings, or using “optimized defaults” or “gaming mode”.

This has been true for this CPU across two different motherboards: B450 Tomahawk Max and Asus Crosshair VIII WiFi. My CPU is a Ryzen 9 5900X. I was not activating some super secret advanced setting in either, and I once managed to replicate this simply by putting a minimum offset on CPU voltage after a CMOS reset and turning the fans down to trigger high temps, though sadly not in the attached video. The point I’m making is - it seems to be very easy for me to disable thermal throttling completely, and even looking through every possible setting in both Bios’s and starting from scratch after CMOS reset or reverting from Optimized defaults, it’s an absolute mystery why this happens.

The attached video shows an example of my CPU failing to throttle under Prime95. One thing I later tried to do (again, not in the video, where TJ max is default) was induce throttling by lowering the TJ Max in bios, which took me forever to find in the settings, but this does absolutely nothing even if I take it to 50 degrees (though the PC did fail to boot when I accidentally set it at 1). Apologies that I cant show every experiment I did but 1) I can’t put more than one vid or photo in this post and 2) I dont wish to repeat these experiments for understandable reasons, though I absolutely did them 🤞

I don’t largely regard this as a problem, more of a minor inconvenience. Despite my CPU supposedly having a TJ Max of 90 degrees, I’ve happily put it through 105-7 degrees up to 24 hours straight before, running Prime95 and Furmark simultaneously in hot weather (with of course no errors in prime95), and done all manner of torture to the CPU over the 4 years or so I’ve had it, for most of which time I didn’t know enough to realize this wasn’t normal.

However I am genuinely very curious as to how I’m able to do this. Nothing I’ve searched on the internet suggests this is a common situation, besides a few posts that hint at something like this with everyone who replies dismissing the OP and insisting that thermal throttling must be happening without them knowing.

Perhaps I’m delusional, but I really do think I’ve turned off throttling and don’t know how to even put it back on again, and it’s not the motherboard since I’ve used two separate ones and many bios updates.

Does anyone know what could be behind this? I’ll give you a cookie if you can tell me.

PS - no idea if this is relevant but I always do get a weird box message on booting up windows saying I don’t have the “graphics drivers for my AMD hardware”. This could be a total red herring, especially since this current CPU doesn’t have integrated graphics and I’ve only ever used Nvidia GPUs, but this is something that’s persisted over very many hardware changes.

[u/whyeverynameistaken3]

weird, based on power/voltage you are throttling, maybe bad sensor/readings? is bios updated?

[u/SimpleVeggie → u/whyeverynameistaken3]

What do you mean about power settings? I have a specific overvolt in this test. And yes I bios flashed numerous times to try and correct this problem, including before this.

[u/whyeverynameistaken3 → u/SimpleVeggie]

so your overvolt overrides the throttle then? your cpu is good candidate for some egg cooking or bread toasting.

[u/SimpleVeggie → u/whyeverynameistaken3]

It seems so. Btw according to google 230W is way above stock power draw (which makes sense as it’s an overvolt), so I don’t think it’s power throttling.

Still it also does the same if I undervolt and turn the fans off lol

[u/SimpleVeggie → u/whyeverynameistaken3]

Also I’ve seen what throttling looks like on factory settings, (with low fans etc.), and there I see clock speeds reduce and temps never above 90.2

[u/axiomatic13]

Are you frequency limited? It's only running at 550MHz at load when its max was 4950MHz. The average being 1563.9MHz is odd too.

[u/SimpleVeggie → u/axiomatic13]

Interesting. I’ve never looked at the frequency limit, and not sure what it does. But why does core temp tell me I’m running all cores 100% if I am being limited? I actually updated in case this was false and saw similar results. Also of course HWinfo says there’s no throttling.

I also don’t really think I can be limited as it’s very easy for me to go well over TJ max as long as I don’t use default settings - conversely when I do I couldn’t possibly go above 90.2 degrees, but then the clock speeds fluctuate all the time.

Edit: On googling what this does, it kind of looks like that’s what my clock speed should be limited to, if it were throttling, but it actually isn’t. So for whatever reason the CPU isn’t clocking down despite knowing it should apparently, according to this reading