Puget Systems did some testing with a Ryzen 7950X in "content creation" workloads to determine the impact of Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) and CPB (Core Performance Boost) on performance and thermals, and while the results may not come as a surprise to those on recent AMD or even Intel platforms, they're worth bearing in mind by anyone more concerned about energy, cooling, noise, stability, etc., than squeezing every last drop of performance from their CPU.
(PBO and CPB were not independently tested; they were both either enabled or disabled together in the benchmarks, so for the sake of clarity I won't mention CPB outside of quotations.)
Though the effect of PBO on performance was not negligible in all benchmarks, in many cases there were no gains at all. The same was not true of PBO's effect on temperature. See the graph and paragraphs below the heading "Ryzen 7950X PBO and CPB CPU Temperature" from the link.
On the whole, it is amazing how much disabling PBO and CPB reduces the CPU temperature. On heavy sustained loads like Cinebench multi core, we went from 95C to just 65C – that is a 30C drop in CPU temperature!
Even relatively lighter loads like Photoshop went from temperatures ranging from 60-80C with PBO/CPB enabled to just ~42C with them off. Others like Premiere Pro, After Effects, and DaVinci Resolve were frequently hitting 95C with PBO/CPB, and dropped to 40-62C with then disabled. As a reminder, these are workloads that saw no difference in performance, yet the 7950X CPU is as much as 30C, or even 40C, cooler with PBO/CPB disabled.
It's also worth mentioning that motherboards deserve special attention, because their automatic or default settings cannot be trusted. Puget observed that by default, the motherboard they used overclocked the CPU beyond AMD's specifications. The board was a Gigabyte X670E AORUS MASTER, but they noted that the behavior is common across brands:
The issue is that the motherboard we used (the Gigabyte X670E AORUS MASTER) was defaulting to overclocking the CPU beyond AMD's official specifications. From what we have seen, this isn't restricted to Gigabyte motherboards, but something that almost every brand seems to be doing. This also isn't something entirely new, or restricted to AMD. On the Intel side, we have dealt with a setting called "MultiCore Enhancement" for years, which allows the CPU to run all the cores at the maximum boost frequency when they should be scaling based on the number of cores that are being used.
(emphasis mine)
I've read of cases in which overaggressive motherboard settings have destroyed CPUs in a matter of weeks.
The new AMD Ryzen 7000 Series of processors bring terrific performance across the board, but have been criticized in many reviews due to the fact that they often hit CPU temperatures of 95 Celcius under heavy loads. However, we have found that they only operate at these high temperatures when...
www.pugetsystems.com
Again, these results will come as no surprise to many here. And this has nothing to with the "3D" parts specifically, of course, but does challenge the wisdom of overclocking even by generally accepted automatic methods that require little to no user intervention.