Motherboard makers are always looking to get an extra edge over their rivals. This usually results in suspicious practices like incorrect power consumption reporting, excessive power consumption, and skirting boost parameters. While such practices are quite common on Intel platforms, AMD has largely kept vendors from getting involved in the sport.
With the launch of the B550 motherboards, ASUS is introducing its Performance Enhancement “technology” on the AMD platform. As per marketing slides, APE boosts performance by as much as 17.5% in power bound scenarios. Going by official documentation, APE is essentially a tweaked version of AMD Precision Boost Overdrive (PBO) which essentially increases the power limits allowing higher all-core boosts and for longer.
In our own testing with a Ryzen 7 3700X and 3900X, the benefits of PBO were quite limited and varied from application o application. That’s in line with the above chart where the 3700X gains just about 5% with APE. The Ryzen 9 3900 (non-X) and the 3950X see more prominent benefits as they are more likely to be bound by power.
