Solution: 5900x crashes on MSI B450 Gaming Pro Carbon AC motherboard

Upgraded to a 5900X on a MSI B450 Gaming Pro Carbon AC Motherboard. To do so, I upgraded power supply to 850W Gold and flashed the BIOS to the latest one. Even though the motherboard supported the chip, the 5900X kept crashing. I would get a black screen and the power button wouldn't work. I had to flip the switch in the back to restart. The motherboard would light up an error on CPU.

Many of the solutions I found on the internet were old and primarily recommended disabling PBO and locking cores to their base clocks. They also recommended changing all sorts of settings. This ruins the performance of the chip and make its acquisition pointless.  Needless to say, I was very frustrated. 

Lucky for me, I found a post by an MSI guy who gave the absolute best answer.

The problem is the BIOS doesn't automatically set the limits for the chip, so the chip will draw more power than the board can handle and crap out. 

Probably wouldn't be an issue if I had a more modern motherboard or a better quality, but such is the way that it is. 

Now I get all the performance of the chip, with Precision Boost Overdrive, and I never go above 90 C. 

I can't use the curve optimizer, but that's asking a lot for a five year old motherboard that was never intended to have this kind of chip. 

From MSI Forums

"Alan J T
Well-known member
Global Moderator
Joined Sep 11, 2020

Looks like your Power Limited you will need to change that in the bios

Set to 200 for all three should give you plenty of power then set CPU Platform Thermal Limit to a max of 90 C"

I'm also using PBO Enhance Mode 3, and Set Global C state control to enable.

Update: all that is wrong. I found this video that taught me what I was doing wrong. There were specific bios settings that had to be done for the curve optimizer to work. The curve optimizer is a way for the chip to do the same work with less energy. Because it uses less energy, it has more headroom to boost higher when it needs to. My system was crashing because I had the wrong bios settings.

CORRECT BIOS SETTINGS:

 
AMD Overclocking > Precision Boost Overdrive > Advanced
PBO limits > Disabled (counter-intuitive and muy importante otherwise crash override)
Curve Optimizer > All core > negative 20. (I did negative 30 but I was seeing stutters everywhere)

5/27/2023 update: In the heat of the afternoon, my apartment reaches 85 F. If I *DON'T* set the curve to -30 my computer gets really hot and shuts down. It runs fine. The stutters I was seeing was related to my video settings. Also, I set CORE PERFORMANCE BOOST to DISABLED. I'm interested in stability, not epeen. 

I ran a 2 hour stream of java Minecraft with Rethinking Voxels at 1440p 60 fps streaming on OBS and recording. Solid. 

6/2/2023 update: tuning my video card caused my CPU to crash. I used Ryzen Master to identify which were my preferred cores, and I gave them a -25 curve instead of a -30 curve. I tried adding a +100 mHz clock boost, but it lowered multicore performance.