Gadgetory

hi guys build Zoid here from actually hardcore overclocking and today we're going to be taking a look at the as Roxas III 90 Taichi ultimate motherboard so yeah let's get right into it right starting with the different features scattered around the board and then we're gonna of course go over the VR ends before that this video is brought to you by thermal grizzly and their high-end thermal compounds thermal grizzly makes cryo not paste for high thermal performance and conductivity without being electrically conductive so you don't have to worry about shorting components Cremona is particularly good for replacing stock GPU pastes as cryo not is a non curing compound learn more at the link in the description below so then features features features well let's start off with the most probably the most useful troubleshooting feature there's a postcode down here so that's really nice to see this basically displays a - well it's a letter and and a number code and you can look up in the manual what those codes mean and that'll give you some idea of what's wrong so really useful for troubleshooting under that we actually find to do two BIOS chips so the board does have dual BIOS unfortunately it's not manual dual BIOS there is no BIOS switch button there's no BIOS switch switch there's nothing really to control which BIOS you're on there isn't there are some LED LEDs to indicate which BIOS chip you're on but as far as which BIOS chip gets used you're basically you basically have a primary vile sending backup BIOS and the board will put you on the backup BIOS if there's enough boot issues so basically it's a software dual BIOS implementation I am NOT a fan of these gigabyte has this kind of dual BIOS implementation on basically every single motherboard they've made in the last couple years and it's just not very reliable it'll sometimes switch the bot like it'll sometimes switch which miles chip you're on at kinda random like for no good reason I'm not sure if this is true of the asrock one but generally I prefer manual control over over which which BIOS chip I'm on the the reason that asrock does it the software way and I assume why gigabyte does it the software way as well is idiot proofing because say like there are motherboards that do allow you to manually control which which of the two miles chips you're on and people have a tendency to break both BIOS chips on those so asrock is basically saying look we're not gonna let you choose which mile strip you're on because you're gonna break the board so I get why they're doing it I'd still prefer if you know there was some manual override for that functionality or they could have added like a third backup bios chip you know for for the especially incompetent users who managed to break both miles chips on a dual BIOS board like I still don't get how you do that like if you brick one chip the first thing you should do is just like recover the bricks chip and then you could start messing around with the biases again you shouldn't like brick one and then go and do the same thing that breaks the first one to the second one like I don't know but anyway as Erick has it software wise because they don't trust people to not do that which I guess is fair next to that we have a clear CMOS jumper there is also a clear CMOS button located up here in the i/o section and it's really far away from like well really everything else so you shouldn't really hit that because I have heard that apparently some people press that one like reaching behind four USB ports or something and it's it's just like well this is right above the Wi-Fi antenna so it's not really in the middle of any of the USB ports so I'd just be more careful I guess I mean you shouldn't really we run the risk of hitting that one and down like he back down here again we have the reset button and the power button there's no sort of advanced overclocking buttons like say safe boot retry reserved switch off of well like a cold bug removal switch that say asus boards sometimes have while all of these sort of extreme overclocking boards from asus have that they have a cold bug removal switch but you don't have that here though the board does actually have all of the necessary voltage controls to do that which is kind of interesting like a dork is basically going like okay this board has to do everything and that's I'm real I'm a fan of that I'm really glad that they're just like yeah we've implemented voltage controls for absolutely everything and I went through the like the BIOS manual and well the motherboard manual and it was just like they've literally just every random voltage like these are voltages that are you know like you'd never need to adjust even on like lnto and it's just like yeah you can you can tweak those too so that's pretty neat anyway so that covers sort of the buttons and troubleshooting features the boards have the board has I'm kind of sad it doesn't have safe boot I think all motherboards should really have safe food safe food is great safe food is like the best bus and Asus ever came up with so and and I think more motherboards should really have it like Osric has it on some of their boards but here they don't so that's kind of unfortunate up here worth noting is the this chip right here which is the a quanti a 10 gig LAN and this thing is freaking expensive like this chip is like almost $50 so this is a significant chunk of the board's price tag which really really surprised me like how expensive this thing is so yeah that's that's worth noting and then of course for power of 4 power connectors we have an 4 pin and an 8 pin we do not have any extra power for the PCIe slots which makes sense like some of the other boards opt to have like a 6 pin or a molex 4 for extra PCIe slot power but really on LGA 1151 you don't have enough PCIe lanes to occupy all the PCIe slots I mean AMD GPUs won't actually stop you from doing that like they'll you can run 3-way crossfire on this like I've done it you can you can run the 3-way crossfire off of this kind of PCIe slot situation but this one's running off of the chips at this one's HX off the CPU this one's 8 X off the CPU it's just like it tends to bottleneck the the GPUs when you do that so it's not really a practical practical use and so it makes sense that there's no extra power connector because two GPUs really shouldn't be able to overload the 24 pin and you won't be using more than four two GPUs anyway so that's that's that and for the CPU power you have the eight pin and the four pin and I've seen a lot of people on the internet freaking out about the extra four pin because they don't have PS use that can with the extra four pin power connector and you really don't need to worry about that your 9900 K unless you're doing like unless you're deleting and like abusing your 9900 K in various ways there is no way you're gonna be able to cool more power than what this power connector is able to deliver so you don't need to worry about that just plug in the a pin and you'll be fine the four pin is there if for some like four lnto or various sub-zero cooling methods people who stand down there dies you know deleted with liquid metal and I still don't think even like deleted with liquid metal you would be able to max out the eight pin really that a pin starts starts being an issue once you start looking at like ten core and a higher core count CPUs or well no now x99 was flying off of a single I panned at least up until the six 950 X came out because the six 950 X does like 400 watts plus pretty easily in terms of CPU power consumption so yeah but on the 9900 K you don't need to worry about that being plugged in and if you don't even have a 99 hundred K you have to worry about that even less right like if you have the 9700 K no then let's move on to the v RM and it's a pretty normal I'm it's not super massive in fact I think this V R M is kind of lacking as far as I'm concerned it's I'm not sure how the cooling situation is I can kind of get a glimpse of the heat sinks here and they are rather substantial heat sinks like I'll give asrock that these heat sinks do look like they have some cereal like they have more surface area than a lot of the past heat sinks they've put out on boards but uh the vrm is unfortunately not say like it's not even as good as what you'd get on some of the X for scent like say the X 370 motherboard X 370 Taichi had a better recurve you're I'm from if my memory is serving if I'm remembering it correctly and I think the X 470 tai Chi is also better on the vrm Department which is kind of odd to consider the 9900 Caples significantly more current than in 2700 X will ever do well then a 2700 X well so that's worth keeping in mind anyway the phase layout is basically the core vgpu so that that's what powers your eye GPU and quite frankly this like for a lot of people this will not go completely unused which is kind of unfortunate but well you know because that could be two extra phases for v core power which would be a lot more useful as far as I'm concerned about apparently some people like to use the quick sync feature of Intel integrated GPUs but since I've never messed with that I don't know how useful that is but yeah so you do get a GPI GPU power up there and then here we get V si si si so system agent power and VCC IO so while this all looks like one block of phases like one big vrm it's actually four different ones and VCCS AVC cio are both one phase each v curve is a 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 phase and that is actually like 10 phase with with doublers so you have this chip right over here which is the ir35 to 0 1 the doublers are on the back of the board which is why you can't see them in this picture you have the ir35 to 0 1 for the vrm control and that is running in five plus two phase mode which is fine this chip goes up to eight phases so honestly if asrock kind of changed the layout of the board and added a like two more phases right where VCC sa and vc cio are they could have gone up to six plus two like that would have been totally viable but they're running it in five plus two phase mode and that v then goes into an ir 3598 which is a dual driver as well as a doubler built in together and this actually goes well both of those lines go into a ir 3598 as well but that that one is running in dual driver mode so that then goes to two phases and this then goes to ten the ir35 2:01 you know it's a high-end digital voltage controller from international rectifier pretty standard for all recent high-end motherboards actually I don't think there's been a single high-end motherboard that used something other than a 3 5 2 0 1 4 v core actually no there's the ISL 69 138 that's the that's the only competitor for this chip the ISL 69 1 3 8 and the 3 5 2 0 1 goes up to a switching frequency of 2 megahertz which is more than enough to completely max out the MOSFETs even if you have doublers so you wouldn't actually run it all the way at that switching frequency now the MOSFETs themselves here are Texas Instruments CSD ESD 87 350 s and these are dual n fats so that's why we only have one chip not to their the high side and the low side are integrated into these and each of these is well Texas Instruments rates these there from Ti so Texas Instruments rates these as a 40 amp power block that is not like a actual useful useful output because if you have 10 of them like this and you actually tried to push 40 amps through all of them at the same time you'd be looking at a heat heat output of around 88 watts so let's let's talk vrm heat output figures right like how much heat will the vrm produce for any given amount of current that you're gonna push through it so 150 amps this is around where an 80 700 K or a 90 700 K will max out somebody might be wondering wait a minute the 90 700 K has 8 cores and no hyper-threading and the 8700 Kaos six cores and does have hyper-threading how do they pull the same current well it turns out the hyper threading increases your power consumption roughly by the same amount that it increases your performance and both of those are about 35 like 30 to 40 percent depending on the scenario so the 9700 K with roughly 30% more core with 33% more cores ends up pulling about as much power as an 8700 came style so that's where where those would fall and also the 8086 k would also fall in this category so 150 amps for those and at that current output which this would be a 500 kilohertz switching frequency 5 volts gate to sort 5 volts drive voltage for the MOSFETs which is their rated voltage like that's what they're meant to run on there's no improvement in efficiency from running them one more so running them like that with 1.3 volts out you're gonna be looking at roughly 19 watts of heat output at 150 amps which I am not a fan of that is honestly that's like it doesn't sound like a lot but with motherboards what tends to happen is the heat sinks don't tend to be able to dissipate that much heat though admittedly the heatsink on this board like does really like it does overhang the vrm like all the way down here so I'm not sure how the cooling system will deal with it but that is a concerning number as far as I'm concerned like a lot of boards where you're looking at around 20 watts they they very easily it go well over a hundred degrees Celsius on the vrm one once you start looking at that kind of heat output and it's gonna get worse if you have a 90 so you know that would be the and it's gonna get worse if you have a ninety nine hundred K completely maxed out because then you're gonna be looking at about 200 amps output and at that point this vrm is gonna produce about 27 watts of heat which like again if as rocks did a good job with the heatsink that's really not that hard to deal with I'm not sure about that what the heat sinks like but this is definitely not the most efficient vrm out there on Zee 390 it's also not the worst there's definitely a lot worse if you if you go you know with a lot cheaper boards yeah you can definitely find VRMs where I wouldn't even put the ninety nine hundred K near them but the the thing is like this price tag I think like they should be aiming more 20 watts rather than 27 which isn't a huge difference but like a lot of the other boards are getting you know that 20 watt figure and and some of the old Trahan boards are getting even less than that so this is just like I'm not particularly impressed by that but hey if Hawks done a good job with the heatsink they can easily like that they can deal with that it's just at that point it's really down to the heat same because the vrm itself is not the most efficient thing ever on Z 390 now going up to 250 amps output at this point we're going you know so this would be like practical water-cooled air Coldwater overclocking and really that 200 amps output you'd be looking at like dee-lighted with liquid metal maybe a sanded down die this is really maxing out a 9900 K you're looking at almost like that's the kind of current you would see at around say one point for each volts right so going past that we're talking about like extreme overclocking scenarios so 250 amps we're gonna be looking at about 39 watts of heat and that is that's all that that's honestly really hot and the only good thing is that you know since this is probably what you're gonna hit with extreme overclocking at that point the motherboard is gonna be probably freezing over at idle and you're not going to be running it for extended periods of use so the vrm won't have enough time to actually overheat so it'll be like it'll still be fine but it won't be like it won't be one of like I'd keep the heatsinks on this board if I was running it sub-zero and I've actually done that for a lot of motherboards where I'd keep the heatsink on them but some motherboards you run them sub-zero and and the heat sinks end up freezing over and then then you have a massive puddle and this one I'd be like well the heat sinks are probably gonna defrost and actually go above ambient eventually you know going further 300 amps and this at this point I'd like I don't think you can actually hit that but let's say you did the vrm would be producing 52 watts of heat if Intel let's say Intel went insane and decided to put a 12 core on the LGA 1151 socket uh-huh Sulu 10 nanometer doesn't work out just keep adding costs so the mainstream socket anyway the 300 amps 52 Watts yeah that is just not work this this isn't big enough I the the heatsink there's no way the heatsink can deal with that at that point 350 amps because we've still not maxed out that current rating right because this is a 10 phase so there are 10 of these you'd think you'd be able to pass 400 mm so 350 amps you'd be looking at about 70 watts of heat which is just like at this point we're like past that 52 Watts figure we're past practical like anything in this range at this point like and you're not going to be able to cool this 400 amps which is where the VR I'm absolute like that's the absolute maximum rating for the actual power for the actual duel and that's at that point you're looking at 88 watts of heat completely impractical so while it is like it's completely like these are 40 amp rated dual and that's right it's just not like a practical rating when you have 10 of them next to each other if you had one of these chips right and a massive heatsink dedicated just to cooling one of these chips then yes you could pass 40 amps through it and it wouldn't like burn out or anything but in an actual real-world scenario where you have 10 of them next to each other that doesn't work that 40 amp current rating really practically speaking you're probably looking at more like 20 you know 20 amps maybe ish maybe 25 depending really like the the heatsink could maybe still deal with that well if you threw enough airflow at it it'll deal with that that's one of those things if you crime enough air through a heatsink you'll eventually be able to cool pretty much anything at least up until the point where the metal like the metal itself making up the heatsink is the bottleneck but uh yeah so you know for a 9900 kit like for a 9700 K I'd say this is perfectly like a good fit I wouldn't be worried I think the heatsink should be just fine for that ninety nine hundred K might be pushing it then again if you're not like doing things to the 99 hundred K to fix the cooling situation you're probably not gonna be able to hit that 200 amp figure anyway you know if you're at like five gigahertz with like one point three volts you're not gonna be hitting that you'd be like well you'll be looking at a few amps below that but that would already significantly drop your heat output I mean there's only a 50-amp difference between these two so if you were pushing like a hundred and eighty 80 amps you know you'd be looking at more like twenty four watts and that's I mean that doesn't sound like a huge difference but small differences you know add up so the heat sink might will obviously have an easier time dealing with less heat output there so really like the this vrm I mean it's a ten phase it's not using particularly terrible components in any way way or form but as just not really big enough I was honestly four Z three ninety I was expecting I was rakta to use a to use a freaking like use a twelve phase right like they've run the a twelve phase of this MOSFET with this controller with these doublers on other motherboards in fact like their X 470 Taichi I'm pretty sure uses this vrm with just two more phases and that would have significantly like that would have you know giving you an extra like that would have significantly helped the efficiency if they just added two more phases but I guess they're like I guess they decided that they're not going to bother with the phases and they beefed up the heatsink because the heatsink does look a lot better than on like previous taiichi motherboards but I'm not sure how that works out in in practice but the vrm itself it really just comes down to cooling because itself it's not that efficient especially not compared to like some of the others III ninety motherboards because I'm already aware that there are boards that can do that 200 amps output with that nineteen watt heat output figure from the 150 amps output for this one so yeah that is you know I'm just not impressed especially considering that a lot of other with a lot of other motherboards as rocks just bit like blown the competition away on the vrm quality and then here it's just like well it's not bad but it's not exactly like it's it's pretty borderline between you know being like bad and good like it's average there this is what I'd consider average that's the term I'm looking for like it's in between sort of the good ones and the bad ones because the components themselves are pretty good there's just not really enough phases as far as I'm concerned vgpu fine like I nobody's gonna push 80 amps through that anyway so I wouldn't worry about it actually most people probably won't have that vrm running if you have a dedicated GPU plug it in then this vrm will start like unless you tell the motherboard to keep the I GPU running it'll turn off so you don't have to even worry about that one it probably won't be running VCC sa and vc cio are both on are both minor rails so they don't really push a lot of current so you don't really need to worry about them but they're made up of fdpc fdpc 50 30 MOSFETs from Fairchild Semiconductor and they're controlled by these chips down here so and this one's system agent this one's i/o and those are an Peck APW 87 22s and those are just single-phase buck converters so no you know nothing nothing too impressive right here we regularly see these kinds of like this which I think exactly this chip might be on a couple of GPUs for memory power so it's it's pretty popular for like single phase applications not you know nothing special right there it really doesn't need to be the CCS nvcc IO never go over you know even like 10 amps output that's pretty much where they top out and VCC eye is VCC IO is even lower than SA so you don't need to worry about those we have a couple of linear regulators around here and those are handling all of the extra extreme overclocking voltages like your well one that like as walk has a voltage that they call the cold bug killer which I'm pretty sure is they're renaming of the VCC PLL underscore OC voltage so that would be on one of these regulators then there's a couple of other PLL voltages for the CPU DMI voltage that would also be on the these so there's a whole bunch of voltages that would be just hanging off of these little regulators down here then we have some miniature buck converters right around this hyper blk rebranded o'clock Jen over here so the the clock Jen's on the z3 90 motherboards they're added so that you have either more grant well basically they're added to add more range to the BC LK overclocking so you can crank up the BC LK to like ridiculous levels some boards will go up to all the way up to like 400 megahertz or higher even and at that point it's really not practical but if you're doing like max memory frequency or max CPU frequency the the other use is that they add extra granularity and so you can increase your core clock or your memory clock by very very small increments by using the BC LK so that's why a lot of zi 390 boards will have clock gens and it's you know so this is as rocks and we have some more voltage regulators around that we don't need the details on those those are so low-power you don't need to worry about them then we have VPP down here again this is one of those minor rails where it's like it exists you don't need to worry about it it's not going to blow up that's for the ddr4 memory chips that's for your ddr4 memory and then up here in typical asrock fashion we have a mess like a completely ridiculous memory of erm so this chip right here is AUP 1674 I can't get a datasheet for that but that is a two phase a voltage controller from UPI semiconductor and this right here is the two phases that it's controlling for VDD R which is completely ridiculous asrock is like and I think while Asus also does two phase memory power but as like as rock goes and uses like full size dual and fats for their memory power which is just I don't know why they do that it's completely overkill I assume it's to simplify the Bill of Materials but the thing is well yeah actually they might have a point with that they probably well they could have used one phase instead of two but again they're only fdpc 50 30s from Fairchild Semiconductor so that is typical as well crashing massive overkill memory vrm for the capacitors all around the motherboard we're looking at Miche in chicon FP series 12 FP 12 KS as mark has them repainted black that's basically just something that you can get if you request it it's no big deal but they are rated for 12,000 hours at 105 degrees and they are used completely everywhere and in Chi Colin is a Japanese manufacturer of capacitors so and I think can we see it nope this motherboard doesn't do that yeah this one doesn't do it actually no they might be doing it because they have like oh no that's that's different rails I'm seeing something that isn't there so yeah that is the Taichi ultimate I mean I'm not impressed like I'm not impressed by the the 10 phase they've opted for the heatsink does look like it should be able to handle it like I think the the heatsink you know the the heatsink plays a huge role here because they are the RM is not exactly what I would consider the most efficient of z3 9 tv core VRMs but the heatsink can make like the heatsink can make it or break it right because if you're if you have a terrible vrm and you stick a big enough heatsink on like if your VM was producing a hundred watts of heat right let's just theoretically say it was producing 100 watts of heat well if you put a hundred watt heatsink on it that's not a problem it's not gonna overheat it's still really inefficient but it's not gonna overheat so it really comes down to the to the cooling system from asrock and from what I've seen of the heat sinks they look substantial so I'm just hoping that Steve tests out the vrm thermals on this board because the vrm itself is one of those where this definitely needs a heatsink there's some others III 90 motherboards where the vrm cool like the vrm heatsink is just completely irrelevant because the power stages and just everything like there's too many phases and the phases are too good and it's just like yeah whoever liked the heatsink is an unnecessary add-on for the VR I'm cooling on those but here this needs the heatsink this definitely means the heatsink and hopefully the heatsink is good so but other than that I guess the highlight for most people with this motherboard is gonna be that a quantity a 10 gig LAN chip because I think this is probably one of the cheapest boards to come with it so yeah you know that's it's kind of that I mean it's it's pretty average I'm kind of sad that because in the past as Mark has made boards where it was just like well nobody nobody gets even close to what asrock had and more recently everybody seems to be catching up and asrock I feel like then they might be slip like slipping up but then again I've not looked at like I never really paid much attention to the as rocks XIII 70 lineup or the Z 270 lineup so yeah that is it for the video thank you for watching like share subscribe leave any comments questions suggestions down in the comment section below and if you'd like to help out gamers Nexus then you can you know pick up a mod mat which you can see in the background of the image from store doc gamers Nexus da net and what else is there we also have a patreon page so you can support us from there and I have a channel called actually hardcore overclocking where I do more PCB breakdowns and other overclocking related stuff so if you'd like to check that you know see more of that kind of content and that would be pretty cool if you checked out my channel anyway that is it for the video thank you for watching and good bye