Gadgetory

hey guys build load here and today we'll be taking a look at the V RMS on the crosshair six hero which is the top of the line board for a m4 from Asus it costs around one hundred two hundred and fifty dollars which for a m4 is actually a really high price point but if you compare it to like Intel motherboards it's sort of upper mid-range in terms of price point whereas the feature set is off it offers is actually really really good so we will only be going in detail over the VR ends as well of pointing out some interesting little extras for overclocking that this motherboard includes as it is an rog board which is sort of the overclocking centric division of Asus so with that out of the way let's get straight to the vrm the vcore vr v core vr m is this part of the cpu v RM right here so you have one two three four five six seven eight phases for your V core and the other four phases right next to that are the SOC voltage so that's the horizon system-on-a-chip part of the CPU and that is basically Rison integrates a lot more of the sort of motherboard functionalities into the CPU so you have the usual the integrated memory controller as well as a PCIe as well as some PCIe connectivity but it also integrates m dot 2 u dot 2 USB 3.1 audio and super i/o so you have a lot of things built right into the chip that would usually have been supplied by the motherboard so that's why this is no longer which is why you have recore and the SOC voltage instead of say system agent like you have on Intel boards where that's literally just or a GPU voltage is the equivalent for Z 270 so yeah that's the SOC voltage and that's made up of four phases as you can clearly see up there the controller for the entire vrm is this chip right here and that is a asp one 4:05 it belongs into the digi+ line of Asus parts and it is a custom part made for Asus by international rectifier there is no public datasheet available for it however I can tell you that it is a four plus two phase voltage controller and we've seen it on some previous ROG boards on the EZ 270 side as well as possibly even before that so I wouldn't like I haven't seen the older ROG board so I can't really tell you about those now then this is a 4 + 2 phase voltage controller and as I've already said the vcore is 8 and the SOC is 4 phases so Asus does have to use a doubling scheme for to achieve the phase count that the motherboard actually comes with this is done using international rectifier ir35 99 ICS which you can find on the back of the board unfortunately I won't be showing those to you and those basically take one PWM signal in and they cut the frequency in half and split it between two phases so essentially you you get like a proper doubling scheme it's not something like where you hook up one driver Mothe one driver chip to two MOSFETs or while two phases which doesn't really achieve the the same effect as multiple phases so this vrm is comparable to a true eight phase of the rme until you really really start cranking up the frequency because the International rectifier 3599 doubler is top out at 800 kilohertz switching frequency output so you can't actually go above 800 kilohertz switching frequency not that that should really matter as most motherboard ship at 200 to 300 kilohertz and really really cranking up the switching frequency doesn't really net you any gains even in extreme overclocking scenarios as vrm like high-end of erm these days with you know high phase counts like eight phase is doing 800 kilohertz can handle transient loads very very well as is so there really shouldn't be a reason to worry about the fact that this erm tops out at 800 kilohertz compared to some other designs which might top out higher for the same given phase count now then if we take a look at the actual MOSFETs that Isis is using which are these chips right here these are Texas Instruments the next fad so these integrates to both the high side and the low side MOSFET and the part number for these is CSD 8:7 350 these are rated to do 40 amps at 125 degrees centigrade and go up to 1.5 mega Hertz switching frequency so they are very like very very nice parts they are extremely efficient achieving 90% efficiency at around 25 amps they do of course drop in efficiency as you approach 40 amps they do not improve their current throughput as you lower the operating temperature as they are packaged limited not silicon limited so basically you can run them at 125 degrees just the same as you can run them at like 20 degrees not that they should run at 125 degrees as the DRM is a you know with the phase count that Asus has gone for this vrm is capable of supplying 320 amps on the vcore voltage so you should never actually be reaching that 40 amps per phase limitation that this vrm design has here and as such you should never really get that hot so you know very nice job from Asus on the vrm this is perfectly capable of handling any air-cooled overclocking water-cooled overclocking even ln2 cold overclocking this really shouldn't have any issues interestingly enough this is also the same exact erm design that you would see on a loss of z2 70 rog board where it is unsurprisingly a lot more overkill than it is here because then is an 8 core and therefore tends to be more power hungry as you really crank up the crank up the overclocks the SOC uses the exact same offset and so ends up with a 160 amp power capability also at 125 degrees so really this vrm right here is really really overkill and especially the SOC par at 160 M is kind of ridiculous and I am kind of suspecting that the reason why the system-on-a-chip section of the VRM is so like capable of delivering such high current is that in the future when we start seeing rising based AP use the GPU portion of those will run off of the SOC voltage not the V Corps and there's a good chance that some of the integrated GPS we will be seeing later down the line might actually be very very powerful both in terms of power draw as well as performance so the high phase counts that you see on Zen motherboards compared to say like V 270 which usually only uses two phases for the eye GPU it can be you know can probably be explained by the difference in the GPU cores that will be coming on the AP use so that covers what powers the CPU so let's move on to what power is your RAM ddr4 vrm is located right over here unfortunately I have no idea what it's controlled by not that it matters too much since Ram is very very low power it is a two phase erm which is actually a higher phase count than which you will find on most other m4 board's most other m4 boards opt for a single phase design well Asus has opted for a two phase the MOSFET right here our Nyko semiconductor which is a budget mosfet maker is one way to put it so Nyko semiconductor pa1 6ba you can't find a datasheet for this small set but you can find a datasheet for its predecessor which isn't a whole lot worse in terms of specifications so for my calculations I use the datasheet for the previous version of this MOSFET not the PE a 16 I use the PE 6 1 6 VA so yeah which was recommended to me by a you know by an Asus engineer when I asked about what the what the part numbers are here so this vrm setup using as you can clearly see 1 2 3 4 MOSFETs is good for 30 four amps thirty four amps at 125 degrees centigrade and you know is ridiculous overkill for ddr4 as ddr4 pulls very very little power with most explain 2 to 4 watts for each stick so even if you have four sticks in there you're only going to be pulling around 16 watts at one point - - like 1.3 5 volts so very very low current demand for the vrm that isis has opted for it's you know there's no heat sync on this vrm for a reason it's because it really doesn't need to do that much work so nice job from Asus there as well and the fact that it is a two-phase could leads to this board having some memory overclocking advanced some advantage in memory overclocking compared to other boards which don't necessarily use a two-phase design which would then suffer from slightly worse voltage regulation so that covers all the V RMS that you really really need to worry about on this board interesting little overclocking feature that asus puts on their rog series motherboards is this this little hole inside the CPU socket so that exists to give you to allow extreme ln2 overclockers to basically put a thermocouple in right behind the CPU to measure if there is - basically check the condition of the thermal paste between the ln2 pot and the CPU itself because sometimes the thermal paste fails when overclocking and this is a really good way to detect any major temperature difference between the CPU and the ln2 pot which has a thermocouple which most of those have thermocouples built in as is already so this allows you to check the sort of thermal paste condition because the CPUs own internal thermal sensors do not work under ln2 as ln2 they're not calibrated to work at those temperatures so they read all kinds of random garbage so yeah you also do get a postcode on this board there are power on recess and other you know useful overclocking overclocker friendly buttons located lower down on the board which I can't show you because this is where the photo ends and that pretty much covers it for everything you need to know thank you for watching like share subscribe leave a comment down below if you have any questions you can go check out the full rise and review up on the gamers Nexus website and please do consider donating to the gamers Nexus patreon to of course support what we do here thank you very much for watching and see you next time you