Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers and access dotnet and I'm joined by hardware editor Patrick Stone he goes and today we're doing a video on what makes a or actually what makes up a motherboard we're talking about specific components on the board so some of our key topics here we'll be talking about the PCH or platform controller hub also the chipset PCI Express and how X 8 X 16 that stuff works and is relevant to you and then of course the vrm which is what handles the power phasing so we'll jump in and start with the vrm or voltage regulator module and the vrm here is comprised of multiple chokes and other devices that Patrick will tell you about in a moment but at a top level what the vrm does is steps down the power from the power supply to a usable voltage that the CPU can use so your CPU might be specs for 1.2 maybe you've overclocked and you have 1.3 volts it's actually phasing down the 12 volt supply from the power supply through these phases here on the board and and converting it to that more usable voltage and it's a it's responsible for delivering cleaner voltage to reduce a Vedra or voltage drops which introduce instability in the CPU especially when overclocking so if you're overclocking and you have a voltage drop because your motherboard is lower quality I'm not delivering clean voltage that can actually create a blue screen or other errors so I'm Patrick I'll let you talk more about the specifics of the VRM thanks Steve if you're looking at the phase power design each of these little phases has three components the first component which you can see here are these little circular devices those are your capacitors you've probably seen capacitors before there's nothing new there but they are one of the parts of a vrm another part that's right beside that it says SFC on here the c is for a choke and the choke is one of the essential parts of a vrm the SF and this one just stands for super ferrite and you can use your elemental reference for the ferrite and then the the next piece here underneath this heatsink pretty cool little dragon type heatsink underneath there you're going to find driver MOSFETs driver MOSFETs are a fancy version of a mosfet which is a low-power circuit and the driver MOSFET has three parts inside of it one driver I see and then two more MOSFETs and it's just like an improved version of the MOSFET so it's just a in this particular case a really nice vrm that's going to control that power reduction I think Steve's going to go now and give us a little information about when you're looking at the motherboard box look at the specs you might something like eight plus two and see what is it that was that mean sure so if you're looking on new AG the product page or something like that and you see eight plus two power phase design or phase power design where you see four plus one or something in that range the number preceding the plus is actually indicative of the number of phases that the power goes through so on this board we can actually count the chokes which are on either side of the CPU and that tells us how many phases are on this board so we can see four on this side four on the top that's eight so it's the eight plus and then the number after the plus is how many phases are dedicated to ram or hyper transport if you're using AMD or other others devices that need to step the power down so over here we actually we have two phases I think for the memory on this board might be one I think it's two though and on AMD boards you'll have one for hyper transport as well next though we're actually going to talk about the PCH or platform controller hub and this is the chipset this is a very critical part of your board selection process when you're using any type of CPU am the or Intel they both have different types of chipsets like z87 or h87 or 990 X or 990 FX I'm actually going to let Patrick go into detail on the PCH and what it does it used to be the Northbridge and Southbridge but AMD merged it and unified it originally intel has taken that as well they call it the platform controller hub and these two leases bridge terminology so I'll let you talk about the specifics awesome thank you yeah so you guys are the gamers Nexus so what matters most is certainly video games well maybe not that's that made it that may not be everything but literally the most important thing okay yeah it's the most important thing let's be serious but anyway so this chipset this platform controller hub on an Intel board is certainly going to factor into your gaming tremendously one of the ways that it does that is it's going to determine whether or not you can overclock the CPU right so we're looking to socket here and if you have something like let's say an H series chipset from Intel then you're not going to have that overclocking functionality it's going to be locked due to that chipset but if you have something like a Z series then you got the overclock so selection the chipset really matters if you want overclock and get more performance out of your machine another thing that it has a determining factor in is these little guys over here you get your SATA ports right so if you want to go raid let's say you want to go raid 0 a striped raid array so you can get more speed out of say like a regular spindle based hard disk drive then the chipset has to be able to support that and again just check your chipsets feature set to see if it can do the raid last thing that I want to go to on a chipset is this PCI Express the chipset also plays a role and the number of PCI Express Lanes that the motherboard can feature in this case you got like PCI Express x16 PCI Express X and PCI Express x1 and so the chipset plays a role in determining how many lanes of PCI Express you're going to get and that is extremely important if you want to use two graphics cards or three graphics cards or if you haven't even better motherboard for graphics cards so all night ins yet well maybe GTX 780 TS maybe 780 Ti okay alright and sounds cool indeed it does alright but I'm gonna pass back to Steve now because he's going to go into a little bit of PCI Express for you sure so PCI Express as it comes to gaming we are mostly looking at x16 and X 6 X 8 slots X ones you're generally looking at things like video capture cards audio cards generally smaller expansion stuff that isn't doing heavy duty video work and then the x16 x8 SAR obviously for video cards and you can actually count the number of pins and see if it's X 16 or X 8 and so on this slot we can physically see that there are half the pins as on the x16 slot you can actually see that on the back of the board as well right there as far as specifics once again we'll throw to Patrick yeah so the the reason that the number of pins here matters and the reason that the number of lanes matters is that's that's how many bits per second you're going to be at a transfer and so with something like a graphics card or now we're moving closer to PCI Express solid-state drives those things going to be transferring lots of data per second and so an X 1 slot simply can't transfer enough data per second and so we have to move to an X 8 or next 16 and if you want that ultra graphics in your video game you got have you got to have the ability to support that sort of bandwidth that again like we said earlier is tied back into the chipset Steve you gonna close it out for us yes just some consumer advice and buying advice here to kind of go back through all three of these components again when you're shopping from other board first of all check that link in the description below for a full article on picking the best motherboard for you to quickly recap some of those points though looking at VRMs when you're looking for a good phase power design and a board specifically for overclocking it differs for AMD and Intel until you want a little bit more phases and do you tend to be pretty good at 6 plus X phases for basic overclocks you might want to go 8 if you're doing something more extreme heat sinks are pretty critical for extreme overclocks because obviously you're driving a lot more heat through the mosfet and through everything else around the CPU so if you are doing OC and then grab one with heat sinks if you're not you can probably lose a heatsink or two looking at the PCH for Intel your choices are basically z87 or h87 unless you go with a server socket and z87 is what we generally recommend for mid-range to high-end systems that are doing more overclocking or need unlocked features or might want to sli down the road or crossfire h87 is completely good for any mainstream build or any budget build where you don't even care about overclocking it's not a concern to you go with h87 it'll save you some money and again full articles two of them actually on this in the link below finally PCI Express don't worry too much about x16 vertex eight because in testing at the end of the day a dual x8 or triple x8 config is going to have a delta of a couple percent between more x 16s like dual x16 if you can even find one of those boards an affordable price so don't don't stress out about dual x16 verse x8 x8 because it's going to be like a 3% Delta max right and other than that that's I mean that's pretty much all the buyer advice we have for you here again check the links in the description below we have a couple more videos coming up so subscribe to the channel if you liked it and we will see you all next time peace