Gadgetory

uga went crazy with its ex $2.99 dark motherboard and the craziest thing they did evidently was add a real heatsink the heatsink has actual fins through which the heat pipe is routed towards the IO and into another large aluminum block which is decidedly less finned but still thinned the tiny fans on top of the board look a little silly but we also found them to be somewhat unnecessary in most use cases just having a real heatsink for once gets the board far enough and also the brilliance of the PCH fan is that it pushes air through both the m2 slots and eventually towards the heatsink near the rear i/o before we get into that this content is brought to you by the thermal take flow RGB closed-loop liquid cooler which is a 360 millimetre radiator plus 3 120 fans that are RGB illuminated the if then we'll take it ringing fans at that this is a 4.5 done a detect pump which is one of the faster pumps you can learn more at the link in the description below the last time we did an X 299 vrm piece was on the Asus Rampage 6 motherboard the ram-paige 6 extreme and we found that on that board it was somewhat easy to cause it to throttle without direct airflow directly over the vrm pushed through a case fan this motherboard has a few things changed one is again that it's got actual fins on it and then the other is that it's got two tiny fans on top of those now in addition to these is a PCH fan the PCH does not need direct cooling at all it barely needs a heatsink on the chip set however when we took it apart this fan blows air through the m2 slot which is a separate story entirely but once it gets through that slot if you look at the back of the board there's no place for the air to exit so it can't go out here so it's channeled in a way that the air is forced up into this area of the board and although it loses a lot of its pressure at this point because now you've made a 90-degree turn so you lose 30% of your pressure at least plus the distance it's traveled even though it's lost some pressure it's still air flow going over a small heatsink relative to this one inside of the i/o shield or the crowd so these are designs that have been sorely lacking and motherboards lately in fact the last really good fend heatsink like this one that we saw was probably on an Asus workstation motherboard from the x99 series so EVGA survived that look a little bit and it is actually functional and this board more or less proves it so the a series content previously we found that we were able to get high overclock stable with direct airflow by putting a fan over the heatsink they were not stable in fact they throttled hard when we ran say 4.5 gigahertz at even 1.18 volts and I think 4.3 at 1.15 may have been throttling as well so that was a problem and these fats and chokes and everything EB J's basically got the chokes directly contacting and the MOSFETs directly contacting and they have insane attention to detail the MOSFETs have individual thermal patch for them rather than a long strip of the thermal pad which in strict theory is better but that's getting pretty granular and probably into immeasurable differences still though good attention to detail now they've left the capacitors exposed which is fine we did end up putting a thermocouple on the capacitors we put a thermocouple on one of the chokes under the heatsink and we put another one on one of the MOSFETs under the heatsink so we're able to take measurements of all three core components further we ran tests with and without these fans disabled and one test with this fan disabled as well so we're able to see the kind of impact that the fans have and whether or not you actually need them active on the board or at what point you need them active on the board just to recap quickly from the ACS content here's a look at one of the frequency charts where we were able to show throttling so this throttling on the clock occurred because of the choke and MOSFET temperatures exceeding what their safety value was set to in the BIOS let's start with some perspective looking at the EVGA boards performance with the vrm component temperatures between the EVGA SX 299 dark and Asus Rampage six extreme we've got a chart that currently only looks at results when we're at 4.5 gigahertz with 1.2 0 volts with these settings the Asus Rampage motherboard operated at a throttle point when no direct cooling was added nearing 100 degrees Celsius on our thermocouple measurements of the chokes and the MOSFETs keep in mind that these are external case measurements and that the internal sensor would read higher temperatures thus resulting in the observed throttling we don't know exactly what the internal temperature is but that's the trip point adding on 140 millimeter case fan brought it down to 65 degrees which is well within spec it's it's way better than it ever needs to be in fact the EVGA x2 99 dark motherboard operated at 73 to 74 degrees on the chokes when disconnecting the vrm heatsink fans meaning that EVGA is heatsink alone with zero fans and with no case fans on it is able to dissipate the heat far better part of this is a better vrm which has four more phases than the rampage and spreads the heat over a wider surface area the other part is that the heatsink is fin as a heatsink should be and similar to the old ACS workstation x99 designs the finned heat sink then connects via heat pipe to another block of aluminum where the heat basically is sitting waiting for the PCH fan to cool it off or it just slowly dissipates and exits the i/o shield enabling both the vrm and PCH fans brought us down to about 65 degrees on the choke or about 68 on the MOSFET with the uncooled capacitors at 65 degrees perfectly within spec once again this is comparative with the thermal performance of the Asus board when under a 140 millimeter case fan that's sitting on top of the VR app now that we've gotten the comparative data established here's a look at all of the EVGA X 299 dark numbers tested at various clocks under Auto settings the fan follows system temperature and lands at about 4200 rpm for which we'll have noise charts in a moment and the auto fan speeds stick to around 50 900 to 6300 didn't have your workload you BGA's vrm fans try to keep the MOSFETs at around 60 to 65 degrees from what we can see but this is still way overkill for vrm temperature remember these types of components can take over 100 degrees Celsius and the vrm heatsink is enough that we're only ten degrees over its supposed target of 60 see landing at 73 - so d4c when both fans are completely disconnected up to four point five gigahertz and one point two volts in open air you could use this board without the fans active at all they would help in the case of course but we'd recommend just running that lower quieter rpms if you're using a hotter case and again vrm components can take 125 to 150 degrees Celsius depending what they are some capacitors are limited to 105 degrees Celsius but even if that were the case here which it isn't these are running pretty cool thermal scaling has the four point three gigahertz and 1.15 volt configuration at about 55 to 57 degrees with the four point five gigahertz and one point one eight volt testing nearing 61 degrees four point five gigahertz and one point two four volts which is stressful intentionally to push the board is landing at 67 to 70 degrees on core components or sixty degrees on the capacitors this was also accompanied by a fan speed increased to 6300 rpm which increases our noise to somewhat noticeable levels plotted over time now the EVGA x2 99 dark motherboard gradually increases in temperature without any fan support but eventually reaches steady state it does take a long time to achieve steady-state which speaks to the mass of the heat sink the passive dissipation abilities and the vrm design the 4.5 gigahertz test with fans unable to reach a steady state quicker and also keeps the lower temperatures so what obviously for comparison here's a chart of just the MOSFET temperatures between the ACS and EVGA boards when at the same clocks and voltages the EVGA board even with its fans disabled does well to compete unfortunately EB J's BIOS had time of testing did not permit voltages below 1 volts so we couldn't test 0.99 2 volts at 3.9 gigahertz on the EVGA board like we did for a SUSE and here's the noise chart the fan tends to stay around 50 900 to 6200 rpm which has us in a range of thirty four point four to thirty five point eight DBA of noise and this is measured at twenty inches of distance of course it's not just the noise level but the type of tiny fans are whiny and that means the type of noise is more noticeable and annoying than the lower words of bigger fans running the fans at 5900 to 6,200 RPM is nearly entirely unnecessary in our tested configurations though your CPU cooler and case configuration will also dictate performance we'd recommend operating closer to 3300 to 4200 rpm which measured at 28 DBA to 30 DB a with a noise floor of 26 TVA in the room the fans aren't too terribly loud but are annoying at the top and particularly at the high end of the rpm scale where we measured 46 point 3 decibels that's nearing the noise levels of some graphics cards that moderate rpm for load level cooling so this is just a board we wanted to highlight for doing something actually sensible for the vrm heatsink it's a real heatsink you can tell that EVGA is primarily a GPU or a video card company because the heatsink they've stuck on here it's not that different from the video cards that they make from the heat things they make for video cards so they've done well with that the fans are unnecessary for the most part you could probably make use of them in a warmer case for instance likely the dg7 that EVGA also makes but the overall execution of this is it's mixes of brilliant and mixes of unnecessary brute force I would say this is unnecessary brute force they're kind of annoying once they're really spinning up you will notice it they get whiny but if you manually control it it'll be fine evj could do a better job here by tuning the fan profile on these fans to slow them down a bit though you have that ability as well within BIOS you just change it to either a fixed percentage or smart mode and then set your thresholds manually the ones that are set right now are pretty aggressive you don't need anywhere near that level of cooling for open-air and for the frequencies we test it in voltages this is pretty smart as well there's a story behind this that is perhaps worth exploring later but the short of it is it cools the m2 device and then it gets some very tiny often unimpacted temperature check or airflow through the extra heat sink over here which is attached via a heat pipe as far as I'm cooling don't get too excited about that you're almost certainly not going to throttle and I'm too SSD controller and if you do technically speaking yes the controller wants to be cold but the flash actually wants to be warm and by reducing temperature too much you technically shorten its life now is it meaningful probably not without some serious cooling or low ambient cooling or something like that but something to think about these are cooling them to devices is largely marketing at this point but regardless the fan here that uses a larger blower fan radial design pushing air over into that chamber is pretty good and we like it builds ideas analyzing this board for us he will have a separate video with full PCB analysis and vrm analysis on this channel and we're going to be doing some quick memory tests to see if EVGA has fixed their long-standing problem of poor memory clock performance on their motherboards if they have that's a big deal it has every bit of hardware that it needs the X 299 dark to approach and achieve that goal of better memory clocks we just need to see if it actually does but as far as the cooling the heatsink is well designed and it's sad that we have to explicitly call that out like this but it deserves it and hopefully other motherboard makers take note because you know the argument we hear is making a heatsink like this that's finned doesn't look as good I think it looks pretty damn good and I know it cools infinitely better then pretty much every other heatsink on the market yes like this one this is an EVGA x99 board that heatsink design is awful but that has been extended now into basically every board on the market like the a C's rampage so there's clearly there's a lot that can be gained from this level of density and surface area and you know if you really want it to look good motherboard manufacturers you just put a sort of plastic cover right on the very top but leave the rest of it open for airflow and then you get a mix of it looks kind of good and it's actually functional but of course I think function looks good and that's subjective anyway so that's all for this one you can 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