Gadgetory

hey guys build Zoid here and today we're going to be taking a look at the PCB on the EVGA x2 99 micro 2 motherboard which we have right here so it's an m-80 X X $2.99 motherboard and this is the second revision of EVGA x' micro ATX motherboard and as far as i'm the i'm aware the main difference with this one is this here heatsink which looks like an actual heatsink instead of a fashion accessory that you get on 99% of other motherboards before that this video is brought to you by Dollar Shave club's daily essentials starter set this full grooming kit ships at five dollars and includes a trial sized versions of the companies at popular shave butter body wash and wipes and also includes a solid high quality razor and a full set of cartridges go to dollarshaveclub.com slash gamers nexus to get the daily essentials starter kit for just $5 and with free shipping or click the link below so this right here this is very nice to see it even comes with a little fan that is actually hooked up over a standard three pin connector that fan is normally plugged into this fan header right here so if you actually want it to like replace the fan or get rid of it completely and then use like a larger fan to blow air over that heatsink you can and you can still have it hooked up to the same fan header with the same controls as the original plan had so that's kind of neat also the this heatsink is very very high surface area so I mean yeah the this this is what I'd like to see on a lot more motherboards but you know now it doesn't look very pretty does it but personally I like the very sort of this whole motherboard kind of has in my opinion a very business aesthetic like there's not really any unnecessary fluff anywhere anyway let's get into some of the overclocking features that it comes with it's not that extensive and then we'll get into the vrm so right off the bat you get a power button you get a reset button you get a postcode you also get a clear CMOS button it's located on the rear i/o and it's above like reasonably far away from all the USB ports somebody pointed out to me that they accidentally hit clear CMOS buttons on the rear i/o well this one should be a tad harder to hit because your USB ports are way below it so you know that's that and then you get a six pin power connector down here which i think is completely unnecessary because this is a like this is a micro ATX motherboard and the reason why these six pin power connectors exist is basically to feed more power into your PCIe slots the thing is this connector right here as to 12 volt connection so reasonably like you'll generally not want to push more than 240 Watts through it but on an EM ATX motherboard with only two you know 16x slots that's 120 watts per slot like that's almost twice this normal specification so this down here you know this is unnecessary on a motherboard that supports 3-way or for way you know multi-gpu setups I get it I get why you'd want to have this but on a motherboard that only goes to two-way I can't really think of a scenario where where this will actually be useful so you know it's it's kind of pointless I mean it doesn't hurt anything that it's there but it is kind of pointless because this is a micro ATX board so that's that and finally you get also two eight pin power connectors for your CPU which makes sense because X 299 pulls absolutely ridiculous amounts of power if you have one of the high core count CPUs and really you know push the push the clocks on it so yeah that basically covers the sort of the you know the more general stuff and let's get into the VRMs so the most important one and largest one is of course this one right above the CPU socket this is the VCC in and it is controlled by this chip right over here which is a International rectifier three five two zero one which technically now is Infineon because Infineon recently bought international rectifier now that is a up to eight phase voltage controller but here it's running in five phase mode then there's five of these chips which you can't see all of them but that's fine there's five chips down there and those are IR $35.99 and those are running in doubling mode so you can probably guess what what we have here in terms of phase count this is a one two three four five six seven eight nine ten phase and the $35.99 is not exactly the brightest doubler on earth mainly because it's based on uh it's actually a quadruple er so you could if you wanted to you like if EVGA felt like yeah and there was enough space on this board with this controller and this book this doubler well this chip right here you could actually have a twenty phase but uh here it's just configured for two-phase configuration because as far as I'm aware I are doesn't actually have another dedicated doubling chip so they have this thing and that's it like this is the only one you can get you want to double you buy this if you want to quad you buy this but the the issue with this thing is it's not like it doesn't do any current balancing at all which means that you do get like a 10 phase interleaved output it's just not very clever so if one of the phases for whatever reason like on a load transition or something ends up pushing way less current than the other phase on the same doubler the voltage controller will not know about it and it'll ignore it because the voltage controller the three five two zero one still sees the entire vrm as groups of basically two phases so you like groups like this those can current balanced so if you had way too much current going through these two relative to everything else then these two would get reduced duty cycles for a bit to bring all of the other phases up to equilibrium with like two equal current output but if you have a current imbalance between this power stage in that power stage you can't do that because the three five two zero one has no idea that these two are actually separate separate phases as far as its concerned this is one phase and the 3599 doesn't do anything either that that chip is has eight pins PWM signal goes in PWM signals come out that's basically all that chip does so it doesn't have any monitoring or logic in it or like more advanced logic in it so this is like it's a ten phase it counts as a ten phase it's just kind of dumb so the actual power stage is used here our IR 35:56 --is which is not the most powerful power stage and I can't write today so 35:56 that's a 50 amp power stage and that means your theoretical maximum output for this entire vrm is 500 amps this is actually above the maximum theoretical output of any ASIS x to 99 motherboard which is in my opinion extremely disappointing no for this board but for the company right I like I'm disappointed with the ASUS motherboards like this you know the the like because the thing is like asus has a RAL rampage six apex and that's still stuck on an eight phase and then there's this thing which is just this is an EM ATX motherboard it's never gonna probably never gonna see liquid nitrogen unless I decide to put it on liquid nitrogen because EVGA did send me a review sample of this motherboard which is why the picture quality is terrible so that's if if you're wondering why that what's up with that it's because I took the picture and since I can rely since I have the board in hand I can read the chips myself I don't need the photo for that more so anyway max output is theoretically 500 amps though if you were actually running that you know if you had a sky like CPU and you had to push 500 amps which on liquid nitrogen you just about might hit that kind of current output kind like not really but you can get pretty close to it 500 amps 2 volts you would be looking at about a hundred and thirty watts of heat output on this vrm and at that point this heatsink right here would not be adequate but that's why EVGA makes the X 299 dark because the X 299 dark has a 12 phase a bigger heat sink and that that kind of power output only produces about 96 watts of heat instead of 130 so that gives you some reference point for Y you know we have even stronger VRMs on the extreme overclocking boards but looking at more reasonable applications like say well if you wanted to run an X 299 chip on air you can so if you were on air you'd be looking at around 200 to 300 watts of CPU power consumption because much more than that and your heatsink is not gonna deal with it that's just kind of a hard limit for air cooling though I don't know maybe if somebody like if there was a like a heatsink with like an absolute ton of heat pipes they might be able to exceed that but all of the the ones that like I've dealt with you you basically like you swap out the fans for something ridiculously loud and you're still stuck at 300 watts for sort of maximum heat dissipation but 200 to 300 watts for those kinds of power levels the vrm would only be producing 14 to 20 watts of heat which is slightly more than what the X 299 dark would do under the same low you know under the same power output but then again that dark has a much bigger vrm this kind of heat output on the vrm should be no issue for this heat sink right here especially because it has forced air flow through the because of the fan so that's great and then for water cooling you're gonna be looking at 300 to save 500 watts you can actually push 600 watts ish on water cooling if you have a seriously massive water cooling loop but generally speaking you're gonna top out around 500 going much above that is Jenn or like it's not really practical on water actually it's just not really practical in any circumstances to go above 500 Watts worth of CPU power consumption so with 300 to 500 watts of power consumption the the motherboard would be producing 20 to 39 watts of heat on the vrm which that should still be well within the capabilities of this heatsink mostly because of the fan if it didn't have the fan then like I think any same thing exceeding much more than 25 watts would actually start being problematic because this does have a pretty high fin density and so like its passive cooling capabilities aren't gonna be exactly incredible but the way this is actually set up is that fan blows basically into like light these faint like there's basically channels set up for air to go through like those fins right here that I highlighted and so the fan actually blows into those things directly and then you'd have hot hair exhausting out the top and bottom of the heatsink so that's it's a really good way to design it because yeah it massively improves the VR I'm cooling situation and also EVGA has a very thin thermal pad on the bottom of that heatsink which really really surprised me because a lot of motherboards they'll go for like ridiculously thick pads because the thicker your your thermal pad is a you know the worse your manufacturing tolerances can be but EVGA is using what looks like a point five millimeter pad which is like the smallest normal thermal pad thickness that you would normally see so yeah that heatsink should have like that heatsink basically makes this motherboard a lot better than a lot of the other X 299 boards because VR my is this is comparable to a lot of motherboards it's better than some it's worse than others but there's not that many boards that come with and this to cool the vrm and this makes a huge difference so I really really like that right there so that covers the VCC in you know it might be viable for liquid nitrogen but I don't like I already have the X to ninety-nine dark so I don't see a good reason to abuse this little board but if it turns out that the BIOS is actually capable which it might be because or this board doesn't like versus the dark the main loss on this motherboard is that the dark has a whole bunch of LEDs scattered around it for trouble for like easier troubleshooting which is really handy when you're on liquid nitrogen and stuff stops working and you're going like well I don't know what isn't working and the post code isn't being helpful then those LEDs get you know are really really useful but those are all missing here but you know there's plenty of other boards that don't have them and you can run those on ln2 fine so if this I don't know it it might be viable but it will really depend on if the the BIOS is up to up to scratch because there are certain voltages that you need to have control over and voltage ranges which is I think EVGA might not give you like ridiculous voltage range on this board just because it's meant for you know nor like high-power em ATX gaming builds more so than or like editing builds or well whatever you want to do with the name em ATX form factor motherboard with the next $2.99 CPU just null lnto because they have another board for that and that's the dark but this does still have the two memory slot like one memory slot per channel situation from the dark so I'd hope that it's decent at memory overclocking as well and at that point you know it's just like well does it have the voltage because the vrm would mostly be okay until you like hammered an 18 cores things like the eighteen courgettes ridiculous but the other chips should be able to handle those so that's the that's the VCC in there and then we move on to the minor rails starting with VCC sa and vc cio and since I don't know which one is which and my best guess is that this is VCC SA and this is VCC IO well they're both controlled by this chip right here so basically that that'll be like that in terms of controls and that chip is a ir35 2:04 not a zero one this is basically it's the same family of seep chip as the three five two zero one it's just a lower phase count which makes it cheaper here it's running in a 1+1 configuration for the VCC i/o and a VC CSA the power stages are again 3550 sixes which is ridiculous overkill for these rails because neither of these does very much especially if you're on ambient cooling VCC i/o and VCC sa my recommended range for both of these is like one point one volts we see CIO and 1.05 VCC si there's no reason to raise them higher than that and in fact even on liquid nitrogen I end up running the si si si around 1.05 and VCC io at like one point three five because on ln2 it really helps with mesh overclocking but on ambient cooling I've not actually noticed any benefit from raising either of these and I did all of my ambient benchmarking with with the X 299 dark around one point one volts for both so yeah you know neither of these needs to do a whole lot of a whole lot in terms of moving power both of them at for 15 amps output at 1.2 volts assuming you would set it to 1.2 volts because the power efficiency gets a little bit better if you go for lower voltage 15 amps 1.2 volts you'd be looking at about 1.3 watts of heat for each which you that's they don't have heat sinks so it makes sense that EVGA opted for ridiculous overkill though there are plenty of motherboards out there which for VC CIO and vccs I go with much much weaker single-phase vrm designs compared to this because again like these are not high current rails so yeah that this is just overkill this is nothing to complain about they're moving on we get the memory and you can't see anything on that side because it's all blur well this sides not that much better is it but the memory situation is similar on both sides so you have two phases they're separate they're not together there's another ir35 2:04 running I assume 1+1 again because I've not actually managed to well I don't have a pin out for these chips so I can't actually figure out what they're wired up to because I can't check where where their pwm signal lines go but I'm assuming what's going on is so this one's VDD are just because that's where the VDD our rail normally sits and then this one should be VPP and both of these should are controllable in software I assume so they're going to be hanging off of the three five two zero four so yeah and both of those and actually for the actual power stages there these are not the 35:56 s I mean they're a lot smaller these are TDA 888 24 zeros from Infineon which is basically the same as all the international rectifier stuff at this point because IR is owned by Infineon but the TDA 88 24 zero is a 35 amp dr Moss part and that's basically a type of power stage and I think it's actually just a naming convention difference between Infineon and a lot of the other manufacturers where a lot of the others will call their stuff power stages which as far as I'm aware power stages are all technically direct Moss anyway so yeah so Infineon Infineon calls this a dr moss whereas like international rectifier considers the 35:56 a pal i our stage yeah because you know spelling power with e is just too mainstream when you can spell it with i but it makes sense them but so power IRC so you have the power our stage from international rectifier and then you have just dr moss for anthony on 35 amps output for memory power is ridiculous overkill ddr4 really doesn't pull that much current so yeah I know I mean the X 299 dark was a similar situation where there was like a 60 amp power stage from Intersil on the memory and that was just like more overkill so yeah this is slightly less overkill but still very very overkill and more and the same applies to the VPP rail like this barely pushes him you like this pushes even less power than the VDD are so this is basically like using the TDA 88 240 0 imeem to the 88 240 is mainly a cost-saving measure because I know in EVGA uses this power state dr mosque well it's a type of power stage so power stage on a whole bunch of other motherboards like the z3 like I think most of their z3 70 line up uses these so for like V core and everything basically so since they have a bunch of them for those boards I assume the logic was well we already have a ton of these we can just smack them onto the em ATX board where we don't need the current handling capabilities of the 35:56 is so and on the other side of the the CPU socket you get the exact same thing 3 5 2 0 4 read EDR VPP so it's actually basically mirrored right across the CPU socket so yeah that's that's the that's pretty much it for the board there's not really much else left well actually nothing left at this point so this on like hardware-wise I have nothing to complain about you get your to eight pins you get a very powerful dumb ten phase VCC and vrm which will also run the core if you use a KB like X but KB like X is just this thing that shouldn't really exist so you know you have your nice powerful VCC and VR MVCC sa and vc cio are both massive overkill because they need to actually cool themselves through just the surface area of the chip and the surrounding PCB so you know massive overkill is the easiest way to which achieve a scenario where they won't overheat memory power is must-have overkill you get some basic overclocking features like you get basically the bare minimum to get around with and you get this unnecessary six pin down here so yeah not much to complain about considering that this is you know not a not like a top top-of-the-line board very well balanced I'd say and I think like I still think this could be viable as like the the cheaper alternative to the X 299 dark so I may or may not well we'll see like I still need to get around to testing the board but hardware at wrong wise I really like what I'm seeing so far so that's it for the video thank you for watching if you'd like to support gamers Nexus there's a there's the patreon as well as store dot gamers Nexus dotnet and if you'd like to see more overclocking related stuff PCB breakdowns and such I have a channel called actually hardcore overclocking where I do a bunch more of you know PCB breakdowns and other overclocking related content as well as live streams and overclocking with like what nitrogen guides that kind of thing so yeah that's it for the video and goodbye