Gadgetory

guys build Zoid here from actually hardcore overclocking and today we're going to be taking a look at the voltage regulators on the EVGA z3 90 dark motherboard and you know I've already covered all of the features of this motherboard in the last video so let's just get right into it because this is still going to be a long one before that this video is brought to you by the coarser 1i 140 compact gaming PC the corsair 1i 140 is a small form-factor PC outfitted with a 9700 K RT x 28 e 32 gigabytes of RAM and a 480 gigabyte nvme SSD all housed within a 2 millimeter thick aluminum chassis the corsair 1i 140 is a 12 liter system fit for desktop use with the same size the I 160 counterpart with higher-end parts learn more at the link in the description below starting off with the most important and largest voltage regulator on the board say hello to the 12 phase V core VR I'm off of an X 299 dark because well it's not actually the same they've changed it quite a bit it has a different layout different inductors but the power components themselves are actually very similar well anyway that's our V core vrm right here then over here we have one phase of VCC i/o so that's our VCC i/o over there then up here we have a GPU power which is kind of an interesting conclusion because like the FTW from EVGA as far as I'm aware does not actually have an IG PU VRM at all so yeah if you want to run your eye GPU this board can the FTW can't which is kind of an interesting and I did that I did this mistake twice that's si sorry that system agent down there this is VCC IO I don't know why I keep mixing that up it like I've previous take I made this exact mistake I was like okay I'll just restart it and I won't make that mistake anyway so that's our main voltage regulators around the CPU socket pretty standard layout here well actually it's not completely standard because they move the VCC i/o up here but the reasoning for that is very simple you need two different voltage controllers because of how many different voltage like the RMS you have here right you have your VCC io v GPU so you need a controller for those two and then you need another controller for V core and VC yes a so al I said earlier V Corps is a twelve phase V RM and as we all know nobody makes a twelve phase voltage controller they only go up to ten phases as of right now and so EVGA is of course using doublers to achieve the higher phase count the doublers used are the ISL 66 17s and these are a really cool doubler and the reasoning for that with them being really really cool is this is one of the few doublers if not the only doubler that I'm aware of that does proper current balancing so essentially what that means is this chip has enough circuit like has enough logic in it to monitor the current going through this phase and this phase and then if one of them is pushing let's say you end up in a scenario where this one is pushing 20 amps and this one's pushing 40 amps well that's not ideal for your VR M efficiency which considering this is a twelve phase that you're not actually going to see that but anyway just example you know just as an example so let's say you're pushing 20 amps through one and 40 amps through the other phase well this is not optimal for your VR M efficiency and it's not optimal for like the RM thermals because this power stage will end up getting a bit hotter as a result and ultimately you know it's it's imperfect so what the doubler actually does is it monitors the current through this phase and this phase as well and when it sees this kind of current in balance it will actually extend the PWM signal going into this phase which is really really cool because like the next current balancing method that doublers use that I'm aware of is they literally just skip like what they would do is they would skip the PWM pulse for this one so basically you'd get two pulses into the lower current output phase and the issue with that is it tends to actually like put like it doesn't achieve balance so what it does is it makes the imbalance in the opposite direction so instead of like you end up with 20 amps going through the lower phase and 40 going through the upper phase so this doubler can actually avoid that and that gives you better efficiency because you actually spread your loading across the entire vrm very very uniformly and then the is l6 six one seven of course reports the combined current of these two phases together to the actual voltage controller over here which is the ISL 69 1 3/8 which is running in 6 plus one phase mode and the plus 1 is of course being run into the VCCS a down there so yeah we have our six you know six phases from the ISL that goes into our doublers the doublers spit out to independent pwm signals so that's what's going on in terms of control now the doublers like yes they boost your efficiency they also improve like that's the main thing they boost your efficiency they also reduce your output ripple because you do actually get like a twelve phase of URM essentially by doing this there is one downside to them they do put a bit of delay on to your pwm signals so you will have it basically makes it more difficult to achieve certain levels of transient response performance because your pwm signals are gonna be a bit slow are gonna be a bit delayed so but an interesting thing about EVGA is motherboards is that they really like to use very low inductance inductors and this is kind of interesting because basically the trade-offs for low inductance on your inductors is lower inductance better transient response so basically that this is like you get better transient response with your lower inductance the downside is that you get higher output ripple and you also lose efficiency but if you you know design your VR a court like correctly you can basically balance out all of the negatives of your inductors because the impact they have on efficiency is actually really really minor so the the doublers can kind of take care of that and the output ripple well we're interleaving 12 of the damn things you could have a pretty like one of these can have a pretty bad voltage waveform but when you properly interleave every like 12 of them at that point is stops being an issue so the doublers kind of eliminate any have the ability to potentially eliminate any issues you would have with output ripple caused by very low inductances so that's kind of an interesting thing where like EVGA is using a hundred and fifty nano Henri's whereas say asus so asus is doing something weird where they have their faces like that well they have their power stages and inductors running in parallel so the inductors themselves rated for like 400 nano Henry's but since they're in parallel they're effectively 200 when you see motherboards that have like faked phases those inductors are also in parallel and they're usually rated at around 400 nano Henry's and effectively therefore become 200 because they're in parallel gigabyte likes to run 300 nano Henry's MSI tends to run around 220 when they're using like one inductor like when they have separate phases so yeah that's it's kind of interesting that EVGA basically has 50 nano Henry is less than all the other board vendors it is worth noting that for example on GPUs is actually pretty standard practice to use inductor values of below 200 nano Henry's mostly because GPUs have such very well they're the power consumption of a GPU is really not consistent so you end up with massive transient or Spacek elite transient response becomes extremely important and so voltage regulators on GPUs tend to opt for lower inductance inductors just to sort of you know confident well basically to deal with the inconsistent loading that they end on end up under anyway so that's kind of the control scheme here ultimately can we make a judgment from this not really you'd need an oscilloscope to actually measure how much of an impact all of EVGA is sort of control and output inductance decisions have made now what we don't need to use an oscilloscope for is to figure out the efficiency and on this vrm it is absolutely ridiculous this is the same 12 phase they had on the X 299 dark in terms of the power stages in phase can't and the power stages are therefore the ISL 99 22 7 B's these are 60 amp smart power stages more and actually these are thermally enhanced smart power stages so and they're extra compact so these are like really really special and really really expensive they're like five dollars apiece so yeah there's a good you know well there's more than six there's like 60 now so we have sixty in the week or we have another ten there and a five over there so we have like seventy-five dollars worth our stages on this motherboard EVGA has you know just kind of blown a good chunk of the budget on just that but hey the end result is that this thing gets some of the best efficiency out of like this is the most efficient 12 phase on Z 390 and it's almost the most efficient the most efficient we are I'm on Z 390 period it just kind of depends on what kind of load you're running anyway so as for the thermal enhancement part while this metal tab on these is literate directly connected into the the actual silicon of the power stage and that basically means that these things have a very low thermal resistance which means they're very good at cooling themselves through heat sinks or really just through ambient air because their case they're casing material is not as much of an insulator as what you normally get the end result is that if you actually measure the operating temperature of these power stages like on on this metal tab and they're not putting out a significant amount of heat per per phase like if you're pushing like say one watt on one of these the temperature difference between the temperature on the tab and the temperature inside the power stage is going to be like what 0.5 degrees Celsius so essentially if you measure the temperature of one of these from the top of it you're measuring the internal temperature almost right whereas with a lot of other power stages you make that same measurement and the temperature difference for one watt can be anything from 3 degrees to say 7 right if you're like especially terrible so very very low thermal resistance on these and basically they're they're great at cooling themselves so yeah EVGA has opted for these and you know what that just just the fact that the power stages are like thermally enhanced and really good at dumping eek was not enough for EVGA you may have noticed that this board is gold-plated freaking everywhere and a lot of that is because EVGA decided that you know what the is it's not enough that we have probably the most efficient 12 phase on z3 90 no it also has to like be completely capable of cooling itself without a heatsink so you have this these basically metal strips right here which are the exposed ground plane all over the vrm so you know that cooling free cooling right there for the power stages again and then of course they they have the screw holes just plated more and then the outer edge of the PCB is also just gold-plated like that so essentially the PCB itself is upgraded into sort of being more of a heatsink than the PCB normally is so that's what that's what's going on with all of the gold plating that EVGA has on here anyway at this point you're probably wondering okay so this vrm is really good at dumping eat it has very extensive power stages how efficient is it very very efficient so operating parameters for this vrm are going to be one point three five volts output 500 kilohertz switching frequency and five volts drive voltage because these don't actually run on anything other than twice than five volts anyway and that's a terrible five there much better so 5 volts drive voltage 500 kilohertz switching frequency and that is per power stage so that's like one megahertz at the controller right because the doublers cut that switching frequency in half so one megahertz at the controller 500 kilohertz on the power stage so with these operating parameters on this erm it will produce is it is capable of pushing a hundred amps output at only 10 watts of heat dissipation it doesn't need a heatsink this kind of this kind of load it really doesn't need a heatsink and interestingly enough this is actually if you look at the efficiency curve for a standard power stage like say the ISL 9920 s to seven B unfortunately that falls in the normally the curves look like that that falls into this part so this is actually like but honestly if the board is pushing less than a hundred amps assuming EVGA has the voltage controller properly configured it shouldn't even run all twelve phases if you're pushing only a hundred amps it should probably run like ten or eight phases max because pushing all twelve phases for a hundred amp load is actually less than optimal efficiency at this point but anyway moving on to a higher load so this is like the upper limits of what a 99 hundred K can do before it becomes completely uncool well can do in terms of sort of ambient cooling methods and we ready for this you're gonna be looking a like dilated CPU with potentially like a direct die frame you're you're not gonna be able to achieve this kind of current draw on the stock Intel the solder ring because the solder just doesn't like it's not good enough at thermal transfer to do that anyway at 200 amps output this vrm is only going to produce about 18 watts of heat so that's what I said about you know we're moving up on the efficiency curve so the this the the ratio of current to heat output is better here than at you know there anyway moving past 200 amps going into the 300 amp territory we actually start getting into like actually the interesting thing is this 12 face hits peak efficiency pretty much at 1200 at 200 amps output so it's pretty much like optimized for running a 99 hundred K as far as I'm concerned and without a heatsink line you which like you know EVGA has a very elaborate cooling system on this motherboard but I think this board looks really really good without anything on it so quite frankly well you might need you might still want the chips i heatsink because that thing looks horrendous but uh you know if you'd like to admire your vrm while the board is running in your system especially if you have like a side panel window which putting this board in in case is not the correct use for it but you know if you do go that way you can actually run it without the heatsink and it's gonna be fine and you can stare at your very expensive power stages these power stages probably like three of these probably cost more than the heat sinks on top of them so anyway moving on the 300 amps output you're gonna be looking at about 30 watts of heat so now we're back at that part of the efficiency curve that's on par with that like the efficiency is back at to the levels of like the hundred amps output and then going up to 400 amps you're gonna be looking at about 47 watts of heat and then finally 500 amps which is like like honestly liquid nitrogen is going to top out around 300 amps it's not even going to reach 400 amps but you know this is a crazy 12 phase so for fear of for Theory's sake 500 amps what would happen well it would produce about 66 watts of heat and interestingly enough EVGA rates this vrm while they spec the board's power delivery system for about 800 watts which tells us that they probably have it like the cooling system on this motherboard as its did like as it chips is designed probably for around 50 watts of heat dissipation because 800 watts at one point 3 5 volts is somewhere between that 400 and 500 amp figure so yeah um you know this this VR I'm is absolutely massive overkill for a well I wouldn't like its peak efficiency right it nails that peak efficiency so that's really nice for these given power stages so yeah it's it's a really nice erm me like is technically ridiculous overkill like there's nothing so if you had better heat like if you have heat sinks on these then there's nothing stopping you went running like there on the efficiency curve right but uh still it's like a good choice like I feel like EVGA didn't do the like because there's a couple Zi 390 motherboards out there which technically at the higher current loads can do better like the the 300 amps 400 amps and 500 am figures there's e 390 boards that can handle those loads better than the dark the thing is at that point you're actually going to be like disabling huge chunks of their voltage regulators to maintain decent efficiency below 200 amps which this one kind of like they shouldn't have to do that until around like a hundred so you know ii v vga has basically like not none the silly thing because they could have like there's enough space here to put a 16 phase if they felt like it it just wouldn't be even remotely practical to do and also the is on 99 the six nine one three eight doesn't actually support that they could have gone for a 14 where they'd have like a 7 + 0 setup and then another controller but anyway the this is like a really good fit for a ninety nine hundred k in terms of power delivery definitely kind of excessive but not to say the extent of some of the other zi 390 boards out there so let's talk about some other zi 390 boards for comparison sake i pulled up my note while pulled up the numbers for like the Aces five phase that Asus has on the Maximus 11 extreme as well as the Maximus 11 gene and that that vrm at 200 amps output gets about 21.5 watts of heat dissipation so it technically could still run without a heatsink but considering that it has less like that VR M is more compact and than this one it has less inherent capability to cool itself it doesn't use doublers so it's a like well actually that wouldn't impact it unless you crank up the switching frequency really high which you can do in the in the BIOS settings but anyway so you know that this is more efficient than like the vrm you get on a Maximus I'll have an extreme where Maximus 11 gene excessive like honestly as I've said like it's a bit excessive still but it is worth pointing out that it is more efficient at 300 amps the the gene you know that while I like to call it the asus v phase cuz that's what it is would do about 36 watts and at 400 amps it would do about 58 watts and that's by no means like I don't consider that a bad vrm it's just like it's a good 5 phase right you wouldn't really get a five phase that does better than that it's just like it's still a five phase and it is less efficient than this and then for ridiculous mode gigabytes z 390 extreme board and MSI Z 390 godlike so both of those use a 16 phase vrm using international rectifier components so they don't have a current balancing doublers whatsoever but there's so many phases in there that from basically 200 amps up they actually have a efficiency advantage at least if the phase shedding works properly at 200 amps those boards the sort like the MSI and the gigabyte board the the top-end MSI and Giga Byte boards would do 16 watts for the the 200 amps 24 watts at 300 amps and that's if they shed the phases so that would be running in 12 phase mode so yeah it's kind of interesting that like I told gigabyte like why didn't you go for a 12 phase like honestly under normal loading this thing is gonna have like the this thing is wasting power running X and another 4 phases that the like you're not peeking efficiency yet because yeah that that 16 watts is assuming they would be hitting the efficiency if they weren't then it would actually get worse efficiency and anyway going up to 400 amps the gigabyte board would only produce about gigabyte or MSI zp9 you got a gigabyte extreme Z 390 godlike from MSI would do about 34 watts so yeah that we RM is impractical levels of overkill this is what I consider practical levels of overkill this is also like like acceptable in my opinion I still think Asus should have like the controller they used could have gone to a six phase and it wouldn't have really like you would have taken up more space on the board but it wouldn't have really had any other negative impacts so yeah I'm not sure why they're like especially on such expensive boards too but anyway it's not like it's a disaster but I really like this VR I'm ultimately I don't think this is like a huge design win over the other board vendors but it is a really really nice vrm and it is like well thought out anyway moving on to the system agent vr m as well as the vc cio they're both single phase this ones of course hanging off of the 69 138 here and it uses an ISL 99 what it wait now nine nine one four zero yes so it uses a 999 one four zero which is just a regular power stage capable of 40 amps output and yeah I mean system agent doesn't really pull much like system agent doesn't pull a whole lot of current ever so this is actually perfectly adequate for for powering the system agent absolutely no problem with that in fact it's rather overkill you quite frankly wouldn't heat a heatsink on like this this if they didn't put it under the vrm heatsink that the V curve erm has it like it doesn't need its own one I'm like if they've moved this phase up here or something so anyway and this is actually nicer than a lot of the VC csavr M's you find on a lot of other boards but again this is like this is impractical levels of overkill because the other boards also don't even need to heat sinks because system agent just pulls so little power compared to a lot of it like compared to V core or anything like that vc cio same situation vc cio pushes even like the the IO pulls even less power than the system agent so the this is even more overkill because that's again the same is l99 one four zero one four zero there except the VCC i io is controlled by this controller right here which is also controlling the V GPU and that is an ISL 6969 one three three and that's a four phase running in two plus one phase mode so you do get a two phase I GPU power and four i GPU power the EVGA is using again the ISL 9999 twenty two seventy bees which are ridiculous overkill for you know i GPU power so there's two phases of that as well another interesting thing to note about the the VRML and the ZT 90 dark here is actually EVGA has opposite for all tantalum output filled like bulk output filtering capacitors which i'm not sure how much of an impact that has these are generally more expensive than your conventional like aluminum polymers like that and we used to see these a lot on motherboards in the past like they were a pretty big deal like gigabyte had boards with them msi had boards with them and they'd like advertise it pretty heavily that hey we're using all tantalum capacitors but i think more recently the aluminum polymers have probably just mostly caught up in a like efficiency and performance to these so these days you just see aluminum polymers everywhere instead of anybody going for these but uh yeah it's an interesting decision from EVGA to go for these because they do have slightly well they have not necessarily better ESR but they may have liked better yes out well ESL would definitely be better on these just because of the packaging they're in compared to your aluminum polymers but ultimately that's one of those things where again you'd need an oscilloscope to check if these make much of a difference if any at all but they are like it's an interesting design choice by EVGA moving up top memory power is provided by yes another is L is L $6.99 22 7b this is like ridiculous overkill for memory power interestingly enough EVGA goes for like the single phase memory power whereas a lot of other board vendors go for like two phase memory power like asus and asrock really likes to go for two phase memory power ultimately you know you can compensate for low phase account with output filtering and I've hinted at this in the features video EVGA is output filtering is rather elaborate for the memory power here so you know I think essentially they decided like we can set the switching frequency on this really high because ultimately it doesn't need to push a lot of power in the first place or a ddr4 barely pull like a ddr4 really doesn't pull much power whatsoever so we can set the switching frequency really really high to compensate potentially for the low phase count and then they really do have a rather elaborate to output filtering system so I don't think this is like like I guess it's just like a design style choice more than like a practical decision there where EVG is like we're gonna run one phase and a lot of the like as Rahl kinases like to do two phase but MSI I think likes to go one phase as well and gigabyte never gigabyte likes to do single phase memory power as well more recently in the past we saw some boards go all the way up to three phase memory power but that was the same kind of logic that you know Britt brings you the the sixteen phase that needs to turn off four phases in order to hit peak efficiency at 200 amps it's essentially just smacking on phases for the sake of having phases which not exactly you know a great way to design things anyway the memory is controlled by yet another is l69 133 except that's running in just like 1+0 mode because there's one phase on it so that is the voltage regulators on the EVGA z3 90 dark I'm a like you know it's not my like it's not anything my well mind-blowing I think compared to like some of the other things EVGA has done here right this is a very similar vrm as to what they used on the X 299 dark in terms of the vcore then they've just kind of added phases for the extra rails that are necessary in fact they didn't even add phases like VCC io and VCC sa was also present on the on the dark so that's that's not new and just basically the AI GPU power is new the memory vrm is actually again like they had the same you know 60 amp hour stage from memory power on the dark and it was also a single phase well for each set of DIMM slots and that one just had like that one didn't have quite as elaborate of an output filtering setup so yeah that's kind of the the the vrm configuration here on the on the z 390 dark it's just like it is very it's a very expensive vrm right it's also very very efficient one of the actually I think it's probably like the like its second most of it while depends on you know the phase shedding there but ultimately it's like the second most efficient definitely one of the most efficient VRMs on Z 390 in general but right now as far as I'm aware it's about second for the 200 amp figure and then well at the higher currents definitely it's not not the top but you shouldn't really like you don't need to worry about the higher currents because it's basically 200 amps plot like anything above 200 amps is very much sub-zero cooling territory and at that point you know you're probably not going to be running the the whatever workload you're running is not going to be running that long so then you can just kind of rely on the VR like it takes so like well the benefit to having all the efficiency is that of course it takes so long for the vrm to overheat that you don't need to have heat sinks on it even when pushing very very high currents like that 300 or 400 amps which if you're running on liquid nitrogen the other thing that happens is ultimately the board freezes over and not having to run heat sinks on the board does mean that you can just have insulation freaking everywhere instead of worrying about you know water building up between water potentially building up on the power stages which would actually really really suck with these because there's a great big like that exposed drain is a great big 12 volt tab right there and if that shorts to anything really yeah you're gonna have a bad day well actually no that's the that tab right there is the the no is the switch node of the phase so it's not well occasionally it's at 12 volts other times it's a like VRML put voltage so yeah like you still don't want that shorting to ground and like at all so you know that's kind of that anyway yeah I mean like after the X 299 dark this is kind of what I expected you know it's more of the same and that's that's definitely not a bad thing and except this does actually go more elaborate on the cooling system right like the the like they they I feel like they've really made better use of all the gold plating they gone for because on the dark it really like it does not use that much it kind of feels more like an aesthetics thing there but here I I'd like their back of the board acts as its own heat sink which is pretty cool so yeah that is it for the Z 390 dark vrm overview and I guess thanks for watching like share subscribe leave any comments questions suggestions down in the comment section below and if 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