Gadgetory

hi guys builds I hear from actually hardcore overclocking and today we're gonna be taking a look at the EVGA z3 90 darks points of interest because unfortunately there's so much interesting stuff on this motherboard that if I try to also talk about the V RMS in one video it just like it'd be like 50 minutes long and I know that because I have a 50 minute take of everything on this motherboard so instead that's getting split into two pieces and this part is gonna be just everything kind of interesting all the motherboard so let's get right into it because either way there's still a lot to cover 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 1 i 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 the first thing that everybody obviously noticed is about this motherboard is that the DIMM slots are very few and in a rather odd location being jammed up onto the top edge of the motherboard right normally they're over here but an EVGA opted to rotate the CPU socket 90 degrees to get the DIMM slots up in up on the top edge and there's two reasons for why they've opted to do this one of them is that basically the team working on this motherboard are apparently a big fan of old dfi motherboards and old dfi mah are big fans of old efi motherboards and DF I used to do motherboards where they would have the DIMM slots up on the top edge so they basically decided that they wanted the z3 90 dark to be a visual throwback to the dfi motherboards that did that and that's one of the reasons why the DIMM slots are are located where they are now there are also there's also a practical like electrical reason for why they've put the DIMM slots up on the top edge but unfortunately because what separates like incredible extreme overclocking motherboards from great extreme overclocking motherboards and then horrible motherboards is not the actual like most of the time it's not the like the CPU speeds you can achieve it's all about the memory and essentially everything that happens in between the memory slots and the CPU you know the the CPU socket where the the memory connects to the CPU so basically EVG doesn't want to give me any information on anything happening in this area and that includes the benefit like because there are practical reasons for why they've moved the DIMM slots up there they just won't share them with me because you know they fall into the category of super of super secret speed sauce for for memory overclocking so yeah that's rather unfortunate that you know we don't know why this is beneficial but I can totally like understand why EVGA doesn't want to share because again this is really where you know the board vendors can really differentiate themselves is with their memory layouts and then what they also do in the BIOS for the for the memory training anyway and the other thing that you know well it kind of stands out on this motherboard not to me because this is an extreme overclocking motherboard and this is kind of standard for those now but to a lot of people it's the motherboard is $500 it's a high-end motherboard and it only has two DIMM slots and this is a very simple reason for this so there's e3 90 dark targets extreme overclocking and more importantly in targets you know very high memory frequency capabilities and by eliminating the extra DIMM slots right because you normally have to DIMM slots on each channel on most other motherboards this one you have only one installed per channel by eliminating the extra DIMM slots you actually well you reduce the distance that your memory signals have to travel from the DIMM slots to the cpu and you reduce the well the the DIMM slots themselves are actually add a whole bunch of parasitics to your memory traces because your memory traces are actually shared between your DIMM slots on a given memory Channel so essentially what's going on with eliminating the DIMM slots is that EVGA is optimizing the memory layout for best possible overclock for the best possible memory overclocking and that's why it's on a one DIMM per channel config raishin which is standard for motherboards in this class I mean look at the Asus apex series the Azrael cozy formula series some of the gigabyte SOC motherboards right like all of these extreme overclocking motherboards it's just like you you don't go with four dims because it's bad for your maximum memory frequency capability and as a side effect also it you know impacts the best kind of timings you can run at a given frequency so yeah EVGA has opted to go for just one dip on each channel and that's pretty standard for a motherboard in this class now where this difference differentiates itself further from other extreme overclocking motherboards is that these DIMM slots aren't any ordinary DIMM slots because if we if we look at the back of the board you can clearly see that there's nothing coming through the PCB because EVGA has opted to use surface mount memory slots instead of through-hole ones and the surface mount ones are a bit more expensive but that's not the main main issue with them and not really the reason why vga is using them the reason why they're going for the surface mount memory slots is that these have at least on paper even lower parasitics than your conventional through-hole memory memory slots so yeah EVGA is opted to go for the SMD type here now this is not unique to EVGA gigabyte has a couple of motherboards that also use these but yeah basically EVGA is just going you know all-out with their memory overclocking capabilities in the sort of physical aspect of this motherboard and actually speaking of the physical aspect you know so we have the the fact that the memory slots are in an odd location there's very few of them they're using SMT EVGA also opted to go for a 10 layer PCB here to lay out the memory like to lay out the entire motherboard with now I'm not sure that they're actually making full necessarily making full use of that for the memory slots but it basically does mean that they have a lot of room to lay out everything however they see lie however they see necessary right and for comparison most other high-end Z 390 boards stop at eight layers so EVGA is just going you know two layers higher so that just gives them that much more space to lay out anything they feel like laying out basically they've gone to the absolute limit for optimizing the the memory layout I mean like ten ten layers is like X 299 territory in terms of feet like PCB layers and they're doing it for Z 390 and if you're wondering like super high-end GPUs top out around 12 okay like you don't really see anything in consumer hardware with more than 12 layers of PCB and here we have a motherboard with ten of them just to lay out to DIMM slots so as well as quite possibly a lot of the other features on the motherboard but still it's it is an added cost and it does mean that EVGA can optimize this area of the board to this area of the board to ridiculous levels so anyway sort of moving on from the the physical aspects of the memory section right here well there's actually rather fancy stuff going on on the back of the board here as well but they also told me not to talk about this either so more super more more secret speed sauce on the back of the board there so yeah anyway one thing which is kind of standard for most extreme overclocking motherboards but was missing is actually is missing from a lot of EVGA motherboards until this one is a controllable vtt DDR rail which is kind of unfortunate because it really limits your overclocking capabilities on like past EVGA motherboards that aren't this but here they have actually given us a controllable vtt DDR so now they're using so in the past they use like a LDO where you were the only way to configure the output voltage of that LDO was with like two resistors on the new motherboards well actually even one resistor depending on what exactly you wanted but on the dark they're using an L do from UPI semiconductor it's a u P 8815 and this is actually controllable with software so you can now tweak your VT TD are up and down and this is very very handy when you're pushing certains kids of Samsung Vita actually they're like I've also seen it be beneficial on other other dies it's just like it's not quite like nobody cares as much about those because they kind of suck they don't clock as high so you know who cares it doesn't go to 4000 CL 12 then it doesn't matter but basically the issue with vtt DDR is that the jtech rule or the j deck role for the VTT DDR is that you basically take your dim voltage right so or VDD R or VDD Q whichever you prefer to call it take your VDD R divided by 2 and let's your VT t DDR this works great until your VDD R gets really high like say 2 volts at 2 volts VDD are you get like 1 volt VT t DDR using the the usual rule the issue with that is there's a lot of memory kits out there where if you do that they start lose all stability completely lose all stability so you end up in a situation where you you can keep raising the voltage everything keeps improving and then suddenly you get to a point where yes the frequency keeps getting higher but the stability just doesn't improve anymore and oftentimes it's because your VT t DDR is way too high for your specific memory K so at that point it's normally you need to lock the VT t ddr2 something around 0.9 five volts my own memory kits for example generally prefer about 0.9 3 5 all right like between point 9 3 and 0.94 so not even that point 95 but basically once you're at the optimum voltage for your memory sticks then you can keep raising the VDD are like the once you have optimum li TT DDR you can keep raising the be DDR so you can go up to like say 2.1 on your dim voltage and still have to maintain that me TT DDR to maintain stability so yeah this is a this is actually a feature I requested that they add for the z3 90 dark and I'm really happy to see that it's made it onto the board but considering everything else they've done you know you shouldn't be surprised I mean they've gone all out for the memory overclocking capabilities so this is kind of a like a requirement at this point so yeah we have that that's that's very nice to have I'm a big fan of that very useful not useful for day-to-day you sir like day-to-day users but for extreme overclocking it can really well it can help you eke out the last hundred to like hundred fifty megahertz out of certain memory kits maybe even more but like that's what it does for like my kids so then moving on next to the VTT DDR we have the dual postcodes which actually only one of these functions as a postcode but the reason why we have for four of these 7-segment display well two of these 7-segment display whatever to to post goats we're just gonna go with that because I can't figure out which way to say it correctly right now it's early in the morning so the dual postcode so one of them acts as a postcode when you're posting just as normal but they also integrate a whole bunch of monitoring functionality so you can actually monitor temperatures and you can monitor voltage with these which is pretty cool so yeah if you don't have like you know like they also give you bolted Reed points right here with the the probit headers which basically that's a header that plugs in and then you get a whole bunch of basically like multimeter sockets coming off of that which are actually really convenient because multimeter probes fit snug into that so you can just like hook up your multimeter to the motherboard you don't actually have to you know mess around with like voltage read points how a lot of other motherboard vendors do them or they give you like a solder bump and you need to stab the solder bump and and if they're really creative they're gonna put said solder bumps under like the 24 pin or something so that they're as hard to reach as possible well now EVGA has nice little headers that you can just plug into and your multimeter can be hooked up to the motherboard but let's say you don't have you know a million multimeter so you can't monitor everything well you can put some of your voltages onto the post code over here so that you can monitor them with this and the multimeter can be monitoring something else so it's a pretty nice feature as well obviously the temperature monitoring is also convenient as you that means you can check your temperatures of the CPU without having any like monitoring you to letís open which is nice to do because monitoring utilities lower your benchmark scores so you don't usually run any a while benchmarking so yeah this is a pretty neat feature to happen then we get some LEDs over here this motherboard actually has a lot of LEDs but none of them are RGB and all of them are in my opinion infinitely more useful so the two LEDs we get over here are dim initialization indicators and these probably would be some of the the less useful ones especially for Z 390 so I think these are like super useful on like X 299 because X 299 has memory controllers that have a tendency to drop memory channels as in you can boot up and instead of initializing with you know you have four sticks plug it in because it's a four channel CPU so one want one stick per channel and it initializes and you get eight gigs of RAM instead of the 32 you were expecting and the reasoning is the memory controller decides to drop after the memory sticks well with these kinds of LED indicators you can actually see that the memory training failed as soon as the memory training post codes finish so long before you even get into the operating system you will know that there's like an issue with your memory initialization which can save you a lot of time because you won't have to bother to go all the way into Windows to realize that you're missing half of your memory channels and your scores suck because there's missing memory channels so yeah the reason why I don't think it's gonna be that useful as III 90 is that as far as I'm aware as III 90 doesn't drop the memory channels anywhere near as much at least I've not seen it on either my 80s 86 K or 99 hundred K you know the the CPU the memory controller on these things either initializes both both channels perfectly or the whole thing doesn't start at all so sure how useful that's gonna be but you know it definitely doesn't hurt anything next we have the best button ever created this is the safe boot button for those of you who like me don't save your BIOS profiles regularly so you do like three hours of tweaking and then you know you screw up one setting and the system stops posting and you haven't saved a single profile in those three hours well this button will save you from from that kind of scenario because you won't have to clear the CMOS when that happens you can just hit the safe boot button and it'll get you into the bios without having to wipe all of your settings so all your settings will be still there but it'll boot up on like safe defaults and essentially you know save you from having to do a whole lot of work all over again now for those of you who like encase the safe boot button doesn't work there is still a clear CMOS there's also a clear CMOS on the rear i/o which personally I would say I would have preferred a safe boot over there as well because the safe boot is so convenient that if I had you know if I committed the heresy that is installing this motherboard inside a case I would honestly take off the side panel and get the safe boot bus in anyway if I screwed up while this wasn't inside a case because this is so convenient so yeah that's that's that right there next to that we have the standard EVGA array of sort of voltage indicator LEDs so basically these indicate that you just have you know varies vrm is functioning so it'll tell you like oh yeah VDD are is present and mana VDD are is present v core is present VC CSA is present just that all of your voltages are actually all of your V arms are essentially firing up I've like I can see a situation like if one of the VR I'm just dies then this will obviously indicate that hey your your V R M is dead right because the LED will turn off but like I think the the usefulness of these will probably go up the older the motherboard is so initially I don't I don't think I well initially you wouldn't wouldn't necessarily need to use these much because well the the arms on the board should shouldn't have issues starting up like that's kind of like not gonna happen unless you get like a dead on a rival board or something so yeah you know they're they don't hurt anything but I've never found a use for them myself yet though I can see how they would be handy like if you have just if the motherboard just becomes damaged in some way then this will save you a lot of troubleshooting time it's just that you shouldn't probably be breaking the motherboard in the first place right this is kind of one of those troubleshooting features where it's like oh you screwed up let us help you so it's still nice for that kind of but you know kind of limited use in that sense next we have a USB header here and this is for BIOS flashback so you can actually flash the BIOS on this motherboard without even having a CPU installed you just need standby power and a USB stick with the right format and then file name and then you know press some but I'm actually no I didn't read through the full procedure for it so I'm not sure what you actually have to press to get it to work but uh yeah you do you do have a BIOS flashback over there so that's pretty neat then you have your power and reset which is just completely standard from other boards like this and that kind of covers that area of the motherboard then we get the EVGA high-end motherboard standard of right angle actually they've put these on more motherboards recently right angle power connectors so 24 pin at the at a right angle and they've recessed them into the motherboard because this thing is a ATX right you can see how it goes way past the the screw hole here so yeah this is the ATX this is basically to reduce the incompatibility with various cases that the e ATX form factor runs into and then you know putting the the connectors at an angle like this further increases because obviously if the if this 24 pin was over here right ending over here then you'd have a connector that's sticking out like there and then then you'd finally have the cables and there's a lot of cable cases where your cable management hole would be like there right or here so that won't just like that won't work at all and then you'll be forced to like run your 24 pins through like who the hell knows where so yeah essentially that's trying to reduce some of that it does look very nice like you know it is pleasing it does also run into issues it can run into issues with with some cases ultimately this motherboard is meant for a test bench and if this is on a test bench it does make it easier to see the post code because there's no you know wires sticking up out of this area and the the buttons are all easier to reach because you don't have to reach over the 24 pin which if it's sticking straight up is actually rather tall and obnoxious so yeah that that's kind of that so on a test bench this really doesn't affect anything inside a case it could cause some issues moving on we're gonna address these in the vrm video though I think if you've seen enough of my movie videos you already know exactly what I'm gonna say about those anyway board comes with triple vials this is kind of standard for the dark motherboards from EVGA so here's your triple bios which one of your BIOS chips is actually socketed so if you really screw up and brick every single chip on the motherboard you can actually just remove one of the chips and like ask EVGA to send you a replacement or or use a hardware flasher to like flash it you could also try flash them directly on the motherboard that's just like more difficult for most people to do any like that that's more difficult to do than if you can remove the chip so yeah one of the chips is socketed there is triple BIOS I'm a big like I think like if you have dual BIOS with with a switch that's already good enough in my book but when you have triple BIOS I mean and it's socketed it's just like well I it's it's a bit better than than dual BIOS it certainly means that if you want to have like multiple different iterations of like the biases or there's like one BIOS which you found that works better for a certain scenario than another BIOS you can have like you know as many BIOS is installed on the motherboard as you want at the same time well assuming you only want three but I don't think anyone who like I don't know why you'd want more than two at the at most times anyway but you know yeah you can store more BIOS is on the motherboard at the same time so you can basically go through like oh this BIOS is really good for this doing this and this BIOS is really good for something else so you can keep them all on the motherboard instead of messing around with flashing every time you want to do a different like use the motherboard differently so that's kind of nice to have here and actually I think multiple BIOS is for like an extreme overclocking motherboard like a minimum requirement like and I'm saying that because I recently like I recently realized my Maximus 11 gene from Asus has no dual BIOS which is just like I have no idea what they were thinking III guess BIOS chips also cost way too much for Asus along with doublers as well anyway moving on next to the triple BIOS we find a PCIe on/off switch so while PCIe in a yeah on/off switch essentially what that allows you to do is enable your PCIe slots and disable them as well as I'm not to devices and the cool thing is while the idea behind this is if you have like water-cooled GPUs and one of them starts to malfunction you can just disable it with with the you know like it malfunctions in such a way that you can't even post with it present you can actually just disable the PCIe slot it's in and you don't have to worry about the the GPU not working so that that's pretty cool and also to make sure that you don't forget which slots are enabled or disabled EVGA actually has LEDs on the motherboard to indicate that the the PCIe slots are you know active and then actually also to indicate if the PCIe slot like the device in the slaw is initializing properly so again I like I think this is a get really really cool i I've certainly like I've this is pretty standard for like extreme overclocking motherboards for a while to have this kind of feature and I've used it a lot myself and I gotta say that the LEDs are actually really really helpful as well because I have sometimes like installed GPUs and PCIe slots I previously disabled and then just forgot about it and then was like why is the GPU not starting like what the hell is wrong right so yeah you do have indicators for that being acted like for the PCIe slots being active or not and that is on every single PCIe slot here as well as the initialization of the device so that's pretty cool next to that we get another switch this is slow mode this is another one of those features I actually requested that they add though admittedly I think it would have been more useful in like X to 99 then on Z 390 but the idea behind this which is the the slow bone switch what it does it forces the CPU into the lowest core ratio possible so you can essentially like if you're on liquid nitrogen right you get into your operating system at like six-and-a-half gigahertz or seven gigahertz or whatever frequency and you need to like configure something so that you can run your benchmark well you don't really want to be configuring windows at 6 gigahertz or 6 and 1/2 gigahertz that's a massive waste of power because your power consumption is actually relatively linear with your frequency so instead of running at 6 gigahertz well you know on Windows desktop you can just flick the slow mode switch it'll put the CPU to like 8x or 12 X I'm not sure which it is on Z 390 I think it's a tax so you'll instead of like six gigahertz plus you'll be like eight like 800 megahertz were basically around a gigahertz in frequency which will cut down your power consumption very heavily like quite significantly which means you'll be wasting less liquid nitrogen while sitting on desktop you know while sitting on the desktop messing with settings and the other benefit is is obviously it reduces the likeliness of the system crashing when you're at you know point eight gigahertz the other use is when you're like making your screen shot after finishing a benchmark right you can you can capture the screenshot and then when you go to save it you can hit the slow mode switch because there's actually rules against making screenshots with slow mode enabled because it makes it really hard to figure out what frequency you were running at but after you have the screen shot and you're going to save it you can actually put it into slow mode so that it doesn't crash while saving because that tends to also happen when you're like really on the edge for some of the single core benchmarks out there yeah saving a screen shot suddenly becomes a very difficult thing to do sometimes and the slow mode switch can make it that much less difficult so yeah very nice feature to have as well and then we get yet more extreme overclocking features also there's a LED indicators for the is it the u dot - yeah it is the U dot two connectors over here so because they're I assume yeah they're part of the PCIe so there's LED indicators for that as well but anyway next we get legacy SATA over here so the idea behind this is is that there's a whole bunch of old benchmarks that run best on Windows XP unfortunately Windows XP doesn't support modern Intel chipsets very well so the you gets you get run into this difficult situation where you can't like boot with Windows XP on most motherboards at all so this right here is an old light is an AZ media SATA 3 controller that is Windows XP compatible there's also like a specific BIOS that the motherboard needs to be compatible with Windows XP but basically the idea is you get the the the controller here for your SATA 3 you get the BIOS and the motherboard is now Windows XP compatible and you can run very old you know single core benchmarks in Windows XP which is their preferred operating system they just score way higher in that than they do in like Windows 10 or Windows 7 and that means that if you're using this motherboard you know if you're going for a benchmark like say SuperPi 32 million or 1 million which is a benchmark that is like that that's one of the benchmarks which really really likes running on Windows XP well if somebody's running seven gigahertz and like the same memory settings as you and you have Windows XP and their own like Windows 7 or 10 you can probably beat them at like 6.9 or or even lower actually you can probably beat them with even lower a CPU clock speeds so that makes a big difference in some of those benchmarks and obviously if you match them on a clock speed you're just gonna you can completely crush them assuming your Windows XP configuration is an on point so yeah you know this this is a very niche extreme overclocking feature but it's definitely something that I'm sure a lot of people who are into SuperPi 32 million benchmarking will appreciate I personally won't because I can't be bothered with installing that many different operating systems and messing with that but there are definitely people you know who spend a ton of time just running super PI 32 million and for them this is gonna be very very handy so then moving along the bottom edge we have some color-coded front panel headers and they've actually kept these you know facing up so that it's easy to see where what you're actually installing we're moving along the edge we also get a speaker here so not only can you see the motherboard complaining you can hear the motherboard complaining or succeeding as well because it'll beep when it finishes initialization pretty much based on how many USB devices you have plugged in so that's also well you know you can always disable it in the BIOS oh it's not like it actually hurts anything and a lot of motherboards don't bother to include this so it's kind of a night like EVGA puts it everywhere so it's kind of an isle yeah it's it's a nice feature to have I guess personally I don't really care well I've actually found it rather rather useful in my own experience because I can look away from the system why let's initialize like posting and not miss the BIOS coming up anyway next we got a 6 pin power connector and well this is here for extra power to the PCIe slots the why I don't think this is actually very useful in here is the like and video doesn't support more than two-way SLI AMD doesn't support like with the Radeon 7 a.m. D isn't going to support more than one GPU at all so the thing that this is solving is essentially that like the reason why this exists is that the 24 pin has a very limited amount of 12 volts power available in it because there's only two pins in a 24 pin with 12 volts and so what tends to happen is if you're running like a 3 Way or 4-way GPU setup and they pull a lot of power from the PCIe slot you tend to melt the 24 pin 12 volt power connector you know the 12 volt pins on a 24 pin and so that solves that but the thing is I don't think anybody's gonna buy this motherboard and run a 3-way or 4-way set up in it anyway because this last slot is x4 so even if you went with 1080 T eyes you can't run SLI off of an X force law and video doesn't let you so the only well I guess some people might well I could run like 3-way crossfire on it but it's less than ideal so like this this is solving the issue that this motherboard really shouldn't run into but EVGA seems to like to put these six pins just about freakin everywhere I mean they've put them on like I have a micro ATX motherboard with two PCIe slots from EVGA with a 6 pin like it's physically not possible to put more than two GPUs in it and they still have the extra PCIe power so I guess they're just really like they want to make absolutely certain that you have all of the the PCIe slot power you could have ever wanted to never need but yeah that that pretty much covers it this board does every well yeah as far as extreme overclocking goes it does everything it's not a workstation motherboard so it has limited you know memory capacity support it did like the the PCIe expand expansion options aren't what I would consider ideal right again there's no plx chip on this because well as I said if you're gonna run 2-way SLI at most and if even that and the thing with the plx chips is if you don't actually to use a lot of PCIe devices at the same time they do add a bit of latency to your PCIe communication so if you're running just a single card or a dual card setup not having a plx chip is actually a good thing if you need a bunch of PCI you can activity then you know you're looking at like 3gb well not necessarily three GPUs but just a lot of PC's ie devices in general well then you know the P Alex chip becomes handy but that's really that that's like a workstation scenario and this this motherboard won't go into a workstation like you can't fit enough RAM in it already like that alone is already probably going to be a problem for for that kind of application so you know this this is purpose-built to max out extreme overclocks and it goes super far to like you know it does everything to to do that and I'm a huge fan of that I think this motherboard is absolutely incredible but it is very focused in what it tries to sets out to do and the features really reflect that so yeah I'm a big fan of it I can't wait to try this motherboard out because the memory overclocking should be absolutely incredible on it and yeah so that's the that's the feature set and points of interest on the z3 90 dark we're gonna cover the vrm separately and I'll give you a teaser there awesome um but uh yeah that's it for this video thank you for watching like share subscribe leave any comments questions suggestions down in the comment section below if you'd like to support gamers Nexus their store dog gamers Nexus not net for shirts and mugs and that kind of thing as well as the actual mod map that you can see in the background of the motherboard and if you'd like to see more content from me I have a channel called actually a hardcore overclocking where I do more overclocking things so yeah and you're very likely there's gonna be a bunch of like z3i new dark content going up sometime soon because I've recently got the board so yeah that's it for the video thanks for watching and good bye