Gadgetory

hey guys build Zoid here from actually hardcore overclocking and today we're gonna be taking a look at gigabytes take on the extremely ridiculous motherboard for the equally ridiculous CPU say hello to the gigabyte c6 2 1 horas extreme gigabytes take on what a overclocking LGA 36 well that this is much more workstation II but still overclocked workstation LGA 36 47 motherboard should look like for the 28 core 31 75 X Xeon from Intel before that this video is brought to you by thermal grizzly and their high-end thermal compounds thermal grizzly makes cryo not paste for high thermal performance and conductivity without being electrically conductive so you don't have to worry about shorting components cryo knot is particularly good for replacing stock GPU pastes as cryo knot is a non curing compound learn more at the link in the description below so then but let's just get right into it right so boards gonna be 14 around $1400 I'm not sure when it's going to be like the hitting retail but it is basically a little bit cheaper than than the you know the rog dominus board that we looked at previously and well arguably like you know it's different it's different so let's go over some of the differences so the first thing power inputs gigabyte has opted for a much less flexible power input setup so you still have the split 12 volt power plane so half the VCC and vrm runs off of this and the other half runs off of that and the thing is that by you're less flexible what I'm talking about is that gigabyte opted for dual eight pin CPU power connectors for both halves of the vrm whereas Asus with the dominus they had an extra 6 pin PCI e power connector so if you had like a 1600 watt power supply which normally only comes with two aprons P CPU power connectors you could plug in your two 8 pins and you could plug in 2 6 pins and you'd be able to power the the CPU with just one PSU well this board you have well you pretty much have to use dual power supplies because most power supplies don't come with eight CPU eight well for CP eight pins so yeah gigabyte has basically decided that you know that they're gonna force you into a dual PSU setup if you're gonna be running this at high you know high levels of CPU power draw though honestly for most cooling setups you're probably not gonna be able to like you're very likely gonna be cooling limited before your power connecter limited so you might still get away with a single PSU setup as long as you don't go too ridiculous on how you're cooling the CPU so anyway we do also get of course the dual 24 pins directly on the motherboard so that's the PSU well the dual PS use power up in sync right you plug in both and you find like the motherboard starts both of them at the same time as a result and so that's how the the power delivery is taken care of and I just dropped my pen anyway moving on we do get a reset switch a power switch dual postcodes I am not sure what they're doing with the second one but either way these are always super handy to have when troubleshooting also this has RGB on it I just want to point that out there's there's RGB on this board like I have no idea how that got on here but there's our DV anyway then we have a random USB port inside the sort of directly like inside the the case essentially I mean personally on a test bench I'd welcome that but I'm not sure what the the use case would be in like a workstation environment moving along we also get a speaker on the board which you know most like yeah most consumer boards I guess I wouldn't really consider this a consumer board I mean like yeah this is just ridiculous but so most consumer bought boards don't don't bother with those were like workstation boards generally do so that that's present and get the color-coded front panel header which I'm a fan of clear CMOS jumper right above that it makes it a lot easier to see what you're plugging into the the ones that aren't color-coded are just well it's not quite as clear is it then we get a bios switch for the dual file system this is a gigabyte motherboard of course it has dual BIOS there's very few gigabyte motherboards that don't the main vials here is actually socketed which is kind of different from what they normally do and then the backup bios is soldered onto the board so the cool thing is if you brick this one and then also brick this one you can probably just ask gigabyte to send you a replacement but main BIOS chip and then you're gonna be fine there's also LEDs for indicating which BIOS chip is active and those are right there and that kind of covers it there's no like retry button safe boot bus in any of those sort of extreme overclocking features that we saw in the Dominus because gigabyte considers this a workstation board and even then like extreme overclocking boards from gigabyte well know like when they do do an extreme overclocking board it has all of it like it has actually generally more buses than anybody else out there but uh yeah they're really treating this more as a more as a workstation board and that's why of course we have a ton of PCIe 16x slots now they're not all electrically PCIe x16 I mean we can kind of clearly see that's an X 8 so that's another X 8 that's this X 16 that looks this looks like either an X 4 or an X 8 again that's probably an X 8 and that looks like this should be an X 16 just because it's the first one but it might be an X 8 as well so you know tons of PCI you connected PCIe expansion options because it's meant for workstations and to make sure that you don't melt your 24 pin power connector they have dual PCIe 6 pins if you I don't know maybe ran like like you could technically rig up 7rx for ATS onto this like the you know with like riser cables it'd be a pretty bad idea as far as I'm concerned but you could still do it it wouldn't also be very practical but it is doable so anyway they do give you dual 6 pin PCI you power connectors to make sure that the 24 pin doesn't melt I am NOT a fan of the location ok just like I like lots of workstation boards do this but putting these right there is just like so like what you're gonna run a cable like that or you're gonna be running a cable like that or you're gonna be well you're not going to be running it across the top edge of the board because boards actually like taller than the actual mounting holes right there so this isn't gonna fit in like any cases at all so yeah like the this thing violates all of the form factors it's it's it's it's own thing anyway so yeah I'm really not a fan of the location I totally understand why they exist I can even kind of understand well I can't understand why they put them there because it's not like this area of the motherboard is particularly crowded I mean this right here is for downright empty and you know like there was no as far as I'm concerned there was no reason to cram all the i/o down here especially no reason for that thing right like what get rid of that this is obviously not being used so you know a well thought out a better thought out option would have been to take these you know clear out this area a bit you know you could probably shift some of these things apart a bit and then move those down there and that would have been a much like tidier layout to manage cable wise but uh anyway they decided to stick it right there and here's one of those things that you know is just more workstation about this board that like this didn't actually end up getting on the board but you can see that there was a there was originally plans for a base board management controller to actually be on this motherboard so that's essentially like a server server thing which allows you to manage the system remotely and yeah Bay that they decided that they're not actually going to bother with implementing that so I mean I'm not I'm not sure how much of a much of a big deal it is do anyone I I don't know that you would actually like want to build a server with one of these I mean on a core now well no there are definitely use cases for like a hike or count high frequency server but I just I kind of feel like if you really care about your single threaded performance you're just gonna buy a ninety nine hundred K and build a server with that anyway because that's just gonna like the the issue with all of the the Zeon's and all of the chips above x2 like above LGA 1151 is that they use a mesh interconnect and it's really quite like compared to the ring interconnect that you get on like a ninety nine hundred K its relatively high latency it's like approaching like it's not anywhere near as bad as like AMD's infinity fabric on latency but it's getting there it's definitely worse than ring and so if you had like a really really really single threaded workload I wouldn't use a mesh CPU for it just because mesh sucks so for for single threaded workloads so anyway moving along we can kind of see that gigabyte opted for a more like the the actual Ryo is actually kind of bare there's not much here which is again I think the logic being that you know it's a workstation board if you want USB ports Ethernet ports whatever ports you got PCIe use it so yeah that's kind of what we can see going on in the i/o section there and that pretty much covers it there's not really much you know random junk just added on to this board because this this really like gigabyte understands that nobodies get like the the couple people on earth who are gonna buy this anyway are probably not gonna be it like they're they're not gonna use wife I like onboard Wi-Fi or something so gigabyte hasn't bothered with anything like that though for some reason they did stick RGB on there either never gonna wrap my head around that head around that but uh before we get onto the voltage regulators check out this heatsink I'm a fan of this heatsink now it's you know there there's no fans in it so gigabyte has opted for a completely passive design it is one giant block of aluminum and this boards got to be so damn heavy like seriously like this is one hell of an aluminum block likely crit yes so anyway I am actually a fan of like this cooling cooling design and I think if they if it actually manages to maintain it like it should manage to maintain the VR I'm completely an adequate thermally with this kind of design because actually because this heatsink so damn big the gaps between the fins are actually quite large so it's not like they're super airflow restrictive like you'd like really dense thin snacks are actually kind of like they they prevent airflow within them so yeah this should do a stellar job cooling the vrm and worst case scenario it's just gonna take forever for this to overheat because of how freakin heavy it is aluminum is actually not that bad in thermal in terms of its thermal capacity so it just gets mixed up because it's really like you know everybody thinks oh it's so light it doesn't have a ton of thermal capacity well no relative to its mass it actually has a really high thermal capacity per unit mass but it's just a lot lighter so it is still like we're like a solid block of copper is still better than a solid like equally sized block of aluminum but it's not that big a difference as you would expect just based on the weight anyway let's go back to the voltage regulators and voltage well I mean there's a lot of them around the board but obviously everybody just mostly cares about this great big strip of power we should we shall call it that so that right there is the VCC in and unlike Asus where you know with the Dominus we had a lot of power stages and not a lot of phases here we have a lot of power stages and equally many phases this is a 32 phase we will not be counting that but we will be counting the quadruple errs that this uses and I give up on fixing GIMP so quadruped layers are 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 & 8 over here so that's how we get our 32 phases each of these essentially takes in one PWM signal and splits it in to four in the process they cut down the switching frequency to 1/4 which is actually a good thing for your efficiency because you're ultimately interleaving all of these anyway so like the one of the trade-offs between voltage regulator switching frequency and phase well it's like more switching frequency means less power efficiency okay generally you're gonna lose power efficiency as you crank up your switching frequency but the benefit of that is you get better output ripple now another way to get better output ripple is to interleave a bunch of phases because if you have a whole phases interleaving they'll actually sort of fill in the the gaps between the well whatever it's too complicated I'm not gonna just describe that in this video but essentially interleaving phases helps with you're out having a bunch of phases helps with your output ripple so this does have a ton of freaking phases and then it cuts down the switching frequency going through the doubler so you actually can get the sort of the best of both worlds where you have really good output ripple and really good at efficiency at the same time now the one downsides of doublers is that they put a little bit of delay on to your PWM signals it's generally sort of 10 to 20 nanoseconds depending on what kind of signal you're trying to actually transmit so that's something to keep in mind and that can lead to you know sort well it essentially means that your transient response can potentially be more like it can make it much harder to optimize it for whatever target goals you may have for your transient response anyway so gigabyte is using the 35 99s here and they are using 8 of them so we do end up with a 32 phase BCC in VRM it is controlled by this chip right over here in the middle of the middle of the board and I actually really like how it's located right here and we can actually see the eight current sense inputs so like one two three four five six seven eight and so this is one of like the issue well this is an issue with any kind of multi-phase like double design or quadruple design the actual controller itself does not see individual phases doesn't see every single one of the phases it essentially still sees this as a giant blob of eight phases and the controller here is I am NOT gonna put that on there nobody's gonna be able to read that is of course the IR 35 to zero one that we find on basically every modern motherboard ever these days like the only other chip you're ever gonna look probably like high-end boards you're ever only other chip you're ever gonna see is like an is l69 one three eight one three eight you know yeah sixteen nine one three eight anyway this goes up to two megahertz switching frequency though I really doubt that's what they're actually running this format so I'm going with the operating frequency for this voltage regular like this vrm to be at most at one point six megahertz on the controller which would translate about 400 kilohertz on each of the phases and that is running in eighth plus zero phase configuration the chip can also run in things like six plus two and anything sort of below those two options so also a seven plus one so the actual power stage is used in each of the phases are gigabytes favorite highlight well yeah they do use these alot so IR 35:56 is these are 50 amp power how I our stages so you know power or stages from international rectifier so that's why they replace the ER with IR and essentially like they're not as so on the Dominus we saw 17 amp smart power stages also from while Infineon at this point and those are basically a bit better at well those are a bit smarter than powell i our stages but these aren't exactly dumb so they still integrate current monitoring they still integrate temperature monitoring they just don't have some of the same safeties and the current monitoring quoi isn't quite as accurate as it is on the smart power stages so yeah that's that's the that's the power stage that could go by opposite of four and so the resulting efficiency for this 32 phase monstrosity is four well we're gonna be going with 1.8 volts output so that's our standard output voltage for all integrated voltage regulator based CPUs like the Zeon 31 75 X 400 kilohertz switching frequency because that's just where the data is she is spectat so that makes my life easier and also it's actually like kinda on the upper limits of what you would realistically want to run this at anyway it's quite possible that this board actually runs it like 200 kilohertz on each phase which like sets the the watching losses for each of the phases and then 5volts drive because while the 35:56 is do actually get more efficient at higher drive voltages they are actually they're not necessarily built to like lasts as long at the higher drive voltages and it's much more convenient to just grab five volts off of your 24 pin then messing around with building like a seven volt or a six volt voltage regulator just to power the vrm so anyway the efficiency results well this is kind of interesting so for 270 watts it's a hundred and fifty amps output this voltage regulator will produce about 21 watts of heat which is ever so slightly worse than what we were looking at on the dominus but then at higher outputs it actually gets a little bit ahead and I think this is mostly down to the fact that the the scaling for all of these operating parameters isn't optimal at low current outputs but like anyway it like the the air is not gonna be huge so very very small advantage while small disadvantage compared to the Dominus there the Dominus would be doing about 19 watts once we get into the efficiency curve of these 35:56 power stages properly which you know starts up at well I mean we don't really get into the power like the the peak of the power efficiency curve is a long way away but still like at very low loads power stages just have issues and that's one of the smart man tidge is actually that the small power stages have very low loads they are slightly more efficient than all of the modern then the older power our stages that we have here which you can actually see right there because this is just way too little current you essentially what like you wouldn't need a vrm heatsink all not at all at this kind of current output so anyway moving on to something a bit more reasonable 540 watts this is usually where more like at least for like other platforms say X 299 this is around where your water cooling is just going to not be able to keep up anymore though I have heard that apparently it's possible to cool more on LGA 3647 which might be just down to the die being so much larger but anyway so 540 watts which would be at 300 amps output you're gonna be looking at about 32 watts of heat output which is a small advantage in favour for this board over the Dominus so the Dominus would have been doing about 35 watts now admittedly these calculate like these aren't super accurate so I honestly consider these pretty much equal anyway yeah it's interesting how basically you know 50 amp hour stages don't like you'd think there'd be a bigger difference but at these low loads it's just kind of like well they're within margin of error cos we're far out of the sort of the peak of the efficiency curve and really like the Dominus will start to pull away the more current you stall or start pushing you know push through it but with this many damn phases they'll like you need a lot of current to maintance start making a difference anyway moving up to a hut 810 watts which like that that's gonna be really really hard to cool if if it's even possible I'm not sure but uh 810 watts and not 600 I'm Rick miss reading my notes four hundred and fifty amps output you're gonna be looking at about 45 watts of heat dissipation on the vrm and at that point the heatsink might start becoming somewhat useful though I still think this would probably you might not run at a great temperature but it would probably still not run at over a hundred twenty-five degrees Celsius at that point so that would still be relatively tolerable to just kind of run run without any kind of heatsink on there anyway going yet higher a thousand and eighty watts of CPU power consumption pushing six hundred amps through the vrm you're gonna be looking at about 58 watts of heat and at this point you might want to you know the the heatsink might be a good idea at this point and then thirteen hundred and fifty watts of heat you're gonna be looking at about seven hundred and fifty amps and so CPU power consumption 1350 watts 750 amps and about 77 watts of heat on the vrm which is still funnily enough like the all of like even now this still has a small advantage over the voltage regulator on the Dominus which is basically a combination as far as I'm concerned it's a combination of the relatively low switching frequency and the fact that these are 50 amp hour stages and that the efficiency curve like we're still not really you know passed like we're still like the the efficiency curve is just messed is not working out in favor of these voltage regulators with this many phases though I think this might be at the peak for for these so past this the Dominus would start winning though it is worth noting that in der bauer like der bauer did a video with overclocking the 3071 3175 acts on lnto and he topped out at only around twelve hundred and twenty-five watts on the actual like on the eight pins so he never managed to get over to twelve hundred watts and this right here would actually be because this is output power this isn't input power so this would actually be like fourteen and what is that that's like 1427 watts on the eight pin power connectors right there so yeah the this board is like you know it's it's slightly less ridiculous overkill but it's still ridiculous overkill and the bit better balanced in my opinion you know and also it's nice that it's like four hundred dollars cheaper i guess so that that's maybe oh we're worth a thing worth considering anyway it's just like it's a silly platformer with silly motherboards silly voltage regulators and silly price points so the end result is just yeah it's ridiculous and i'm like like so far none of the boards i've seen for the like unfortunate I know there's basically three boards that I'm aware of that will be for this platform which is like this one the Dominus and then the one that EVGA is working on and I think at this point EVGA is probably going to be the one brain the reasonable voltage regulator this is not one of them this is this is a slightly less ridiculous thing compared to the Dominus but still is just massive massive overkill so yeah I mean you know well I'm not surprised after the Dominus that's that's where I'll leave it anyway moving on to the minor rails I hear we have what I assume is VCC si just because this location kind of makes sense for that rail that's on just a 3553 which is the Gigabyte favorite 40 amp smart 40 amp power stage not smart so it's like it's the same product line as the 35:56 it's just a smaller package it's cheaper not by much mind you and yeah gigabyte uses that unlike a ton of motherboards like they it seems to have way too many of those because they're everywhere but yeah so the the 40 amp power of power IR stages right there and for the controller we're looking at an IR 3 v 2 0 4 so this is one of the things like other things like gigabyte has done compared to the Dominus like remember in the Dominus video I was like yeah Asus just smacked in ASP 1405 I'm like literally every single rail they could find which makes very little sense because the ASP 1405 is probable is like an 8 phase voltage controller and so asus was essentially wasting these 8 phase voltage controllers on like single-phase rails well gigabyte has enough sense to actually go buy a different chip that isn't another ir35 2:01 so if this was done like the Dominus we would see that chip right there and here and here and also there like all of those would be more 35 to 0 ones but gigabyte decided you know what that that's just silly so they actually opted for 3 5 2 0 4s and the 3 5 2 0 4 is essentially a four phase variant of the 3 5 2 0 1 is it for Phase II is for phase or 3 I can't remember right now how many phases it goes up to four it totally goes up to four anyway it doesn't really matter because we're like not going to be hitting the limits of what it can control either way but so they have a three five two zero four up there and that one's just running in 1+0 configuration this one over here is running in three plus zero and takes care of our VDD our rail which is this three-phase right here yet more 3553 s so just more of those from international rectifier then down here we have what I assume is gonna be so this should be VPP and that's some kind of fully integrated buck converter on there and so that's its own thing we have another rail like that over there which is a VPP and that's that's a supporting rail it's it's a 2.5 volts and it's for the member for the dims for the ddr4 memory anyway so we have those then we have what I can only assume to be VCC io over here which is another 35 53 and a 3 5 2 0 4 and then we have these two regulators which I honestly don't know what those do and then regulators over here which I also don't know what those do something has to be powering the chipset which could potentially also be that and there's gonna be just minor rails all over the place but without having the board in hand it's like well without having the board in hand or at least like an Intel platform specification which I didn't manage to find yeah it's really hard to tell what any of those are but there's a bunch of minor rails all over the board and those just use yet more international rectifier parts I wouldn't worry about them you're probably never gonna like you'd never on the off chance that the BIOS gives you control over them you'd never want to change them anyway because they don't do anything like it's bad if they stop working but there's no point messing with them 90% of the time anyway VDD are over here is yet another three-phase so controlled by yet another three five two zero four so that covers it gigabytes take on the extremely ridiculous motherboard for the equally ridiculous 31 equals CPU admittedly gigabytes extremely ridiculous mother motherboard is like ever so slightly less ridiculous than the Asus one it's also ever so slightly less ridiculous like less expensive I mean $1400 versus $1,800 well it's not like it's gonna fund and you tights it like you're probably gonna be running tights and RT X's on something like this anyway so at that point I guess I guess you could put the money towards more water cooling because you'll probably need it for the CPU if you plan to do any serious overclocking so yeah that's it for the video thank you for watching like share subscribe leave any 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