Gadgetory

gigabytes horas Z 270x gaming seven motherboard is the first of three on our bench for review having housed the Intel i7 7700 K for the past week or two will next be looking at the MSI gaming Pro carbon and MSI tomahawk C 270 boards and hope to soon expand that some H and B 250 chipset looks for today it's the gaming 7 from gigabyte for which we've recruited build Zoid for overclocking analysis before getting to that this coverage is brought to you by a thermal take and their $100 core p3 chassis the p3 can be wall mounted and makes for a unique easy access test bench for convenient Hardware swapping learn more at the link below we've already reviewed the intel i7 7700 k kb lake cpu in another video and article which will link below if you haven't seen that yet but now we're going to focus on the chipsets at least for a little bit anyways e2 70 is the one on the table here and that is obviously replacing z1 sony the only major differences between these other than intel obtain support is that there's expanded HS io lanes available on the z to any platform here's a look at the block diagram for z2 70 will throw z170 up on the screen for reference as you can see the biggest difference is that Intel now allows for us a ports more importantly intel has added for HSI ole aims to the chipset allowing now for a maximum total of 30 high-speed IO devices we've explained this a few times before but the lanes that I'm talking about can be shared with things like Gigabit Ethernet USB 3.0 and other high-speed i/o devices as the name would suggest and this also includes the capability by motherboard manufacturers and to some extent Intel to peel off lanes for additional PCIe devices up to a cluster so to speak up by 4 so you can pull off out of the HS io lanes and the chipset sets of 4 lanes that go to PCIe and that's not necessarily a hard PCIe slot it can also be m dot 2 devices and things that are enabled by PCIe lanes but might not actually be a traditional PCIe slot so this means that with the by 4 limitation and this is not new for cable 8 this is old news at this point with the by 4 limitation you're generally not using that to add more GPUs this is a common misconception people think that the chipset dictates their GP lane availability and to some extent that is true or possible anyway but it's mostly the cpu that is leverage for those lanes for the GPU so you pull off for if you plug in a GPU you're basically limited to a by for setup and with multi-gpu configurations that means basically crossfire because nvidia sli wants by eight more realistically you're using these lanes for things like SSDs that live on PCIe slots either through AIC is or through m dot 2 devices the PCIe lanes through the chipset have now increased to 24 3.0 up from 20 on z170 and H 270 also sees an increase in total PCIe lanes and HS i/o lines regardless we've already broken down the chipset differences in our Intel KB Lake review and proceeding chipset differences content so you can check that out in the link in the description below for more information getting back to the motherboard review at-hand gigabytes board on the table here is at an MSRP of $240 that puts it up in competition with some ROG boards it's certainly one of the more expensive ones that will be available and the other ones we're looking at like the gaming Pro carbon fall closer to the 161 $70 price point so that's what you're interested in stay tuned for the coverage after CES which will be at this week so for this board the Auris badge means that it is equipped with of course RGB LEDs that has been the thing for the last year and still is so those are on here there are RGB LED arrays between the RAM slots if that's your thing there's RGB LEDs pretty much everywhere the peak the core vrm the PCIe slots below them there are a couple of LEDs and Ram and then some of the shielding over here the i/o shields which she can remove if you prefer for what it's worth there's also a laser etched acrylic housing thin on the right side of the board that can be illuminated and you can swap it out if you want to laser at your own option instead getting back to more mission critical things board layout includes multi BIOS with two different firmware chips a toggle switch bounces between them as you'd expect and additional caps which toggles can be used to regulate gain of audio output moving on the board there are buttons present for power overclock application and eco mode the latter two do require gigabytes easy OC software to use so it's not just going to work even though they'll light up and eco-mode doesn't really seem to do a whole lot doesn't really reduce power at least any meaningful amount but gigabytes got issues with voltage and power draw anyway and we'll get to that in a moment troubleshooting features include additional LEDs with legends for Diagnostics that's a huge plus alongside the expected 7 segment display also a valuable addition as for the vrm design and layout we spoke to build Zoid of actually hard core overclocking about this and he has a separate video for us going up on this channel so subscribe for that which will have a full analysis of the vrm and some of the overclocking capabilities but I've got the basics for you here I worked with builds ahead to do some basic resistance probing on the motherboard so we could at least figure out what we think is an 8 plus 3v RM so it's eight plus three phases 8 for the core and then 3 for the GPU the basics are that the 8 plus 3 setup appears to be doing some sort of trickery our current theories are that gigabyte is either switching on two phases at a time or is using something like a doubler to assist in its setup VCC sa and vc cio are using minor v rms located elsewhere on the board and this as far as the core vrm goes isn't a real 8 phase it also doesn't really matter for skylake in kb lake at least for most users and kb lake is basically skylake just with taller fin height and wide and gate pitch unless venturing into more extreme overclocking territory at which point you may be considering a different motherboard anyway most overclocking endeavors will do just fine with this a plus 3 setup regardless at 125 see the vrm should handle well over 200 amps on v core with the GPU BRM capable of handling 80 amps and up at 125 c and this is assuming a pretty safe 500 kilohertz switching frequencies or giving it a bit of an assumption there but most boards are in the 200 to 300 kilohertz range so adjust as according to those changes I mentioned voltage issues earlier and that's what we're talking about now so kb lake in our review of the 7700 k is pretty easy to demonstrate that between two different motherboards in this case the gaming seven here and the game pro carbon from msi we were seeing drastically different temperatures this happens because of the voltage configuration in theory the idea is supposed to be read off of the cpu so the CPU says I need this much voltage and the motherboard complies with auto settings anyway and what's happening is what appears to be a gigabyte biocide issue which could be resolved through a firmware update but is at least in this version of the board a problem reading voltages way more than what's necessary to operate at stock settings this is something we've been communicating with Intel and gigabyte but haven't yet received a resolution here's a reprint of our charts used in the Saudi 700k review gigabyte with auto settings and an otherwise out of box configuration is pushing at times one point 404 volts to the CPU during load and this is absolutely unnecessary that's with a 4.5 gigahertz clock rate we're able to sustain the same four point five clock by manually tuning V cord to around one point one eight volts and that's without any instability issues demonstrating that gigabytes of voltage frequency table is definitely over-ambitious and what it's supplying to the core what's the downside of this well it's temperature as you probably guessed running an unnecessarily high voltage for an auto configured out of box fresh from factory motherboard on the 7700 K is resulting in again one point four volts throughput and that means that we're getting temperatures of something like 94 see when this boards competitor at least a cheaper competitor is performing about twelve Celsius cooler and that's because of the unnecessary voltage even though the CPU remains stable in either state and this is just to reiterate with a Krakken X 62 C LC this is one of the best closed-loop coolers on the market it's $160 and further it's with that cooler using both 140 millimeter fans to 80 millimeter rad at full rpm so that's 1800 rpm with the pump also at max rpm and the temperatures on this board are still 94 C with the out of box settings and that's on an open-air bench just to further drive it in how big of an issue this is so if you buy the board and you don't think to check voltage which if you're running auto why would you then what could happen is you're running into thermal throttle issues it probably won't damage your cpu intel has protections in place for that but you will definitely see clock reductions and we saw them and talked about them in the Intel review of the 7700 K so open air bench with an ambient of about 20 see maybe 22 & $160 closed leave liquid cooler with a an approaching unbearable our fan rpm we're getting 94 C so that's not good hopefully gigabyte fixes it can be resolved through BIOS updates and of course it can be resolved by user input you can go in manually set the voltage to something like one point two seven five if you want it to be at the high end or maybe one point two and probably be fine it's very easy to check stability if it's not stable then just increase it slightly but not to the one point four that gigabytes running and just again for perspective Emma sized board that we have tested so far is sitting at around one point three two volts for the same auto settings where gigabyte was doing about one point four that's for four point two to four point five gigahertz on the clock we're also pushing more wattage to the CPU as a result of gigabytes configuration big surprise there so you're drawing more power and of course drive more heat that lands the CPU at 133 to 138 watts at the high end where Emma sighs at lower V core Auto settings land us at around 100 watts with maximally 111 watts that's much lower obviously if we look again at temperatures and voltages we are able to get the CPU down to a way more acceptable 70 C with a manually adjusted voltage of about one point eight eight to one point two eight volts depending on what the CPU wanted at the time so to recap that's a 24 C reduction in temperatures just by us going in there and changing the voltage which is trivial and hopefully gigabyte does soon for their BIOS because the table is clearly referencing a much higher number than is necessary now the good news here is that even when overclocked in using their auto OC which they call CPU upgrade so something like 5 gigahertz which trivial with kb lake at least the 7700 k we're still seeing the same voltage so it's not doing something like one point seven volts or anything insane like that it's still sticking around one point four so at least there's that but it's not a great piece of news overall so it is easily resolved though you can fix it or gigabyte could but at $240 it's not something that you should have to worry about let's move on to UEFI and look at something like gigabyte does a bit better than the v core settings the options overall or what you'd expect from a gigabyte motherboard any owner of a high-end or moderately high-end z1 seven years e97 gigabyte board will recognize UEFI overall and its options there are a few newer options here a VX tuning for overclocking is a nice addition for more extreme overclockers as is the presence of VCC PLL overclocking for users of Alan two gigabyte has also resolved issues with PWM not working properly unlike some previous gigabyte motherboards this II 270x gaming seven actually uses a PWM signal rather than direct voltage control for fan speed adjustment this is important for users of maglev fans or fan splitter hubs so good on gigabyte for finally fixing that speaking of fans the board does make abundant use of full PWM for pin headers which is always nice to see and we can also appreciate that their support for upwards of two amps throughput on the hybrid fan headers with OCP available there are a few additional pin outs that are designated as pump headers on the board and in BIOS that's useful for isolating cooling solutions by label and then while it was on the bench gigabyte gave us a pre-production BIOS fix that resolves the memory overclocking so achieving thirty-two hundred megahertz XMP is really not a problem the z2 70 board it supports it completely to disclose some preferences here because it does matter for this section I'm a fan of the older school approach to bios where you use a keyboard and no mouse and then ideally you give me something without a bunch of graphics and useless speedometers and things like that because I just want the options in a tree listing that you can arrow through and hit enter to modify to that end gigabyte has done it well this does not have the insane amount of graphics knobs speedometers and car references that for example MSI's bios almost embarrassingly uses despite being good bios overall just kind of not necessary so gigabyte doesn't do all of that it does have some issues with the mouse and to quote build Zoid if you're going to have a mouse in there at least make sure it works gigabytes mouse works but it feels like it's stuck on an XY grid sometimes where it won't quite do diagonal movement unless you whip it across the desk so that could be improved on again thankfully this is something that can be improved on through a BIOS update it's not a hardware level issue just like the vcore one is probably not a hardware level issue the gigabyte z2 70 x RS gaming 7 motherboard is optimal I guess if you fix the vcore issues it's not bad and that's the major point of concern so all these other things really in the face of the V Corps it's pretty much irrelevant once that's fixed this board will be much easier to recommend I do have a few caveats I'll mention in a second but the majority of system builders who buy something like this assemble a system are probably not going to check v core if they're running out of box settings for the CPU or the motherboard and even if you do some lightweight overclock and it's still pushing more voltage than as necessary at times depending on the clock rate so that should be resolved there is a temperature Delta that we've measured between our samples that can vary by sample based on the soldering and the thermal paste application but our samples show about 6 to 7 C Delta between skylake and kb lake and that is not terrible but it's exacerbated by the gigabyte v core which creates more like a 20 C Delta between its competitors so I'd like to see that fixed that's why I've spent so much time talking about it today the price for the motherboard $240 is a bit ambitious I think I would personally not be paying more than like 170 hundred $80 of this Maxx 200 but probably 180 is where where I would invest my money and the LEDs if you really like them I guess the board has them but the problem is everyone has them now so even at the 165 dollar price point if that's what you care about and you don't really need any other features you can get it for cheaper and it looked basically just as good so it's a tough selling point 240 bucks is drifting toward something like some low-end entry-level ROG boards and those generally have better options for you if you're an overclocker if not then get something cheaper and for any kind of extreme overclock and generally you will want as we've learned from speaking with build Zoid something like an ROG board and ax power board something like that from MSI or Asus and we might look at those later for now this is over-ambitious the LEDs are ok but do not make up the cost and gigabyte at least has done well with forward thinking on liquid cooling this board has the pomp adders which star really that special but they do label it pump so that's nice and then there are other boards have the ek water blocks connectors which is also good forward thinking so they've done some things well it's just not enough hopefully the price drops if not we might be looking at other boards that are cheaper from gigabyte in the future we'll have the gaming Pro carbon up soon so subscribe for that content links in the description below for more information as always patreon link in the post roll video if you wanna help us out directly thanks for watching I'll see you all next time you