Gadgetory

hey guys build Zoid here from actually hardcore overclocking and today we're gonna be taking a look at the Meg X 578 motherboard from MSI so this board is gonna be going up against the crosshair eight hero from Asus and the X 570 horas Master from gigabyte so this is you know this is a pretty high-end motherboard like this falls into that category of motherboards words like these are these are all rather overkill for even like your 3950 X that these are going to be quite expensive though actually significantly less like significantly lower price points than what you actually pay for like the flash chips like the flagships 4 X 570 are insanely expensive let's start off with some of the noteworthy features around the board and then we'll move on to the vrm and like memory stuffs as well before that this video is brought to you by the EVGA gtx 1660 XC black video card EVGA gtx 1660 XC black uses a fat heatsink to allow the card to run at lower noise levels for longer capable of sinking more heat before the fan kicks in and also has a day 1 game ready drivers for game launches the 1660 XC black is short and compact for installations a small form-factor pc build but if you need one that isn't extra thick it's also accompanied by a dual fan counterpart with a thinner heatsink for standard dual slot support learn more at the links in the description below so starting off with the rear i/o we've got a clear CMOS here which i'm a huge fan of because this does make it possible to clear the bios for super convenient if you're just overclocking your daily system and you get get it into that scenario where it doesn't want to automatically recover though most motherboards these days are pretty good about recovering on their own anyway below that we get BIOS flash back to actually be able to update the bios of the CPU I mean of the motherboard without having a compatible CPU for the motherboard because it does allow you to just update the BIOS without even a CPU installed you just need to power the motherboard which I think for MSI boards the requirement is that you have the 8 pin and the 24 pin plugged in and then there's like a bunch of requirements for the format of the USB stick and the name of the the BIOS file on that USB stick in which which USB port you plug it into then you whack this button and it'll update the BIOS for you so yeah pretty a pretty neat feature to have is actually like as far as I know every X 570 motherboard that's coming out will have this feature so yeah but still kind of definitely nice to have the Wi-Fi card is missing from the board that will be present when when you buy it retail I assume it's been removed for the purpose of making this picture then you've got one gig Intel and 2.5 giggle tech which I think that's the order the ports are in and they might be swapped around it doesn't really matter that much you can check on MSI as a website which ones which right and then that sort of covers everything in the rear i/o we of course have the optional and very useful extremely useful extra 8 pin so yeah you don't need to plug this in if you have a PSU that only has a single eye pin power connector you don't need to worry about the existence of this extra power connector over here it doesn't do anything like it first of all it's literally connected in parallel with the other one so the motherboard can't distinguish between or like you can't tell the difference between this one being plugged in or that one and the other thing is is yeah you don't need this like you really don't need to this because the thing is the first eight pin can handle already up to 384 watts and this is a problem if you're on the some of the like intel h EDT platforms can exceed that 39 to 50x unfortunately still can't okay unless you're pushing at 39 50 X on like liquid nitrogen you are not gonna be exceeding that 384 watts power consumption figure so the extra a pin is just completely useless for any kind of water-cooled overclocking for any rise in CPU you that you can install within this motherboard it doesn't do anything so yeah it's it's just a thing that board vendors do for no reason is add extra power connectors because I guess it makes the motherboard look more impressive to people who don't know anything about how power connectors work which is that you know if the power connector if you're not pulling more power than the connector is rated more you don't need another one so otherwise you know the power connector II would be rated lower so anyway moving on from the very useful very useless HP extra 8 pin we have the far more useful postcode readout right here so you can you can tell a lot from the postcode but it also depends kind of on the platform on some other boards on some platforms the postcode is completely useless you might as well just have the four le like trouble before troubleshooting LEDs right here which these will tell you if you have like a memory error CPU error VGA error or a boot media error and the post code will tell you that too but it'll generally give you more details it's just that on some platforms there's no extra details even through the post code because it'll always end up on the same like any memory issue ends up with the same final memory post code right or that kind of thing so yeah still definitely not like the this is definitely a feature I really like to have on a lot of other words because when it does work it can be super helpful and massively simplify the overclocking process now the only complaint I have for this post code right here is that it is located under the PCIe slots it's not luckily it's not like jammed somewhere right here where if you put another PCIe card you're just never gonna see it because it's gonna be covered up but if you were running 2-way GPUs I mean I that's not a very straight look well yeah about the backplate of a GPU would start obscuring that and then depending on how tall your other GPU is yeah you might not be able to see that post code the other thing worth noting here is that you do only get four SATA ports I have no idea why there's only four SATA ports it kind of looks like msi just ran out of space on this board but in that case you know what they could have just removed the OC dial taking the postcode moving that moved that down here which like i still don't like the postcode being located anywhere unlike the lower half of the motherboard because of the whole GPUs are gonna cover it up but uh like at least it's there right like at least there's a postcode I will always a pre having a postcode is better than not having one even if it's in the wrong place as long as you're not using too many GPUs because if you do use enough GPUs and it's covered up then you know it might as well not be there because you can't see it anyway but still this thing right here my personal experience with it is that it gives you overclock so this is basically a bunch of overclocking profiles for your CPU and the thing about CPU overclocking is that it's very simple you raise the core voltage you raise the core clock and you check that you're not overheating or that you're not over see no I'm not exceeding the maximum safe core voltage that's all you have to do to CPU overclock so I'd argue this like if this worked well I'd argue it's still not very helpful and the reality of it is is that my experience with the OSI dial is that the profiles on it generally range from very low clock speeds at extremely high voltage to even higher voltages and higher clock speeds so it is not like I would never advise anybody to actually use this because the way this is tuned is that it's set up so that the profiles just work and to achieve that they basically just tend to just slam voltage into them so you know that that's kind of the thing is just yeah they're not good profiles whatsoever this honestly like they should have replaced that with SATA ports SATA ports are more useful than the OC dial anyway next to that we find a reset button and a power button those are of course extremely useful if you do do have the motherboard on an open air test bench and that pretty much covers all of the the overclocking features on this motherboard so we don't get like dual BIOS smile switches or any kind of like super like extreme overclocking targeted functionality on this board but we do get sort of the Barrett law like the bare minimum for you know good overclocking I would say a good overclocking support for like test bench usage so anyway moving on the VRM and in the vrm department we have what would like a year well actually it's not even like a year ago if we go back a couple months this would be an extremely high-end vrm and it doesn't really change the fact that it is still an extremely high-end vrm it's just not quite as extremely high-end as it used to be because we've got a v core that is 12 phases BAM and then we've got plus two so two more phases on the SOC vrm over here and the way this is controlled is with an international rectifier ir35 2:01 which is of course you know like the this chip is everywhere because this is these default high end voltage controller for high end the words for the last several years if you have a high end motherboard it probably has an ir35 2:01 if it doesn't have an IR three five two zero one then it has an ISL sixty nine one three eight because those are literally the only two options available for for CPU power for a very long time now well there are some other options they're just not as high-end as these two that I just listed off now the one downside to the ir35 2:01 and it's only really a downside now because there's an option which has more phases is the fact that it only goes up to eight phases so here it's configured as a six plus two and to achieve the twelve phases MSI is using a whole bunch of doublers located on the back of the board so on the back of the board we have a bunch of these chips and these are of course just a bunch of international rectifier ir35 99s and these are doublers and quadruples but they do not actively current balance themselves so that actually Falls entirely upon the voltage controller on the motherboard so I've been digging through some international rectifier documentation recently and it's come to my attention that technically the ir35 2:01 because of how accurate its current sensing system is it can actually current balance even through an IR 3599 so there's a lot of other doublers out there which will actually integrate current balancing functionality because if you use a doubler you basically run into with most voltage controllers you would run into the issue of the controller has eight current sensing inputs and now you have two phases on one current satan singh input and it won't be able to distinguish which phase is which but the three five two zero one is so good that it can still distinguish between the two which phase is turning on and off because the the current flowing through each phase it's not DC like it's not a fixed amount of current it goes up and down so it can actually tell which phases which and it can still current balance to some extent even through through the 3599 so yeah it's it's not like so that that's a mistake that there's in a bunch of my past videos so yeah this is actually like a twelve phase with with current balancing because you can't curve through the $35.99 s if your voltage controller is good enough to support that functionality which not all are capable of doing so anyway the other thing worth noticing about the doublers is that they do add a little bit of delight to your pwm signals because they are an extra chip on your pwm line and that does mean that you're gonna have worse transient response then if you just kind of through the doublers out and kept the same motherboard design overall but the thing is there's a lot of things you can do to your motherboard in terms of how it's designed to optimize the the transient response that don't necessarily include throwing out the doublers so I personally my personal view on the the doublers is at least currently because I'm still doing some like I'm still researching more into how much impact the doublers actually have on transient response in real-world usage which I I currently have a few tests that seem to indicate that quite frankly under certain loading conditions it doesn't matter what you do the vrm is just not gonna have a chance under other loading conditions that does make a difference but yeah so inconclusive test results so far and my current outlook on it is is that the the difference seems to be so marginal that it doesn't really matter anyway so yeah I see I see no issues with using like I see no reason to consider a VRM inferior just because it uses doublers compared to a vrm that doesn't use doublers of course there is the XD PE 1 3 2 g 5c from Infineon that now supports all the way up to 16 phases even then the difference would be really marginal with VRMs a lot of the time you get into a situation where it's just like well there's technically a way to do this better but it's not going to give you any return in terms of actual real world benefits so yeah I really don't see a problem with MSI using the higher $35.99 s though it is technically an inferior control scheme to having you know an XD PE 1 3 2 g 5c and it is an alternative control scheme to just not using doublers at all because there's upsides and downsides to not using doublers at all as well so yeah that's not like like having a lower phase counter is what I by that like if you had a six days with no doublers there's upsides and downsides to that as well so we're not going to get into all of that anyway for the actual power stages MSI is using international rectifier ir35 55s which are basically the standard high end of power stage for the last several years except for the fact that last year we started seeing a whole bunch of smart power stages which unfortunately just do everything that the power our stages do they just do it better they're more efficient they have better current monitoring they have better temperature monitoring and they also integrate a bunch of safety functionalities that the how IR stages don't integrate whatsoever nonetheless these are still extremely powerful and efficient so even though they have like you know the minor downsides to these compared to smart power stages are honestly like unless you're a sir like the whole point of smart power stages is that they're meant for server applications because they're you know efficiency is absolutely the most important thing ever so having a very accurate current monitoring system built into your power stage is super is a priority for desktop systems like this yeah it's not really so the fact that this has slightly inferior current sensing is just irrelevant and having the various safety features is also irrelevant when you're vrm is this freaking overkill right twelve phases of 60 amp hour stages this has a theoretical maximum current throughput of 720 amps you're not gonna overload this any time soon so for the VR I'm running at 1.20 for the VR I'm outputting 1.2 volts at 400 kilohertz switching frequency on the actual phases so that would be a 100 kilohertz switching frequency at the controller and then 5 volts drive the efficiency of this vrm is as follows so 100 amps output which is where you'd be looking at for like slightly above a hundred amps is basically all of the different eight core CPUs from the seven nanometer a core to the 12 nanometer eight cord to the 14 nanometer eight core the 12 nanometer eight core is actually by far the most power hungry a core CPU only a m4 socket because it's it's basically the 14 nanometer chip just with more leakage and higher clock speeds so yeah anyway hundred amps output this vr1 will be producing about 11 watts of heat it will not need a RM heatsink whatsoever for that right like that's non-issue for a vrm especially when it's a 12 phase like it has so much surface area just because of how many components there are that you don't need a heat sink for a hundred amps output whatsoever now for 150 amps output which is far more than any of the first gen or second generation CPUs would pull safely so you could actually get a 2700 X to pull this current it's just that after a few months of pulling that much current your 2700 X would clock significantly worse than when you first set up your overclock so yeah this would degrade a 2700 X pretty quickly but the 12 Corizon CPU the the new seven nanometer one that one will be actually a capable of hitting this kind of current draw Alden safe voltages under extreme load so we're talking like prime95 with you know a maxed out overclock 150 amps output would be actually what the CPU would pull and then at that kind of current output this VR will produce 15 watts of heat oh yeah 15 watts of heat which means you still don't need a heatsink going up from 150 amps to 200 amps which is where the 16 Corizon 7 rise in 3000 series chip will max out so the 39 50x that one will max out around 200 amps so again like maximum voltage that you can run on like water cooling under a AVX workload like say prime95 or a video encoding or some really heavy CPU workload you're gonna be looking at maximum current draw sustained around 200 amps and you're gonna be pretty and the vrm is gonna be producing about 19 watts of heat which again because this is a 12 phase it should still be right capable of dissipating this without needing a heatsink though at this point a heatsink might be advisable as that is a that is a pretty significant amount of heat and it also depends on you like the air flow situation now going up into the sort of theoretical current outputs for this vrm so you know 300 amps because it's 60 amp hour stages right like who doesn't want to know what would happen if you actually made use of all the current capability that msi offers on this motherboard so if there were like which on liquid nitrogen you can't actually hit 300 to 400 amps current draw that is possible but uh yeah on water cooling or air cooling you're gonna be stuck at most you're gonna be stuck under that 200 amp range where this vrm is absolutely ridiculous overkill so anyway 300 amps I'm gonna be looking at about 30 watts of heat at this point the heat VR I mean sink is pretty much a necessity 400 amps output you're gonna be looking at about 48 watts of heat and you can technically design passive heat sinks for well like all the way up to 95 watts of heat right there's passive CPU coolers for 495 watt TDP CPUs the the thing is is just like designing those kinds of heat sinks tend to make them very bulky and kind of ugly because you actually need to prioritize surface area and thermal efficiency over aesthetics and so with the types of heat sinks that most motherboards come with 48 watts of heat you're actually would need a fan to dissipate it you wouldn't be able to do it passively with the if you follow like typical motherboard heatsink design these days but if you had a heatsink that was actually designed to dissipate like prioritised you know dealing with 48 will also heat passively it's doable it would just kind of be the rather bulky and pretty ugly 500 amps output this vrm would be producing about 70 watts of heat that is still doable with the passive heatsink it would just be very very large at that point and the preferred cooling method for that kind of heat output would of course be a water block but as I said earlier a risin even a 16 quart 39 50 X you're gonna be looking at less than 200 amps of current draw so yeah this VR m4 for like an air-cooled or water-cooled build the daily system the RM is apt like V curve erm is total overkill yeah you know it's on like it's on par with the other options that you get at this price point honestly within a given price range you're gonna end up with roughly the same solution for the vrm and the the feature set and the memory and everything so yeah this is definitely this is a solid motherboard it's just that at this price point in the price range where this motherboard is I'd say all of the motherboards are pretty damn solid so it's just like yeah you know pick your own poison at that point so SOC vrm two-phase more 35 50 55 power of 60 amp power stages so not even worth discussing how much heat this is going to be putting out because the SOC vrm never really needs to put out anything more than 20 amps and quite frankly a single 35:55 can deal with that all on its own that's not an issue that's actually within peak efficiency for a single 35 55 yeah SOC vrm is just totally overkill as well and now let's move on to the memory of erm so the memory of erm is this right here at least the main one there's obviously there's a ton of supporting voltages like v TT DDR which is done with just a linear regulator and there's well no point listing them off there's also like VPP which is normally done with a small buck converter anyway so VDD R which is the big one the most important one that's just a single-phase but it is actually like out of the single phase memory V RMS this one's one of the far more powerful ones because MSI is using these like a recently picked up a bunch of these MOSFETs which I'm a huge fan of because they are they're evidently they're cheap because they use them everywhere even on like low-end motherboards but these are actually really good MOSFETs so you have four c0 29 ends from well not really good MOSFETs but compared to what other cheap MOSFETs are these are really good as far as cheap MOSFETs go but for c0 29 ends from on semiconductor for the high side and then for c0 24 ends for the low side which actually makes this one of the more efficient single-phase memory VRMs out there not that that really matters ddr4 really doesn't pull that much power the most important thing for ddr4 overclocking is what's going on between the CPU socket and the memory slots so all of this right here which MSI has kindly highlighted for us with these visual indicators of where the like memory things here non memory things there right that that's what that stripe is indicating it's not actually electrically much of anything because it is just a break in the solder mask and you can see that it ends like right there so it's just a break in the solar mount mask unlike the audio ice audio section isolation slaw it doesn't even go all the way through the board so if we go on the back of the board right and we to the well if we look in the memory section you can't see that stripe anywhere here but you can see it right here because the thing is here with the audio isolation one you can actually shine the light straight through that stripe right there because it does actually cut through every single one of the the planes and the motherboard the idea being that you basically isolate the audio sections ground plane from the ground plane of the rest of the motherboard because obviously there's all kinds of things sinking current into the ground plane so you're gonna have all currents flowing in all kinds of directions on the ground plane of the of the main motherboard and that would potentially lead to interference issues with the audio sections right if you had like if you had like return current from a PCIe slot flowing through your audio section that that would kind of suck so that's the idea behind having the isolation slaw but the memory you don't want to do that because you actually want to solid ground plane in this area now other interesting things that make em si is doing with the memory section here which the the visual indication doesn't actually electrically achieve anything it's just kind of like hey this is where our memory stuff is but what they are doing that's kind of interesting is that MSI is going for full ground fills over all of the memory traces which seems to be like I I assume they're trying to do some kind of memory shielding with that and I say I assume that they're trying to do that because most motherboards don't bother with anything like this most motherboards you can see all of the memory traces even motherboards that are really really good at memory overclocking you can still see all of the memory traces but here or at least most of the memory traces but here MSI has actually dedicated the bottom the very bottom layer and the top layer of the motherboard to basically just ground like this is just a great big round fill all over where all of your memory traces run and then they have another one down here we can kind of see some of the power planes also being like the there's a power plane down here which I assume is VPP and then there's a VDD our power plane that should be running through here but I'm not sure we can see it from the side of the motherboard anyway so yeah but they are doing the ground shields on the back of the board they're also doing them on the front of the board right you can just well I mean you can't see any memory traces so that's how you know that they filled out the the did a ground fill all over the memory traces right here and you can kind of see that the the part of the ground fell over there we have a little vdr I uh Island over here because there's a power plane that goes like that basically and yeah so MSI has obviously put some extra effort into the memory section of this motherboard the topology that's actually hiding under all of this shielding is just a regular date well MSI is daisy chain because the thing is like not all daisy chains are equal okay it also depends also how the bios handles the the how the bios handles the memory but uh yeah msi has been doing daisy chains for ages and ages and ages they are I say they're daisy chains are really really good at this point it gives you the best sort of the best of both worlds where you can have a lot of RAM or you can have a very high memory frequency if you just use this dims law and that dims law and also if you're wondering like how much of a how much of a downside is there to daisy chain when you're full populating all of the memory slots well on x4 70 MSI's daisy chain motherboards would actually go from like so unlike two sticks you would easily do thirty six hundred megahertz on four sticks you would generally top out around 3200 which that I would mostly say is down to the Rison ii like the yeah rise in second gen memory controller more so than the actual memory topology because msi also uses daisy chain on zi 390 and on zi 390 that daisy chain is capable of hitting in excess of 4,000 megahertz on for dim memory configurations just depends on the cpu quality and the the actual specific motherboard but they do have a few boards that with the daisy chain can go over 4000 megahertz on four dims so yeah like you know the this should not restrict you until you're trying to exceed 4,000 megahertz assuming that the CPUs memory controller is good enough all of the big aluminium polymer through Hulk ball capacitors that we see around this motherboard are made by a nipple Nippon chemi-con which is as the name implies a Japanese capacitor maker these capacitors are all right for five thousand hours at 105 degrees which doesn't sound like a lot but that rating also includes full voltage which these are 6.3 volt capacitors on your V core which week or you're not going to be going over 2 volts so that means the capacitors degrade slower also the lifespan of the capacitor basically doubles for every 5 10 degrees that you reduce the temperature by so 5,000 hours at 105 degrees is 9 is like 10,000 hours at 95 degrees right so yeah like and also it's worth noting that aluminum polymers don't do catastrophic failures they basically get slightly worse at being capacitors over time so it's really like this is fine okay this is completely fine to use 5000 hours 105 degree rated capacitors there's real as far as I'm concerned if you're like especially if you're vrm is this overkill and you have a vrm heatsink on the motherboard right it comes with one then yeah I don't see a reason to have like a 10,000 or 12,000 hours rated capacitor because the vrm is not going to be getting that hot that you would actually be concerned about the lifespan of the capacitor in the first place right that is it for the Meg X 578 it's it's definitely a like hardware-wise I really like the board it kind of gives me Z 390 dark vibes with the trim that they have going on but admittedly like the this is again this is just missing PC this is sold missing solder mask it doesn't functionally achieve anything it just kind of looks it just gives you the 390 dark vibes but it doesn't do the same thing that like the gold trim on yzi 390 dark actually achieves the this board is competitive with everything else the the main downside I can see with this motherboard is the four SATA ports like I really don't know why there's only four of them here but other than that there's really nothing else I can complain about that at least like that that I want to complain about this is a really solid board and the only question I have is just how does it compare in terms of memory overclocking to a lot of the other motherboards right because like it's nice to know what topology they have and we can clearly see MSI was trying to do something with the memory layout here that's new on their past boards they wouldn't have these ground like actually I don't think they've done these ground fills over their memory traces on any other boards in the past so that's definitely new but I can't eyeball you know memory overclocking capability from from just looking at the motherboard so and yeah so that's it for the video thank you for watching like share subscribe leave any comments questions suggestions down in the comment section below and if you'd like to support gamers Nexus we've got a patreon and there's also the gamers Nexus merch store which is door doc gamers Nexus dotnet if you'd like to pick up things like mod mats and then I have a channel called actually hardcore overclocking where I do more overclocking related stuff so if you'd like to check that out that would be awesome there's gonna be links to all of those things down in the description as well as in the comment section so that's it for the video thanks for watching and good bye