Gadgetory

hey guys builds weed here from actually hardcore overclocking and today we're gonna be taking a look at the crosshair seven hero now before we get into all the power delivery details I'm just gonna highlight some of the overclocking features that this board has before that this is brought to you by the msi gtx 1080 gaming X and Nvidia's GeForce experience which allows you to retro actively capture key gameplay moments with shadowplay convert captures into gifs with new tools and apply filters to games hashtag no filter Emma sighs gaming axe PCBs are high quality with well-built power management and coolers that we've previously recommended learn more at the links in the description below on the integrated rear i/o you can find the clear CMOS as well as bios a flash back button it's in this area so you can actually flash your motherboard with no cpu just a just a 24 pin plugged in and it'll flash off of the 5 volts done a standby power of your of your power supply so that's a pretty cool feature especially handy if you like it can recover from like corrupted bios flashes and so that's that the motherboard does have an 8 pin and a 4 pin for CPU power for those of you unaware the 4 pin is completely optional in fact the way these work you could probably just plug in the 4 pin and not the 8 pin it would be a terrible idea to do that but it would probably turn on but you really do just for daily use as you really do just need the a pin and even only quit nitrogen I wouldn't be surprised if you were fine with just the 8 pin the the 4 pin really shouldn't make much of a difference under any conditions now then moving along the top edge up in the corner here we find the post code as well as some troubleshooting LEDs under that the post code is of course extremely handy if you're trying to troubleshoot any kind of boot issues because it tells you with pretty good with a pretty good amount of detail what exactly went wrong the LEDs below that are they're color coded and they're much like they're not as helpful in my opinion but they are a good quick indicator of what is malfunctioning even though the post code will give I'll always give you a you know better amount of detail so you basically just check the goto then check the motherboard manual for what that code means so yeah that that's a postcodes much better than the LEDs but you know it doesn't have hurt to have both and if you're just trying to quickly figure out what might be wrong than the LEDs are a good first indicator now then under that you find the power button and the reset button so you know one turns your computer on and the other one just resets it so no rocket signs right there you can't see it in this picture but there's a voltage read points right along here they are well here you can see them better so that's the actual voltage read points they are next to the 24 pin which i think is probably the worst place to put them in terms of accessibility because well it's just kind of hard to get probes from a multimeter under the 24 pin cable that'll be you know plugged into this area the vcore DRAM and SOC voltage read points have an upgrade to them in terms of signal integrity so they're actually differentially routed this time around and that basically means that they'll pick up less noise and they'll be more accurate when you when you try to probe them and also while we're on the back of the board you can see right here there is a hole in the socket and this is for putting a temperature for putting a thermocouple through four extreme overclockers to basically monitor the temperature of their CPU because CPU the built-in CPU temperature diode it does not work at well basically below minus 20 degrees it is completely useless even below minus five degrees the diodes often just stop working so I'm very very you know that this is a handy feature though I I as a you know extreme overclock it I can see the point of it I and I can imagine there might be some scenarios in which it could be helpful but generally speaking I've never used it most other people I know of never never ever used it but for those you know for those who want to use it it's there and that definitely doesn't hurt to have it so that another one of these features that the board has now then going down along the edge you don't really find anything for a while until you get down here and this is my first major complaint for the motherboard don't do this just like that don't don't do this don't put you know two control buttons up here two controls buttons over there and two more and like another bunch of controls down here like that's just it makes it really really hard to sort of have an optimum orientation for the board because like if you're comfortable if you have easy access to this then you won't have particularly easy access to that or this if you're on a test bench so I well I completely understand why they've done this because this board isn't an ATX so it does actually like Asus for their other for a lot of the other top and ROG boards they're like a bit wider and that's mostly to well that allows you to accommodate holding extra buttons up in the corner here but yeah that this is like this is just not this ruins quality of life when overclocking and so basically your safe boot button and your retry button are down here the safe boot you press that and if you have bad BOTS like if you're having trouble posting because you've screwed up some settings you hit safe boot you get into the BIOS and all of your settings are still there you've just booted on stock settings that's a really really handy feature for those of us who don't keep good track of saving profiles if you're good at saving profiles the clear CMOS is all you really need but this is way more convenient because you don't need to save profiles and yeah so that that's a really nice button tap next to that there's the retry button the retry button is for if you have very difficult memory settings you can press the retry button a few times to basically force the motherboard to try retrain the memory settings and well it's a good way to try get hard memory overclocks working it's not exactly like that this isn't something you would use for daily overclocks because restarting your computer like several times to get your memory to post properly it probably means that your memory isn't stable even once it does post so this is very much for benchmarking purposes and not for daily usage next to that you find the ln2 mode jumper this it kind of varies how much this does depending on the motherboard but under without ln2 mode dips enabled the slow mode switch under that doesn't work but also your BIOS voltage limits aren't aren't as ridiculous as they could be because normally an ROG motherboard has volt bios limit BIOS voltage limits that are completely unsafe for you know long term usage like you can set like one point six volts to the CPU two volts into your memory one point 4 volts into your SOC like completely ridiculous amounts of voltage are already accessible without the ln2 mode if you go into ln2 mode everything gets bumped up by a couple hundred more milli volts so you go from no particularly safe for use as is - definitely not safe for daily usage at all and arguably not even safe on liquid-nitrogen it like basically unlimited voltage mode more voltage where then you could ever possibly want below that you do find the slow mode switch which does require the ln2 mode to be enabled to work and what the slow mode switch does is it forces the like if you turn it on it forces the CPU ratio to the lowest possible setting if you turn it off it puts the CPU back up to its current speed so very very handy for extreme overclockers because if you're just sitting in the bowels you don't need to say if you running at 5 gigahertz or 5.5 gigahertz or whatever whatever you've gotten it to similarly if you're in Windows and just you know setting the things up or making a screen shot or doing any or like you know preparing things there is again no reason to have the CPU running at 5 gigahertz and you can force the CPU to a much lower frequency using the slow mode which a ensures better stability and be it he saves you liquid nitrogen because not running at full speed all the time does mean the CPU doesn't like you're still going to be a high voltage but the massive drop in frequency does actually significantly lower your power consumption so it also lowers your liquid nitrogen usage so that that's a very very handy feature to have on all extremo like I think this is a must-have for most extreme overclocking motherboards that have a you know high power consumption architecture available to it so you know X 99 X 299 X 399 X 4 70 X 370 all of these should have the slow mode because these CPUs can idle on a lot of power if you let them and idling on a lot of power is not good for for your temper basically or ln2 usage so that's definitely a nice feature to have and that pretty much covers it in terms of the really obvious stuff that this motherboard has in terms of extreme overclocking features it does also support vclt overclocking though will not cover the details of that here and yeah it does not have a it doesn't have a dual BIOS it is a single BIOS motherboard as was the previous crosshair Aero board so yeah which personally I prefer having motherboards with dual BIOS but well no I just strain it like it's just better to have a backup bios built into the board that don't have one at all and the other thing is the BIOS chip on this motherboard isn't even socketed so if you have one BIOS chip and if that one BIOS chip fails for whatever reason it pretty much needs to get like removed and replaced by soldiering not great so yeah that is like the the BIOS flashback function should be able to recover you from like 99 percent of you know various BIOS failures and corruptions but if there's something actually straight up wrong with the chip then the lack of there being a second chip or just the ability to remove it it is is kind of a problem so yeah I I do prefer or like I think for a board in this price category it really should have a second vial so it doesn't really make sense to just have one especially because BIOS chips aren't exactly expensive and historian and in the past a lot of our og boards had dual BIOS so I don't know why they stopped doing that so much these days anyway let's get into the power delivery system now aces have done some interesting things with the vrm this time well one interesting thing with the VR I'm other than making it just more massive like other than making it massive overkill there's one interesting thing they've done so this right here is your V core and SOC vrm because the way it's actually laid out is kind of funky so that right there is your SOC v RM this is V core right v core and this down here is also V core and the reason why this is done is because this motherboard does not have any display outputs so there's no good reason to put an APU in it and even if you did put an APU in it you can't actually use the APU GPU to do anything so the SOC vrm on this motherboard will basically not have to do any work because it's never going to be running a you know a apu so asus decided to put the SOC vrm between the V Corps and the other V core for basically thermal purposes because it means that instead of having one big you know halt blob like this you get one halt blob down here and one halt blob down there and overall your temperature is actually like your your overall thermal density is a bit lower because you have this cold spot in between the two rather than just having one big halt stripe like that so that helps improve vrm temperatures the the actual V RMS themselves for V core you're looking at a one two three four five six seven eight nine ten phase the SOC is a two-phase like that the voltage controller is on the back of the board which is kind of an interesting place to put it most boards have it on the front but I guess since they already had SMDs going on the back of the board anyway they decided that well just doing more work on the back doesn't doesn't really raise the cost because obviously if you just do one side of the board it's cheaper than doing both so the voltage controller that Asus uses for the V Corps and SOC BRM is this chip right here and it is the ASP 1405 so that is an asus rebranded part from international rectifier it's probably an IR probably an ir35 ir35 2:01 so the same thing you would find on all the other high-end motherboards it might have some special features specifically for Asus but with all probability it's just probably just like it's almost certainly just a straight rebrand here it is running in a 5 + 2 phase configuration the 2 is for the SOC the 5 runs into a bunch of doublers in this case IR $35.99 s so the dumbest doubler that ir makes because this thing literally just so those are IR $35.99 s and that gives you a 10 phase by the definitely liked by the bare minimum definition of what a 10 phase would be and the reason some somebody pointed out last video that I'm less harsh on these doubling schemes and it's basically because doubled up a doubled up five phase has more in common with a 10 phase than it has with a 4 phase or a five phase like it is a lot lot better than just a straight 5 phase it but of course having like a 10 phase or even a real 8 phase those might have an advantage over it but it's not comparable to a 5 if it's doubled up into a 10 so the $35.99 literally just takes two the PWM signal from the asp 1405 and cuts the switching frequency in half and puts it into two phases so this thing does have 10 phase interleaving so one phase out of the ten is only ever turned on at the same time which means you do get all the benefits like you have lower Ripple and you have better thermals on the vrm and better efficiency but the vrm does lack things like current balancing because the IR 3599 is incredibly dumb it doesn't even do the most basic current balancing of like turning off like skipping a phase and it can't do duty cycle extensions which some of the really expensive doublers can do but it does do the bare minimum of that you know you only do have one time one out of the ten phases running at any given time so and your your transient response is also better than like a comparable five phase so it is as close enough to being a ten phase that I'll go and say it's a ten phase because it doesn't really deserve to be lumped in with the other five like with five phase designs there so that's the control scheme here the SOC is just a straight you know two phase running off of the SP 1405 now if we go back to the front of the board the actual chips making up each phase well the chip making up each phase because it is one chip these are international rectifier power stages these are ir35 55s the Asus favorite 60 amp power stage these are actually surprisingly cheap apparently like you can get these on digi-key in a reel of three thousand for two point one seven dollars apiece so I'm not sure what's up with that I think they're on like a massive sale because I'd expect these to cost a lot more under normal circumstances but yeah they're currently going for two dollars apiece so they're cheaper than they normal then then what I'm like I I expected to see them around three to four dollars so yeah but right now these are cheap which kind of explains why Isis decides has been using them so much because this isn't like they've been throwing these on so many boards recently and graphics cards and well it's a 60 amp power stage though the end result is that this is massive overkill for a risin eight core like it's ridiculous how overkill this vrm is so if you're looking at running so with this VR I'm running at 500 kilohertz switching frequency all in the actual phases so that would be 1 megahertz coming from the controller and 5 volt gate drive for a 8 core like I'm just gonna go with the 1000 series 8 core and the 8000 and the 2000 series 8 core CPUs because well they're the highest current draws that you're gonna see on a am4 motherboard so for the 1000 series at one point for 2 volts you'll be looking at around a hundred amps and for the 2000 series you're gonna be looking at one point for 2 volts and about 125 amps and with these with this operating configuration for the vrm you're at a hundred amps you're looking at about 12 watts of heat which is very similar to what we saw in the the gigabyte gaming 7 and at one point for you know at 125 amps output you're gonna be looking at 13 watts of heat because it's just completely massive overkill this vrm doesn't need a heatsink at all like the gigabyte one didn't this is even more efficient these components are physically larger this thing will run ice-cold under basically any operating conditions it's massive massive massive overkill and if you write you know if you crank it up to liquid nitrogen which I don't have accurate power figures for liquid nitrogen yet about 1.8 5 volts and I think the CPU might hit 200 amps I'm not 100% certain about that because very low temperatures massively change how much power as CPU pulls and it by massively change I mean massively reduce the amount of power our CPU poles so I'm not sure if it'll even hit that much current draw it might go even it might go above that it might go below that I'm thinking probably below that but for 1.8 5 volts 200 amps this vrm will only produce about 22 watts of heat which is just like it's it's ice hold like that is still you know spread across this many phases 22 watts of heat is really not much so yeah that is that this thing is massive overkill it's just absolutely massive overkill then then again that's like with the price tag that this board comes with it makes sense that it would be so yeah very very impressive erm from Asus also for temperature monitoring since people are wondering about that the temperatures in on this vrm are read directly from the IR 3555 is they have a temperature monitoring function built into them so that's how that's taken care of and yeah it that that's like probably that that's one of the most accurate ways to get vrm temperatures possible directly from the power stages because that temperature sensor is actually built into the silicon that's doing your switching of the that's actually in the same silicon as the MOSFET so it has the least amount of thermal resistance towards the things that are actually getting hot now the SOC vrm is made up of the same 35 55 s so it's it 2 is ridiculous overkill and for a so for about 4 well 1.2 volts 20 amps output which is probably around the max you will see for a CPU risin you're gonna be looking at about 2.2 watts of heat and for 30 amps at 1.2 volts you're gonna be looking at about 2.4 watts of heat there's no point rating this for like SOC current associate current draws of an APU because there's no display output so no good reason to put an APU in this board the SOC VR compass again massive overkill it's just this is kind of the kind of everything like everything about this board really well about this vrm right here is a best described as massive over hill so I yeah I can't come plain here in fact what's kind of interesting about this vrm right here is it's it's technically bigger than what you would get on some other top-end ROG motherboards on let's say power hungrier platforms so yeah this I'm pretty sure is currently the strongest vrm from ROG that you can get on a motherboard like I don't think they have a board with a stronger vrm than this they do have GPUs that have had stronger VRMs than this but not motherboards so this is actually really close to their top-of-the-line GPUs in terms of in terms of like the vrm design which is uh which just like the the reason why GPU like GPUs get such some so much stronger vrm designs is because GPUs are like have a stock power consumption of like 250 watts right whereas a CPU at stock is like a hundred and if you overclock a GPU you can easily do as much as double the stock power consumption and on CPUs you can do roughly the same but a CPU going from a hundred to 200 watts is nothing compared to a GPU going from 200 to 400 watts so yeah this really wouldn't look out of place on a 1080 Ti in fact if my memory serves me correctly this is very very very similar to what the Asus 1080 TI Strix has for its of ecore VRA so yeah this is ridiculous overkill for for horizon 8 core but hey for a price for a motherboard at this price point I mean it'd better be ridiculous overkill so yeah nothing to complain about the actual vrm itself the capacitors around the motherboard so these guys and these are niche econ FP series and you can actually tell that these are FP 10ks so these are rated for oops wrong button these are FP 10 kHz columns and that 10 K stands for 10,000 hours at 105 degrees centigrade I mean Celsius so and I keep doing that wrong so there so yeah these are basically the only higher rating I've ever seen on a motherboard is 12,000 and honestly if you're not hitting that hundred and five degree figure the time that these capacitors last is like orders of magnitude larger than that that rating at 105 degrees like if you're at 80 they last for ages and ages and ages and ages so yeah this like you should not be the CPU will probably be obsolete before these kappa capacitors and this vrm hit they're like mean time to failure so yeah nothing nothing nothing in the power sit like in the cpu power section to complain about for the memory power asus has gone with the Asus usual of two-phase memory of erm it's this thing right here and the these MOSFETs so these are discrete fats and these are Nyko semiconductor and yeah this is a really cheap MOSFET manufacturer but the thing about Ram is that it doesn't really pull about power well pull all that much power so these Nyko PE a 16 VA MOSFETs even if you have four memory sticks pull at one point three five volts pulling two watts each which is actually a bit high for that voltage you know you're gonna be looking at six amps output on this VR I'm max and that'll produce about one watt of heat so that this isn't overheating and asus has been using this for memory vrm design on tons and tons of boards because it works so yeah that covers the memory of your room right there and that covers the actually the entire board I mean you do get some minor voltage regulators down here but none of those is you know you're not gonna be changing the voltage outputs of any of those so there's really no need to worry about there about about them and yeah that covers the board like my only complaint is that they put the the like they put some of the controls down here and then some of the controls up here I find that absolutely infuriating when a motherboard does that because I use these buttons a lot and when they're this far apart it really gets you know it starts getting on your nerves after the 50th time you need to go press the safe boot button and it's on the other end of the motherboard which you can't reach but other than that like this board is extremely solid massive amounts of overkill on the vrm it's just yeah it's well it's uh it's it's a pretty heavy upgrade compared to the old crosshair 6 here Oh actually like you get not only do you get two phases more than before all of the MOSFETs were actually like just upgraded it went from the Texas Instruments power duel and that's to these International rectifier 3555 s and that's just another massive upgrade so yeah it really like this this is the strongest vrm that I'm aware of that asus has on on motherboards right now so yeah that should pretty much tell you everything you need to know this thing is massive overkill and they're like there's like as long as the BIOS is good there's not really any way that this mother I could see this motherboard letting you down physically there's nothing wrong with it so yeah that's it for the video thank you for watching like share subscribe leave a comment down below if you have or any questions if you'd like to support what we do here with gamers Nexus there's a patreon link and shirts you can buy you'll find a link down in the description below for that and if you'd like to see more overclocking content and PCB breakdowns things like that I have my own channel called actually hard for overclocking it would be awesome if you would check that out thanks for watching and see you next time