Gadgetory

hey guys build lid here and today we're going to be taking a look at MSI is X 370 X power board so this is MSI's top-of-the-line motherboard for the X 370 chipset is also as far as I'm aware the most expensive am4 motherboard you can get right now so you know you'd be expecting great things from a board demanding such a price tag I'll be going over some of the overclocking features the board feed the board has and then we'll you know focus mostly on the BRM before we get into that this video is brought to you by the current bundle on the GTX 1060 and GTX 1080 video cards where you can get Ghost Recon wildlands or for honor at checkout this comes alongside new MSRP is for the GTX 10 80 series cards now down to $500 you can learn more at the link in the description below so with that out of the way let's get started starting off with the features so down here you find a power button and a reset button and this thing which is the this is an automatic OC dial which basically just preloads overclocking profiles I do believe it goes up to like 4.4 or maybe even in 4.5 gigahertz but I can assure you that 4.4 or 4.5 gigahertz will not work the like Verizon is just not capable of such clocks on water cooling or air cooling and and MSI just puts profiles on to their motherboards that are extremely high for the platform they're all unlike my x99 X Power has a has a 5 gigahertz profile which is a profile that would work for like top 1% of haswell-e CPUs not even Broadwell u so yeah it just don't use it and do all your over clocks manually it'll always give you the best results rather than relying on some pre-loaded profiles because the problem is this isn't like some automatic overclocking system it just loads up a profile that's been put into the BIOS which gives you really high voltage for certain clock so doesn't tend to work very well so moving along the bottom edge here we also find this six pin power connector and this is here to provide extra power to the PCIe slots so basically well this slot down here the slot above that these slots all get extra power from this expand right here as well as the One X slots should also be hooked up to that but basically this exists if you're running a well if you're running a GPU setup which has a really high PCIe power draw a lot of people like say when the reference are X 480 came out a lot of people were worried about the over draw on the PCIe slot generally speaking your PCIe slot is not where you're going to see issues the main issue with high power draw on PCIe slots is if you have two cards that really pull a lot of power from the PCIe slots or even three or four then what tends to happen is the 24 pin the 12 volt connector the 12 volt pins of the 24 pin connector tend to melt so because you push too much power through them they heat up and you know burn themselves melt the plastic and basically destroy themselves so in order to avoid that there is this expand connector down here to basically give you extra power for the PCIe slots which could come in handy if you're running like a crossfire setup with really power-hungry GPUs but yeah I think this is a little bit unnecessary for four-way capable motherboards it's really useful but the thing is this board isn't four-way capable though it is one of the few uh X 370 motherboards which has this slot down here wired as X 8 as we can clearly see that you know the paint like you can see that the last metal in connection right there so that's an X 8 like X 8 slot that's an X a and this is the neck side as well this is an X 16 but if you want to run 3-way crossfire on this board then you're going to be running X 8 X 8 X 8 and the cool thing about well it'll work for crossfire it won't work for SLI because this last slot is going through the chipset and that might some issue but generally it should work especially for benchmarks this won't be a problem for games I I think you might see some kind of latency issues and other weirdness so this is a small advantage over some other X 370 boards because a lot of the other X 370 boards in this at like the tall of you know the top X 370 boards don't have this last slot as x8 they have X 4 here which crossfire will still run off of X 4 except even in my own testing for like 3 mark firestrike benchmarking X 4 starts causing serious issues even like it X 4 is really really doggy so while it'll work it's really not usable so to speak so you know it is a nice thing that this is included but I wouldn't really recommend using it now that moving up to the top of the board the very last feature that is really useful for overclocking on this board is this right here which is of course a post code display this is really useful if you're debugging like any kind of overclocking issues if for some reason your system isn't starting up this is a really as long as this is working this is a really good way to figure out what is wrong so that covers all the various OSI features so with those out of the way lights to take a look at the VRMs our two main vrm sections are the vcore vrm right here so that's the cord that powers the CPU cores if you're overclocking rising like your core clock so you're going from like say 3 gigahertz stalk on a 1,700 to 4 gigahertz or 3.9 gigahertz or whatever your tip is capable of this is the vrm that will is the most important for that then up here you find the SOC vrm and this powers the memory controller and all the other system on a chip parts of Rison so that would be like the PCIe controller the SATA controller the USB controller there's just the SOC portion Verizon is pretty massive and it has a lot of components in it and that's all powered by the SOC in the future I expect the SOC vrm to also power I gpus of all the a.m. for all the a.m. for AP use which as a right now I don't think any are currently available to buy so yeah right now this is like I have no idea how important the SOC is on rising CPUs it's not that important but associ doesn't pull that much power even though it is like it takes up a lot of space on the rise and die it isn't particularly power-hungry when we start seeing ap use the SOC vrm will be more important as the GI GP will probably pull all of its power off of that and I GPUs do pull quite a significant amount of power compared to you know just controllers so those are the two main VRMs you have on this board both of them are controlled by this chip right here and that is a ir35 2:01 this is a h+ kind of interesting voltage controller because it can do 8 + 0 7 + 1 + 6 + 2 phase operation here it is running in 6 + 2 phase because we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 phases here which are split up like that and up here for the SOC we have actually four phases which are split like that I have 1 2 3 4 and that 3 looks terrible there that's more 3ish so this is a four phase so this gets doubled up the +2 part gets doubled up and that's done by IR 3 5 9 8 running in doubler mode and the 6 phase over here the V Corps vrm is actually running off of also ir 3 5 9 8 but the IR 3 5 9 8 can both be a doubler and it can be a dual driver either or it can be both at the same time but it can either double or it can drive two phases also to be done signals so you have three ir 3 5 9 8 and those give you your 680 core VRM so you know this is actually a pretty good well actually as far as control schemes are concerned there's nothing wrong with what MSI has opted for this is very similar to what you'll see on a lot of other motherboards they won't necessarily use ir35 9/8 but they will have like they will be using a six plus two phase initial voltage controller set up some of the lower end boards are four plus three or four plus two so there's really nothing wrong with this six six plus two phase control setup so now let's move on to the actual power capabilities of the V RMS starting with the V Corps vrm we have - we have two low side effects and we have one eye side fat right here the high side MOSFET is a Nyko semiconductor PK six one six be a this is a seven million RDS on MOSFETs I've alts but the thing is this is a high side fat so we don't really care about RDS on what we really care about is sweet it's witching speed which these aren't really that great at that and will actually get to the result of that soon enough the low side MOSFET is a Nyko P P k63 to be a and this is a 3.3 million RDS on MOSFETs and both of those so this is actually like amongst low side MOSFETs this is not that low RDS on which loads I'm all sets the big focus there is really really low low RDS on ice I'm all set you want really really quick switching really quick switching and luckily MSI is using two two more sets for the low side so actually your RDS on is effectively cut in half it also has the side effect that's the heat put out by the low side of the Fay's is spread across more surface area because you do have two MOSFETs creating all sharing the current and therefore also the heat load so this does have this this works okay however these MOSFETs really aren't that great compared to what you see on a lot of the other high end motherboards and the end result is that this vrm assuming one point four five volts output voltage which is quite a bit it's like 50 millivolts more than what you want to run a rise in CPU at 300 kilohertz switching frequency which is sort of the typical switching frequency you will see for most VRMs motherboards initially run motherboards GPUs and everything will typically run between 200 and 500 kilohertz switching frequency with 300 kilohertz being sort of the preferred one because lower switching frequency gives you better efficiency at the cost of slight you know at the cost of slightly worse voltage regulation so that's why I chose 300 kilohertz because the most realistic without having the board in hand and being able to check what it actually runs at so you have one point four five volts 300 kilohertz and assuming that the VRM is at 125 degrees centigrade it is capable of handling 252 amps if you can cool 64 watts of heat that that's a real problem a lot of the other motherboards 4 X 370 have way more efficient VR ends like that well and way more powerful actually this is just not a very good this is not a very good vrm for a high-end X 370 motherboard it's not going to limit you in any way shape or form when overclocking arise in CPU as Rison is actually extremely low current you're looking at 4 gigahertz 1.4 or 5 volts for me in my testing only seems to pull about a hundred amps from the vcore vrm so it's really not a high current demand CPU but this vrm is really really significantly worse than all the other ones even if it won't actually impact your overclocking capabilities because the control scheme is line and it's not it's not like you're going hit a current limit it's not like you're going to melt the vrm it's just not as efficient as the other VRMs and if you're putting 100 amps through the CRM you can expect it to put out about 15 watts of heat so yeah it's you know it's not going to limit you and overclocking but it is less efficient than the alternatives it's also lower quality than all the other alternatives the other like a Zurich and Asus both have VRMs capable of excess of 300 amps continuous gigabyte has a vrm that those 240 amps at the same parameters as this one here except it does it with a lot lower heat output and those hundred amps that also weigh lower heat output so if you're choosing your a if you're choosing x3 70 motherboards with vrm quality as your number one criteria this really should not be at the top of your you know selection because this vrm the vcore vrm here is just terrible well it's not terrible if this was a mid-range board it would be fine if this was a low-end board it would be actually really really good but this is a high-end board and also a really really expensive high-end board so that really you know doesn't work well here so let's move on to the SOC vrm the SOC vrm is the same also - except we're looking at a one high side and one low side pet the end result of that is that assuming the same well not the same because you don't want to run your SOC about 1.2 volts 1.2 volts 300 kilohertz 125 degrees the SOC vrm is only capable of handling only capable of handling 164 amps of current while putting out 58 watts of heat compared to say while compared to the other motherboards available in this price bracket this is even less efficient than the vcore vrm like the vcore vrm is not so far behind the other competitors but this is just kind of terrible luckily the SOC on reisen CPUs really doesn't pull that much power so in practice you're only going to be looking about 20 to 30 amps of current draw and only about 3 to 4 watts of actual heat output so that's not really a problem but this erm again is just kind of subpar compared to the other other motherboards which you know like if there's other features you desperately need that this board comes with I'd overlooked look to the RM issues but if you're mainly buying this because you want a powerful VRM this board is not for you there's better alternatives out there now then let's move on to the memory v RM for the DD ddr4 and ddr4 poles very little power and so this erm naturally doesn't really like you can't go that wrong with it the same offsets again and we have one high side and two low side sets here so it looks mostly like the SOC lost that extra load side fat for space space-saving reasons because here we have two low side feds for no apparent reason because VD r4 is really really low power and the end result here with this V RMS this phase set up on the memory VRM at one point four five volts because that's a safe running like this is a safe voltage to run ddr4 at daily if you're overclocking one point four five volts 125 degrees centigrade 300 kilohertz switching frequency this erm you're looking at a maximum current capability of 84 amps with 21 watts of heat dissipation so that's really really overkill for ddr4 because ddr4 runs in single-digit power consumption for the actual memory stick so even if you have four sticks of RAM in here you're not going to be looking at you know more than say 40 watts of power consumption and I've got really high actually that's really really high for ddr4 realistically you're looking at more - more like 2 to 3 watts per stake with which with 4 sticks is only about 12 watts so the great news here is in practice this erm will only offer push about 10 amps and we'll put out about you know one to two watts of heat so this vrm here is perfectly fine and in fact it does have an advantage over a lot of the other motherboards out there because this is a two-phase amending other ex 370 motherboards both high-end and low-end do not go for a single-phase design though always how low-power ddr4 is having two phases may not actually give you any major advantage in practice even if theoretically it does even though it's like theoretically it's better but in practice it might not be that big a difference so that pretty much covers this board honestly I'm really let down by what MSI has done here it's compared to past xpower motherboards compared to other past and MSI boards this thing really doesn't compare to to the predecessors it is you know the vrm is really not that great for the price point there is no there's no external clock generator on the motherboard you do at least get the postcode and the power buttons and the this is actually nice if you really want to run across a 3-way crossfire which that would actually be probably like that I would sort of see as an advantage for this motherboard but I have yet to do my multi-gpu testing horizon in fire strikes so I'm not entirely you know it's like that that's more from a benchmarking perspective from a gaming perspective this this is completely pointless and then and then for some reason we also have an A+ for pin can like this right here which makes zero sense with the vrm that MSI has paired like given this VR like given this board because you like this VM couldn't like it's just not strong enough is like right first of all Rison doesn't need an eight plus four pin worth of power ever there's no scenario where you're going to need that much power and the other if for some reason you actually needed that much power this vrm couldn't handle it anyway so this really looks like they're trying to make the board look better than it is by putting an extra power connector that nobody's ever going to use and yeah you know it's just that's a marketing stunt as far as I'm concerned that this right here is a marketing stunt overall for a high end motherboard this erm vrm is just not that great but if there's as I said earlier if there's any other features on the board you really really want then you know there's no issue that the arms not going to limit you when overclocking it's just subpar compared to the competition so yeah that about sums it up for this board and thank you for watching like share subscribe if you would like to help out what we do here at gamers Nexus we have a patreon you can donate to that and if you would like to see more PCD breakdowns and other overclocking videos you can go check out actually hardcore overclocking if you didn't understand anything I said about VR ends and doubling and all that in this video then actually my channel has two videos explaining both how VR M's work and how doubling schemes work so now you can go check those out if you're interested thanks for watching and see you next time you