Gadgetory

hey guys build Zoid here from actually hardcore overclocking and today we're gonna be taking a look at the Asus zenith extreme motherboard I will be covering some of the OC features before we get into all the VR I'm is there's not really that much on this board so let's get right into it starting off in the top right corner the board does have two you know eight pin power connectors for the CPU honestly for thread Ripper I think this is ridiculous overkill though AMD actually requires two eight pin like eight pin and a four pin by specification even though technically speaking like thread Ripper doesn't pull like as much power as like skylake X so even with a overclock as long as you weren't pushing it too hard the thread ripper should get away with just one eight pin without any real issues now obviously there's no harm in having a whole extra eight pin but yeah I think them the this is pretty freakin overkill because thread Ripper does not get as power-hungry as a sky like X before that this video is brought to you by thermal takes view 37 case the vo 37 focuses on highlighting custom PC builds with its full panoramic window and tinted front acrylic and our thermal testing the view 37 performed reasonably well when considering its looks focused build which is partly thanks to the airflow design and the removal of a bottom power supply shroud for a balance of looks and performance check the link in the description below for the view 37 now under the 8 pins you find a power power button reset button below that there's a 24-pin connector and next to that you find the this four channel dip switch right here and that is for enabling and disabling the PCIe slots and this is basically if you have a you know say a water-cooled multi-gpu setup or a liquid nitrogen cooled GPU set up or you know you're just incredibly lazy and one of the cards has an issue or there's some kind of software problem or for whatever reason one of the cards like you want to disable one of the cards without actually physically removing it from the system you just flick the which for that pcie slaw and it'll disable that card so that's that's a pretty handy feature in my opinion now down in the bottom right corner of the board you also find the sort of the more advanced extra like extreme overclocking features so this right here is the ln2 mode jumper this will extend like how far you can push voltages normally there's like normally our og boards have voltage limits that are just kind of unsafe well once you put the ln2 Jumper into ln2 mode the voltage limits go from pretty unsafe to completely unacceptable so you know you'll never feel voltage limits and once you move that over and it's like I'm not really sure why they do it because it's not like outside of ln2 mode the voltages are that much more reasonable under that there is a slow mode switch next to that there is an RS VD slow mode basically immediately pushes the CPU multiplier to the lowest possible setting very very handy for basically idling in like if you're on Ellen 2 this is really really handy for putting the system into like basically very low power consumption or just for stability so that you know in between fine-tuning settings or in between opening benchmarks saving screenshots that kind of thing the system doesn't crash because you're no longer at 5 gigahertz you're at like a gigahertz so that's what that switch is for right there there's also this switch which is the RSV D and that switch is generally used by ROG motherboards it basically has well that switch basically will have a sort of profile for a whole bunch of voltages to try removed cold bug cold boot bugs and cold bug issues I'm not sure how well that works on Rison on the Intel motherboards from Asus this switch is amazing it can make like for a lot of CPUs you don't have to actually know anything you just flick the switch and everything works it skips a huge part of the fine-tuning process if if this works well but on Rison running sub-zero is a lot more complicated and so I have suspicions that this might not be quite so flick the switch to look competent because even if the switch sets everything up correctly it might still not work just because Rison on ln2 is well Rison and therefore you'll have all kinds of issues even at the best of times now next to that you get two buttons now these are actually useful for even regular overclockers so this red one right here that's safe boot this is super handy if you well basically if for whatever some reason the system isn't posting and you don't want to wipe your bios settings you press the safe boot button it'll boot the system at stock settings but all of your settings in the BIOS will still be like present and next to that you get a retry button this is for getting the memory to retrain if you're pushing really hard memory settings basically what the retry button does is it temporarily cuts all power to the motherboard and that basically wipes the motherboards training profile for the memory and the motherboard has to essentially relearn how to run the memory and eventually if you're lucky it'll learn how to run it properly in your you'll boot like 37 33 CL 12 or whatever memory settings it is that you're aiming for and if you're unlucky it'll just never ever actually get there even with the retry button but this is very very handy for overcome for extreme overclockers if you're really like hammering the memory safe boot in my opinion is just handy for everyone sliding along the bottom edge of the board you do get this molex power connector for extra power to the PCIe slots because of course the 24 pin only has to plus 12 volt lines and well if you have for very high power consumption like high PCIe slot power consumption devices so like 75 watt 75 watt and 75 and another 75 your 12-volt pins on the 24-pin are gonna go melt down on you like they're literally just gonna melt which isn't good so for that reason there is this molex power connector down here now personally I'm not a fan of the molex patent of power connector I think it's like the worst power connector of all the power connectors in a computer this one sucks the most it also only adds one 12 volt line to the PCIe slots so if you were doing something really crazy like say hammering the reference aren't like absolutely hammering the overclock on reference Rx for 80s and four of them i I don't think this would be enough to save the 24 pin or itself like it would just blow up both of them because you you might end up in a situation where you have like a hundred Watts going through every single PCIe slaw and at that point you'll still overload the the molex and the 24 pin at the same time so like that is like an extreme you know exception kind of case but yeah I it's just there's other boards that use a 6 pin and I think that's just straight-up better so yeah and the board has a postcode it's unfortunately not actually on the board itself it's integrated into the heat's while the i/o cover which I'm not really a fan of but uh yeah it kind of is what it is as long as as long as the you know as long as the board has a postcode I can live with it but I'm not a fan of i/o shields I usually remove them because the they cover up the cooling system so let's actually take a look at the back of the board and be oh well erm heatsink is not actually that much better visible here but yeah the postcode is buried into the i/o shield so if you want the postcode but no i/o shield it'll be kind of awkward anyway the last feature I wanted to point out on the back of the board is this hole in the CPU socket so the is basically for putting a thermal probe through the well behind the CPU to get a well if you're on liquid nitrogen basically the internal dye sensors stop working so if you want to see the temperature of the CPU well of something closer to the CPU than the Ln to Paul you need this hole in the socket that's really the only way to do that so that's why that's there it's a it's a standard feature for basically all asus rog motherboards also interestingly enough all of the capacitors for filtering the vcore VRM are located on the back of the board as well because if we go back to the front of the board there's you know there's no space right here to add bulk filtering capacitors so yeah that's just kind of an interesting design issue with with the tr4 socket for thread ripper because this thing is absolutely freakin massive so that covers the OSI features and we can start getting into the you know V RMS starting with the largest and the most important one the vcore vrm located right over here now the voltage controller is over there and you can't see it either way that chip is a asp 1405 it's a digi+ power digi+ power branded chip but it's that that's an asus rebrand it's probably an international rectifier three five two zero one based on the fact that asus uses this same chip for a whole bunch of very different vrm configurations all using international rectifier parts and there's not that many international rectifier chips that are relevant currently that would be capable of running the various configuration that asus uses this chip for so it's probably a three five two zero one but it's like the the asus rebrand name is the asp 1405 either way it does support one two three four five six an eight phase output like we have here and yeah so this is a true eight phase VR m4v core and each of the phases uses a single international rectifier IR 35:55 Asus is favorite power stage so that is a 60 amp power stage from international rectifier it's not particularly intelligent but it is a very solid part the only thing that's kind of interesting about this eight phase vrm really is that this is a vrm that asus has been using for ages basically this is the same vrm you would see on a rampage six extreme a rampage six apex a rampage five extreme a rampage five extreme edition ten or rampage five edition ten I'm not sure if they drop the extreme part from that one's name but yeah Asus has been kind of recycling this power circuit for a while now and that's fine because you know there's no reason to fix what isn't broken and this power circuit it has is actually really really solid so let's go through some power numbers for this thing considering that it is an eight phase-- with these 60 amp power stages so for thread Ripper at say ambient cooling systems you're gonna be looking so you know air cooling water cooling you're gonna be looking at voltages of like one point three five to one point four two volts one point four to being the maximum one point three five being sort of the happy place where the CPUs cloth-like the difference between one point three five volts and one point four two volts in terms of actual overclocking very very little the increase in power consumption rather significant so this is sort of the the happy medium voltage obviously this is still gonna be pretty hard to cool because at one point three five volts you're probably gonna be looking at about two hundred amps current you know current draw by the CPU which translates to about 270 watts of heat dissipation which means your in a pretty significant heatsink but it is still within the realm of what an air cooler can deal with and for this configuration right here the vrm would produce about 18 watts of heat on the MOSFETs so that's not a you know that's not a ton of heat and the vrm heatsink that the board has especially considering that there's like a little fan that blows through the actual fin stack that hides in the i/o cover that should be no problem for one point for 2 volts you'll be looking at maybe around 240 amps actually you probably won't even go like it probably won't even hit that high and about 26 watts of heat output so again really not that much this Pat like for ambient overclocking this 8 phase is extremely solid there's a good reason why Asus has been reusing this 8 phase for like high-end desktop motherboards for ages and ages and ages and ages it's because it's good so yeah no problem handling the thread Ripper for like ambient daily overclocks especially considering the vrm cooling situation it has now if you start cranking it up though things start to get kind of concerning but I'm not sure if thread Ripper will actually pull that much current at the various settings so purely theoretical 300 amps 1.5 volts you'd be looking at about for 1.5 volts you'd be looking at about 41 watts of heat that might be a workout for the vrm cooling situation cuz that the main like the main block for the heatsink is still well a block not a lot of fins in that itself of the most of the actual surface area is crammed into the i/o cover which is gonna have kind of restricted airflow and 41 watts of heat is quite a lot of heat so I'm not sure how well a little handle like you know if you're like benchmarking on a big custom loop well if you're just running benchmarks they most like most of them probably won't be long enough to really cause vrm thermal issues because it takes time the vrm to overheat but that that is quite a lot of heat and it could cause some issues for extended workloads at completely unsafe settings for daily usage and if you were on liquid nitrogen which I still don't think you're gonna hit this but the limit of what the datasheet makes easy to calculate as 440 amps 1.8 volts - you know on the core at this I don't think even on liquid nitrogen you're actually gonna hit that amount of current consumption but if you did hit that the vrm would produce about 95 watts of heat which is really hot and concerning that is uh yeah that is a you know that that's no small amount of heat luckily on liquid nitrogen this area of the motherboard should be getting like frozen through from the ln2 pot on the cpu and with thread ripper technically not having a cold bug like you can run it all the way down to minus 196 degrees centigrade the main problem is stuff kinda stops working on the way and you have memory issues and boo issues and it's kind of a mess but if you know what you're doing you can get the system to run at minus 196 degrees centigrade is just difficult to actually do that and if you do get that running well there's like this entire area of the motherboard is just gonna start freezing over pretty quick so the vrm will you know be starting out at temperatures that are quite possibly sub ambient and as long as the benchmark isn't too long this won't necessarily be an issue though it is kind of concerning and would probably over at whelmed the vrm heatsink eventually so yeah but for you know normal users this vrm is plenty there's really nothing you need to worry about this about like there's no need to worry about this vrm if you're just gonna be running at everything you know for a daily system so that's nice and on liquid nitrogen well if you did really like like thread Ripper doesn't hit that high as far as I know it maxes out around sort of 600 watts power consumption it does like it doesn't really like sky like X is a lot lot worse than thread Ripper when it comes to power draw so yeah I don't like I don't think the vrm will actually get as much of a workout like it won't necessarily hit this kind of current output especially not like that kind of voltage even on liquid nitrogen but you know just from a theoretical standpoint that's what would happen if you did hit that amount of current at that voltage that's the V quorum plenty good enough for what it needs to do moving on to the next major erm we have the SOC and that is this group of phases down here controlled by this chip over there and that is again the ASP 1405 the vrm is a one except this time it's configured for a one to three phase design and the chips used these guys right here are Texas Instruments power stages these are CSD 90 737s and these are rated for maximum 25 amps output minor problem here I don't know how much current the SOC vrm for thread Ripper poles my like based on what rynason poles it should be between 30 and 42 amps peak at 1.2 volts you know as SOC voltage and there's really no good reason to go much above that or blight well there is reason to go below that but there isn't really much reason to go above that I've not really seen any improvements with my CPUs going like significantly over 1.2 volts but uh and I don't have a thread Ripper system so like just based on Rison there shouldn't really be much reason to go over 1.2 here but thirty to forty two amps and so at 30 amps 1.2 volts you're gonna be looking at about 5.5 watts of heat and at 42 amps about eight watts of heat so this could get pretty toasty especially considering that there's gonna be like there's probably gonna be a very hot graphics card sitting right over the BRM so yeah these like I'm not a hundred percent certain about like if I'm happy with this there's also a good chance that thread Ripper doesn't literally pull twice as much SOC current as a rising chip does and it only like I'm basing it off the fact that there's to rise and dies in there so they assured each pole you know the same amount of SOC current and there's two of them so twice as much but if it turns out that it's not pulling twice as much current then actually this would be non-issue because you wouldn't be hitting these kinds of current levels and that kind of heat output now 30 amps 5.5 watts I think this should be non-issue even with the the GPU situation but that eight won't figure that that could be a problematic but really like that I have no way to tell from just looking at the PCB here that would need to be tested but on the flip side I don't think there's actually any motherboards with a better SOC vrm out there so yeah it's kind of an interesting situation in that way now then let's move on from the SOC vrm to the memory power which you get to phase memory power for both well each group of memory slots so you get you know one two phase right here split like that and that's controlled by this chip and on the other side you get the same thing that chip and these two phases so what chip is that that is a another one of these asus rebranded DG plus power DG plus power controllers which is a this one's an ASP L 11:03 I have no idea what that actually is it does seem to integrate all of the gate drive for the actual memory vrm so the two-phase memory of erm on the other hand I well actually even the two-phase memory of erm is actually kind of a mess so the specific the exact MOSFETs that are used here I can't get the datasheet for them but they're apparently very very close in specification to Nyko semiconductor and they are Nyko parts like Nyko semiconductor does make these it's just like a slightly different skew so these are Nyko PK's well the close you know no no PK p ii series PE six one six six one six B A's are the chip like the MOSFETs I'm basing the power figures for this thing off of and Nyko semiconductor has a terrible reputation because they make pretty garbage MOSFETs but the thing is DRAM doesn't need it like dr4 and even ddr3 doesn't really need a lot of current like a lot of power so using you know Nyko small Nyko semiconductor MOSFETs for from memory power I don't see an issue with that and there's a reason for it if you do have for memory stakes you're gonna be looking at about you're gonna end up with something like eight watts for the whole memory group because each stake is about two watts at most and well eight watts uh you know 11.35 volts you're gonna be looking at our average current of about six amps which with this two-phase vrm translates into about one watt of heat there's literally no reason to worry about that at all like that is that's gonna cool itself passively just through the surface area of the chokes and the PCB itself so yeah this that like that this is another one of those recycle asus rog recent lot loves to recycle their circuits VRMs because they've been using a very very similar to phase VRM again for ages there is a whole bunch of motherboards using basically this vrm with incremental updates to which mosfet and incremental upgrades to the power stages possibly the voltage controller though I do believe that they all rain like they all end up ranging from 300 to 500 kilohertz anyway so yeah and all of them are two-phase so yeah that this is another one of those asus recycles but at least you know that this vrm works and never had issues in the past so to sum it up the zinnias extreme overall solid board the SOC vrm I'm not entirely sure about but that's mostly because I'm not entirely sure about quite how much current it actually needs to provide the V curve erm for thread Ripper is completely acceptable even though this is like an old old like this is a vrm design that asus has been running for literally ages admittedly like there's been some tweaks and upgrades to it over the years but its basic like the the asus high-end mother like high-end motherboard of erm since like LGA 2011 the original LGA 2011 I don't mean the haswell-e version I mean the Sandy Burgi version like the the the the high-end vrm for those boards has been 860 amp internet 60 amp power stages from international rectifier and whatever voltage controller is relevant at the time that does eight phases and Asus has been basically doing that well since LGA 2011 because 2133 2011 - 3 is basically this 2066 is this this is zenith is this so yeah but on the zenith this this is completely adequate on X 299 I I find this somewhat a concerning but at least on the thread Ripper like thread rippers not as bad as sky like X in terms of power consumption so I don't have any complaints for the V Corps VR I'm here memory power is you know stat standard Asus there are motherboards out there with much much more expensive MOSFETs for their memory power but again is like these you know these Nyko parts are doing 1 watt you're not like it doesn't matter if you push it down to half a lot like no margin of error for most testing a quote like if you're measuring system power that's gonna be margin of error so memory power absolutely no complaints the feature set on the motherboard is solid the fact that they decided to put the freaking post code into the IO IO cover I find kind of an inconvenient but overall really really solid board if you're looking at this thing for a daily system there's not really anything to complain about at least that I can see so yeah that's the zenith extreme hopefully the zenith 2 extreme will turn out to be just as good or possibly better but knowing asus they're probably just gonna slap the same vrm on it again unless thread ripper turns out to pull liked white like the kilowatt audun well no because that'd be uncool Abul yeah unless thread ripper suddenly gets a lot more power-hungry asus is not changing that PRM for a while so the this this is quite possibly gonna be a good reference even against the zenith 2 extreme because i'd be surprised if they didn't just recycle all these power circuits again but again they work really well so it doesn't really matter and that's it for the video thanks for watching like share subscribe leave a comment down below if you got any questions and if you'd like to support what we do here with gamers nexus there is a patreon link down in the description below if you'd like to see more you know overclocking focused content i have another channel called actually hardcore overclocking where i do a lot of hard or overclocking that's it for the video thanks for watching and see you next time