Gadgetory

hey guys build Zoid from actually hardcore overclocking here and today we're gonna be taking a look at the V RMS on the EVGA X 299 dark motherboard and I did specify V RMS because there's so much to talk about on this board that if I actually wanted to cover everything that's on the PCB this video would be 40 minutes long and nobody would want to watch it so let's get to the V RMS starting with the largest and most important one the VCC in and or V core if you're running KB like exits week or if you're running sky like X its VCC in before that this video is brought to you by thermal grizzly makers of the conductor not liquid metal that we recently used to drop 20 degrees off of our coffee leak temperatures thermal grizzly also makes traditional thermal compounds we use on top of the IHS like cryo not and hydro not pastes learn more at the link below so the reason why you have this distinction is that skylight Dex has a fiber and KB like X being pretty much just KB like glued onto a X $2.99 package doesn't have a fully internal fire is the fully integrated voltage regulator this thing exists is basically a very low voltage low voltage DC to DC converter it's present on the CPU and Intel uses it because well let's say you have a 200 watt CPU well ok no welcher 200 watt CPU and there's kind of two ways you could try deliver that power right you could deliver it as 2 volts and a hundred amps or you could developer it as 1 volt 200 amps both of them are still 200 watts now this one is really really hard on a vrm and the reason for that is is because power dissipation well there's more to VR and power dissipation than just this but very basically a good chunk of your V RMS power dissipation is conduction losses and those are expressed as power equals I squared R so your vrm resistance is kind of fixed well somewhat fixed you can get it down but the the amount of effort required to make this lower is kind of ridiculous past a certain point and takes up a lot of physical space now you have this current component which that grows quadratically so it's much much so in you know with the fiber you can very easily massively drop the heat output of the vrm by just going from you know VRML putting one volt at 200 amps to the R I'm outputting two volts at a hundred amps and then the VAR I'm doing the the fully integrated voltage regulator doing that last step of the conversion of going from 2 volts 100 amps to 2 volts to from 2 volts 100 amps to 1 volt 200 amps so that final conversion happens on the CPU itself and your vrm has to just do 12 volts down to 2 volts instead of down to 1 volt and stupid high current which would produce a lot of heat so that's why you have VCC n instead of just straight V core because the actual V core is generated on die with skylight Dec CPUs as well as some other voltages those system agent and io are both external so let's talk about the VCC nbrm we have here it's 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 phase and that means it uses a doubling scheme because nobody manufacturers a 12 phase voltage controller the voltage controller here is a is al 69 1 3 8 this is a inter sale part and Inter sale are owned by Rene sauce so that's just a little side note it supports up to seven phases at one megahertz switching frequency this is a seven phase it's kind of special because it'll support any phase configuration that's X plus y less than 7 so it could run like here it's running a six plus one phase with that plus one being this phase right over here but you could also run it as a four plus or a you know say a five plus one or a two plus one if you felt like wasting money because that is an expensive part so that's the that's the voltage controller running the operation and is running six phases here now the PWM signal from that goes into these chips right here these are the actual doublers and these are also inter-cell parts is l66 one sevens these are some of the smartest doubler chips you can get they support some amount of current balancing so they won't just let you know like the most basic doublers essentially just pass a pwm signal between one phase and the other these things will actually allow you to do things like turn off half turn off the extra phases if they're not being used balance current if one phase is pushing significantly more current than the other then it'll actually skip a cycle or extend or shorten a PWM signal for the phase that's that's doing less or more work to get it back into current balance so very very smart doubler this is about as close as you're gonna get to having a real 12 phase vrm as is possible there's not really any other like there are competing parts that can do the same amount of work but there's no anything better than this out there so yeah this this is as good as 12 phase as you're gonna get and the actual power stage used is also absolutely top-of-the-line inter-cell componentry this is an ISL 99 22 set 22 7 B these things are five point five dollars apiece for and that's when you're buying them bulk okay so these are some ridiculously expensive MOSFETs and that's buying them bulk from like a normal part supplier like Mouser or digi-key I'm not sure if EVGA actually gets like a even better bulk discount on these but if you're buying a real of these from Mouser yeah you're paying five point five dollars a piece these are really really expense of power stages some competing parts like an international rectifier 3555 is about three dollars so these aren't cheap and there's a reason for that these aren't just regular power stages these are smart power stages and they come with a special casing so first let's go over the reason why these are considered smart they integrate current monitoring and temperature monitoring directly into the package so there's a thermal sensor and a current sensor built into these power stages so they also integrate protections like overcurrent protection and over temperature protection now over temperature protection on these is it's very soft it basically just tells the voltage controller hey you might want to shut down the VRM we're over a hundred and forty degrees centigrade internally we're probably gonna die if we keep running any longer but that is ultimately like the EVGA can ops to literally just disable that protection from the side of the voltage controller now the OCP on these is set at ninety amps and that is hard if if any of these phases exceeds 90 amps output it's gonna shut down that phase and raise a flag for the voltage controller that hey you might want to shut down the rest of the vrm because basically if one of those phases hits 90 amps then probably most of them are not far from that from hitting that amount of current either and shortly after one of these shutting down the current load would end up probably like it would push the current load onto the remaining phases which would probably push the rest of them out of well over OCP trip points as well and then the whole vrm would shut down luckily you should never actually run into that scenario because this is a 12 phase and if you're pushing 90 amps per phase then that's like a hundred and eighty amps that's a thousand and eighty amps total which the yeah the skylake X is power-hungry but it's not two kilowatts power-hungry cuz you're VCC and will probably be between like one point eight and two point something volts two point six is considered maximum voltage for ln2 for air and water cooling you don't want to go over two point two volts my experience it doesn't actually like it seemed for at least the CPU I've been dealing with seems to prefer a lower VCC n rather than a really really high one but I'm still in that like I'm still pretty close to two volts so yeah you don't have to worry about the OCP on these it is there in case of some kind of catastrophic failure but you should never ever really hit it now the other cool feature of these is that they have this exposed metal contact and that is actually hooked directly into the silicon die inside of these MOSFETs and it massively improves a thermal resistance of the packaging so the internals of these run a lot lot cooler because they're transferring heat through a bit of metal rather than ceramic or resin depending on the kind of MOSFET packaging you're dealing with some will use ceramic packaging some will use resin so here you actually get proper metal thermal transfer to the heatsink VR I mean the you know the very significant vrm eats sink that EVGA puts on this board so those are all very nice features that these have and in terms of actual current capabilities these are rated for a continuous output of 60 amps assuming you can handle the heat output 60 amps 1.8 volts on one of these produces 12 watts of heat so you're not gonna be pushing 60 amps through you know like if you end up in a situation where every single one of these is pushing 60 amps that vrm is gonna be producing a ridiculous amount of heat however you should not run into that scenario because for reasonable power outputs say for air-cooled overclocking on sky like X you're gonna be looking at like 200 to 300 watt power output on the VRM and I'm doing all of the ratings again with that 1.8 volts output of the VRM and 500 kilohertz switching frequency because well the vrm can't actually go over that because you have that one megahertz running through doublers which will cut down the frequency in half even if these are really really smart they won't double the they can't produce more frequency out of thin air well they can't maintain frequency while maintaining phase interleaving and phase interleaving is the most efficient way to run of erm anyway so it's not like they're gonna just pass straight in one megahertz pwm into the VR on the other thing is you don't actually get control over the switching frequency so it's whatever EVGA decides to program and throwing the erm efficiency out the window for marginal improvements in a voltage regulation it's probably not something they opted for so 1.8 volts 500 kilohertz air-cooled you're gonna be looking at 200 to 300 watts CPU power consumption and AVR em heat output between 12 and 16 watts so really not that bad and the ridiculous heat sinks that EVGA puts on this board is gonna handle that no problem now on water cooling things start to heat up you can probably push between 300 and 500 Watts depending on the workload overclock and voltages at which point you're looking at 16 to 30 watts of heat and now the you know now that vrm heat sink that EVGA puts on this board starts actually being useful still massive overkill because there are other boards that can sustain this kind of power level admittedly they use the same vrm and a slightly less cooling oriented heatsink but there are boards that can sustain this just this thing has the best we are I'm cooling on a modern motherboard for a while now so it'll handle this kind of power output no problem now if we go on liquid nitrogen things go absolutely insane we're talking power draw levels from 500 watts into the thousand watt range hot very very hot and that's what that's gonna be and the end result is that you're gonna be looking at VR on thermal outputs of 32 96 watts and well that's like a GPU like that's the low-end GPUs worth the worth of heat output or a reasonably high-end CPU worth of heat output the good news is for the motherboard that most you know liquid nitrogen workloads that would pull a thousand watts won't last more than a couple minutes the other thing to consider is that when the CPU socket is at a minus hundred same yeah minus 100 degrees skylake X has a pretty high cold boot bug due to the voltage or a fully-integrated voltage regulator it doesn't work below minus 100 degrees in most cases there's some CPUs that go a bit lower some that go a bit higher but in most cases around minus 100 degrees and below that you're not gonna be able to put like the the system's not gonna even run so for that you know with the socket at minus 100 minus 100 degrees centigrade the surrounding area of the CPU socket tends to end up very cold as well so what you'll find if you're doing any liquid nitrogen overclocking this entire area of the motherboard which actually with this being a to dim kind of this area of the motherboard tends to all end up below ambient with anything really close to the CPU socket actually just being sub-zero so something like this memory stick I would not be surprised if that ended up at minus 5 degrees centigrade and actually just building up straight ice as it's not that rare for the memory slots to literally freeze over on really long overclocking sessions so the vrm will actually end up it won't be like like if you're normally running your system your vrm will be slightly above ambient temperature if you're on liquid nitrogen your vrm will start at a temperature significantly lower than ambient because it's literally the closest thing to the CPU socket and it also is hooked very heavily into the ground plane and the collar and the power plane which are both massive copper layers that will you know transfer the cold from the CPU socket to the vrm very very quickly the flipside to this is is that the vrm area tends to end up being a puddle as you know you go idle and the vrm ends up at -5 degrees and then you go full load and the vrm ends up at like plus 50 or plus 70 by the time you finish the benchmark and all of that ice that built up when it was idling is now water which kind of sucks so yeah which is why insulating on liquid nitrogen especially for sky like X is like really really important now a few people might be worried about that power draw figure versus the eight pins the good news is a eight pin on 18 gauge wiring you can handle 480 watts because these are for 12 volts and for ground connections they're not like GPU 8 pins which are 3 to 12 volts and 3 grounds so these actually all the pins in these actually transmit power and each pin pair is good for 10 amps if you have 18 gauge wiring if you're on 16 gauge wiring you can push 624 watts per connector just fine so you don't actually have to work like you don't have to worry about these melting but cables might get pretty warm if you are you know again running extended loads that's the other thing it takes time for things to get halt so just because you're pushing a thousand watts doesn't mean these connectors are gonna have it like are gonna be at that really high stress level for long enough to cause you know to start getting really really hot and to the point that it's concerning so that's the V core of erm let's go cover I mean VCC n slash recurve erm let's go cover some of the others the VCCS AV RM right over here also controlled by the is l69 one three eight it's that plus one part of that six plus one and this is well it's a regular old power stage it's an is L part again and this is a ninety nine 140 and it's rated for 40 amps continuous output 15 amps 500 kilohertz switching frequency you're gonna be looking at about two outs of heat so you know no big deal there now if you look so you know VCC sa is plenty overkill because this is kind of what you'd be looking at in terms of current draw there now the VCC I OVR M is located down over here this thing does not actually have a heatsink this now the VC CSA shares its heatsink with the VCC and vrm so basically the temperature of this thing is in tirely bound to what the you know the core power consumption because that's what's really gonna change the temperature of that vrm heatsink now this thing doesn't actually have a heatsink which is why it ends up with a stronger power stage even though it doesn't have to deliver as much like it doesn't deliver more power than the VCCS a does the voltage controller used here is actually not inter-cell this is an international rectifier 35 to 0 for this is a four phase part it runs three plus one phases and any configuration up to that it's not flexible like the like the 69 138 which incidentally looks 69 138 i forgot to mention this can run seven plus is zero but yeah anyway back to the 35 to zero for this thing runs three plus one and it's controlling this chip right here which that's a international rectifier 35 50 56 that's a 50 amp power stage and for VCC which i should have labeled that VCC I oh you're gonna be looking at about again 1.2 volts you know around 15 amps and this will produce about 1.3 watts of heat because again this is a 50 amp part not a 40 amp part so yeah and this has no heat sink so it needs to be a bit more efficient than the one sharing it you know getting to share with the vcore vrm now then moving on to the even more minor V RMS the memory which is this right here is the actual phase and the controller is all the way over here now these are inter cell parts again and this doesn't make a lot of sense to me this as you can probably guess by the way based on what it looks like yeah that that's one of that's an is l99 22 7v I have no idea why EVGA decided to put these on memory power it makes zero sense to me it just like because here's the thing like you could make the argument Oh Bill of Materials they're already buying a bunch of these yes but they're evidently buying a bunch of these as well because these are doing VCC i/o all right if they used only these everywhere I'd guess it but they have the 35:56 that's a 50-amp party this thing is a lot lot cheaper they have the 35 2204 which the voltage controller isn't a 69 138 this is a this is the 69 1 3 eights little brother this is the 69 1 3 3 which is again X plus X plus y less than 4 this time so that's a four phase capable voltage controller and it comes with the where is it in my notes same switching frequency limitation as the as the 69 138 but yeah that so you know they downgraded the voltage controller but ultimately they're already buying 35 to 0 fours and they're already buying 35:56 A's so I really don't know why they decided to put the 60 amp power stage on to memory power like this is such a ridiculous overkill and it's a single phase as well which compared to say the like the core like the main competitors for this motherboard are the rampage 6 apex and the asrock OC formula and both of those used to phase memory power whereas this uses single phase the asrock has a more powerful memory vrm but like it doesn't matter like it literally doesn't matter ddr4 is like like 2 to 4 watts a stick maybe really it's around 2 watts most of the time and when you really hammer the voltage you might get to 4 volt to 4 watts if you're on like a dual ranks take with you no chips on like 16 chip memory stick which would be dual rank and really crank up the volts you might hit that high power consumption figure but again it's just like it's nothing compared to any of the other things and then you get this ridiculous power stage here and I have no idea why it just makes zero sense to me then again asrock did basically the same thing on their OC formula or they have a two-phase with like 40 amp power blocks and it makes just as little sense to me as why the vrm is so powerful now ROG you know asus rog decided that yeah we're doing into phase but we're doing it with like really like MOSFETs that are like what would you say I had to quit for the job yeah that's one way to put it there they're much much weaker MOSFETs than what a ga or as ROC opted for and they use they did a two-phase design so this is not as powerful as the OC formula it's stronger than what Asus has but it's still ridiculous like even the Asus one is just overkill like if this is ddr4 it doesn't pull any bloody power and you do get one memory phase for each set of DIMM slots on either side of the CPU so you get the same thing right here with the voltage controller there and then the the phase is this part so yeah and ultimately you know you might think compared to the OC formula and compared to the rampage six apex this has less memory phases this is going to be worse at memory overclocking well again ddr4 pulls so little power it's a very low strain like very low power strain device so it doesn't actually matter how many phases you put on this ultimately what matters is the trace layout and the BIOS you find like the the BIOS programming that's what really decides memory overclocking know how many phases you throw at the memory slots because the memory doesn't really use that much power and that's why EVGA opted for you know that's why I guess EVGA decided that they're gonna go with just one phase cuz it really doesn't matter I have one of these boards for for tech like I have a review sample of this board to test with and it's incredible like the the four memory slots that EVGA has opted for they work they really really work like this board is beastly at RAM overclocking on sky like X it's ridiculous so you know as much as it would make sense to complain that this doesn't have to phase memory power I couldn't care less this board is absolutely amazing at memory overclocking like EVGA no evidently no what they were doing when they just decided to you know not bother with wasting board space on more more phases that ultimately wouldn't do anything and instead went and really like nailed the BIOS and and tres lay outside of the of the memory memory overclocking here because this thing's a beast Lumi who was the number one overclocker in finland he's got this board to run 41 41 20 megahertz on ddr4 at CL 12 and I've gotten to 39 50 and I'm very very close to making 4,000 working at CL 12 as well the last little vrm that is worth mentioning kinda the VPP rail is conveyed by a fully integrated buck converter which is a eye are 38 99 and that's a 10 amp output part but I don't know how much power VPP actually pulls and this VPP that's of EPP DDR and this is basically a supporting voltage for your memory sticks it doesn't actually really do much as long as it's a 2.5 volts your memory is going to overclock just fine you can't you can't actually change it on this motherboard if I yeah I don't think there's a BIOS setting even for this voltage which is fine like I don't see a problem with that this voltage never helped anything in all of my like with all the motherboards where I had access to that voltage it doesn't do a damn thing so it's just good that it's there and again plenty overkill because this is a supporting voltage that's main memory power this is just a minor rail for the memory so yeah that's that's the V RMS on the EVGA X 299 dark it doesn't get better than this literally there isn't any retail motherboards that I'm aware of that use better Maus like all the top X is 299 boards for in terms of erm capabilities use the exact same component tree that the EVGA x2 99 dark uses for VCC end like this 12 phase VCC nbrm it's the same you would find on an OSI formula as ROC uses it on a few other boards I think gigabyte has basically the same vrm but the EVGA dark takes it a step like EVGA is dark here takes it a step further because they put the most ridiculous he liked the vrm heatsink they have is amazing it is just awesome and they've also gone ahead and tried to like the gold placing is supposed to allow them to expose the ground plane for better you know heat dissipation from the PCB itself but I think they're mostly using it as a gold trim to make the board look better which it does so you know can't really complain about that and yeah so this is a beast of a motherboard you know it is absolutely a beast of a motherboard and huge props to EVGA for for making you know a motherboard that does truly compete with the ram-paige six apex and the OSI formula and from my personal experience with the OSI formula and the X 299 dark I like the dark better and we will go into more details on all of that in a separate video later because this is already long enough so yeah thank you for watching like share subscribe leave a comment down below if you would like to support what we do here at gamers access then there's a patreon link down below there's also merch you can buy and if you would like to see more extreme overclocking related content I have a channel called actually hardcore overclocking and that's it for the video thanks for watching and good bye