Gadgetory

hey guys build Zoid here from actually hardcore overclocking and today we're gonna be taking a look at a low-end X 570 motherboard the MGP X 570 gaming plus from MSI so this is the successor of the X 470 gaming plus which was one of the cheapest x 470 motherboards you could buy the thing is X 570 across the board is far more expensive so don't expect this to be anywhere like yeah don't expect this board to be anywhere near the price point of the X 470 gaming plus that it's replacing unfortunately X 570 is way more expensive than X 417 just because of like the chipset cost and and the PCIe 4.0 before that this video is brought to you by Dollar Shave Club and their starter sets get your Dollar Shave Club starter set for five dollars by using our link below available individually for shave shower or oral care or all together in one package the kits can be customized to your needs with options including toothpaste and a toothbrush hydrating shampoo face cleanser and scrubs body wash or a razor with cartridges and shaving cream convenience is key and care packages can be scheduled to send when you need a restock go to dollarshaveclub.com slash gamers Nexus or click the link below to learn more anyway before we get into the vrm let's go around and highlight some sort of worth worth noting noteworthy overclocking features there's a BIOS flashback BIOS flashback bus and hiding right behind the I think USB ports over here so you can update the bios of the motherboard with just an 8 pin power connector and a 24 pin plug it in no CPU no ram no GPU no nothing just just a USB stick with the right file format and a file with the right file name hit the button you can update the BIOS pretty useful if you have the motherboard and a incompatible CPU that requires a BIOS update which considering like this is an x5 70 board I really like you you'd be looking at buying like a next-gen like more newer than Rison 3000 CPU to run into that situation so you know kind of a hard situation to encounter on an x5 70 board I'd say but it is apatite like that that's what it's meant to solve anyway next to that we do get the eight pin and the completely useless 4 pin we all know what I think of four pins on low and unnecessary for pin power connectors on low-end motherboards so I'm not even gonna go in well like let's just put it this way that can handle 384 watts you don't need this at all especially on a motherboard of this caliber like if you overload that 8 pin the vrm is already going to be gone yeah like this vrm is gonna be gone by the time you overload that 8 pin so you know before you need that 4 pin but but like if you if you actually pulled enough power to need the 4 pin the RM has no chance absolutely no chance I mean it can't even max out the 8 pin so anyway moving on we get some useful features like a bunch of troubleshooting LEDs over here so you have CPU errors memory errors VGA so GPU errors and boot media errors you know it'll just slide up so it's not gonna be like it's not as useful as a post code but it's significantly useful more useful than nothing and it's less obnoxious than having the motherboard beep at you right it'll just give you a little LED telling you hey your your there's something wrong with your memory or there's something wrong with your CPU so pretty useful to have like I consider this a bare minimum for a lot of motherboards there's motherboards that like other words that don't have this annoy me a lot like that's that's boards where it's just like okay well that's below the bare minimum for troubleshooting features as far as I'm concerned if you don't even have like little LEDs to indicate roughly what component you should be looking at super handy when doing any kind of overclocking so that's that and for clearing the while so you've got the clear CMOS about a clear CMOS jumper right here which I think they could have positioned that a bit better because like sometimes what I do with say my systems is I hook up the clear CMOS to the reset button of the system right so that if you're of the case so that if you're doing a lot of overclocking you can just hit the reset button and it clears the CMOS because well the reset button isn't really that useful in my opinion for a daily system that often and if you're doing if you're like setting up an overclock you'll be potentially clearing the BIOS over and over and over again within a couple hours right so I think this could have benefited from being a button on the rear i/o arguably more so than the BIOS flashback I think the BIOS flashback is one of those features that you use once and then never again because after you've updated the BIOS it's like you can just use the BIOS flash utility in the vials right like or you can even update the BIOS for Windows so I've never done that myself I always go through the BIOS so yeah but still like a bit more convenient than having to pull the battery though by the time like depending on your GPU and like PCIe expansion card configuration pulling the battery or shorting that jumper might be equally annoying things to do right if you have like a three slot GPU and then uh then another card in here reaching that is gonna be quite the adventure anyway so that kind of covers all of the basic overclocking features that the motherboard offers also ignore these those are for troubleshooting engineering sample boards so those aren't going to be present on the real like if you buy the board retail those won't be present at all you can just ignore them so yeah with that out of the way let's just get right into the vrm so this right here is our V core right there and that is a eight I don't know what I'm doing it's an eight phase-- and the next to that we have a two-phase SOC VRM and for the controller we're looking at an IR three five two zero one which obviously does not support an A+ to phase configuration right or at least three five two zero one this goes all the way up to eight phases but it does not go up to eight plus two and this is like the thing is this is a significant upgrade from compared to like the x4 70 gaming plus that this motherboard replaces as this is like the default high end voltage controller for high-end motherboards for the last several years so you know like you're getting a pretty serious international rectifier voltage controller right here with this board and it is a low-end x5 70 so this is this is not like the cheese like this is definitely not cheap to do though it is still I think like a five ish dollar chip so it's not like you know and I assume that it's the alternative for the cheaper boards is like two or three dollars so it's not huge change in terms of the cost of like one chip like if that was the only thing you change on the entire board it's like five dollars but uh yeah the the thing is it doesn't do like it doesn't integrate drivers and that kind of thing so when you actually want to use a three five two zero one it gets more expensive than just the fact that you're replacing the controller because if you're replacing a controller that integrates like three or four of your phase drives then it's like well now you need to buy three or four new drivers anyway here it is running configure it as a four plus two phase and on the back of the board we of course find a bunch of doublers as well as a dual driver now all of those are there we go so the first chip over here is a dual driver so that's our two phases for the SOC and then here we have a doubler and I don't know why I'm changing the capitalization of the DS so don't know there we go doubler and then we've got two three and four doublers over there and all of these chips are international rectifier IR 3598 because the 3598 is a dual driver with an optional doubling function so for like this one over here you have two phases from the ir35 to zero one go in and then two completely independent phases come out because it literally is like having to say CHL eight five ten drivers in one chip except this is weaker than a CHL five ten because like a CHL a five ten is the same sized chip except it drives one phase so it's significantly it's a pretty significantly stronger driver than this one but uh yeah like that you only have to worry about the strength of the driver if you're trying to drive some really like slow power like well high capacitance power MOSFETs all right which this board doesn't need to worry about because the this is using some pretty normal low side powers mullets they're not the not the worst ever but like if like the eight five ten is a good fit for something like a sixty eight ninety four or in some cases there's GPUs where they'll actually like put two sixty eight ninety fours in parallel and at that point it's like yeah you need a pretty serious driver to switch those kinds of MOSFETs on and off at or even as a nibble speed so there are thirty five ninety I wouldn't really work very well but here it's fine like these are pretty normal MOSFETs so anyway here we have one running as a doubler so one PWM signal it goes in and then to drive two sets of drive go out to the actual phases fully interleaved and yeah so that's kind of the control scheme that you're looking at with this vrm and for this board especially this has some pretty major benefits because since it does use discrete MOSFETs the efficiency of the vrm is quite heavily dependent on the switching frequency because like that one of the big advantages like higher power stages have over discreet MOSFETs is that they have significantly lower switching losses because they the the MOSFETs inside a power stage your optimized to switch much faster than your discrete like your normal discreet MOSFET and the end result is that you can go from like 300 kilohertz to 500 kilohertz and not really notice a significant change in heat output whereas on something like this 500 kilohertz these MOSFETs would produce way more heat than they would produce at 300 kilohertz so with a vrm like this the doublers make a pretty major you know give you a pretty major efficiency advantage and you also get reduced or you know if you decide to run them at a higher switching frequency so let's say you're going from a four phase at 450 kilohertz which is the X 470 Gaming plus to what this is which you could do eight phases at 450 cards well you can have significantly lower output ripple at roughly the same efficiency or you can go and drop the switching frequency all the way down to like 250 kilohertz potentially have still slightly better output ripple because you are on eight phases not just for and yet have much better vrm efficiency because each of the high side MOSFETs is being switched on and off 250 thousand times a second instead of four hundred and fifty thousand times a second right so a pretty major dig pretty large drop in switching losses right there because of that anyway let's talk about efficiency now for efficiency I'm going with 300 kilohertz switching frequency at each of the phases because that's a pretty normal switching frequency to run even discrete MOSFETs at like 3 well you could make a design of erm around a lower switching frequency than that but you generally don't do that like you generally don't do that kind of thing so yeah 1.2 volts output voltage 300 kilohertz switching frequency and 12 volts gate to source voltage so that that's the the drive voltage for the MOSFETs this is important because you can drive most like you can switch a MOSFET like this with 5 volts but the thing is if you do that you get a significantly higher RDS own they also take longer to switch on and off and well you end up with worse overall vrm power efficiency so with a motherboard like this it's like they actually you get best efficiency with like 10 volts the thing is on a motherboard you already have a 12 volt rail so it's like why would you convert your 12 volts into 10 volts just to drive your MOSFETs it's much easier to take 12 volts and just jam that into the MOSFETs the MOSFETs you know they'll handle that kind of voltage not fuck it just fine so 12 volts gate to source drive voltage for this anyway so with those operating parameters and 300 cord switching frequency there so that's the operating parameters for the vrm that I'm going to be doing the efficiency with and it's also worth noting that when I do discrete MOSFET VRM efficiency I do not factor in the power consumed by the drivers so like the the ir35 99-98 on the back of the board those produce heat i'm not factoring those in for convenience which is pretty lazy of me the reason why I consider like don't factor them in is they don't really make that much of a difference to your overall power consumption they might be like 1 or 2 watts in total right spread across the entire VRM they might be even less than 1 watt the reason why it's important that I'm not factoring them in is that low outputs that makes discrete MOSFETs look really good because I'm not factoring in the like fixed amount of power loss that you get from having drive like from the drivers because if that driver has to switch the moss-like as long as that driver is turning the MOSFET on and off that is power being lost - turning the MOSFET on and off like that costs energy to do and I'm just not factoring that power loss in because at high current outputs it's like a very small portion of your overall heat output so not particularly important at low current outputs it makes discrete MOSFETs looks kind of silly efficient compared to power stages because if I have power stages they automatically factor in the driver losses in their heat output so like I would actually have to do more work to remove the driver loss from like a power say you know efficiency calculation so I'm just just pointing that out as like if at low current output the discrete Massa if this looks really efficient at a hundred amps output it's mostly because I'm ignoring the fact that the driver is also Berna maybe like a watch or two and yeah that makes this vrm look a bit better than it should but it's not super important which is why as I said for convenience I kind of ignore that so 100 amps output which is a little bit like that should be pretty close to the amount of current and that's a maxout 3800 X or a maxed out 3700 X poles this V arm will be producing about 12.5 watts of heat at 300 kilohertz so about there at 125 amps which is around where you'd want to like that's the maximum current you'd really want to be running a 2700 X on you'd be looking at about 18 watts of heat output going up to a hundred and 50 amps so you'd be looking at about 24 watts of heat output and at this point it's worth like that this is a pretty serious amount of heat and so let's talk a little bit about the cooling system that MSI has designed well actually the thermal management that MSI is doing on this vrm so there's a huge advantage that this the x5 70 gaming plus has over the x4 70 gaming plus in that this vrm is not one blob of four phases it's six phases and then two phases so what basically you have is 3/4 of the heat output of the vrm goes into this massive heat sink right over here and I know it doesn't look like it has a ton of surface area but the profile for that heat sink looks something like this and then the MOSFETs are at the bottom of that right so you actually have a good amount of surface area it's just not very visible so and I've tested motherboards with this style of a heatsink but on v4 50 it works really well like this style of a heatsink is awesome I'm actually not sure why for high-end motherboards if you wanted to just kind of make like make your life easy and make really good VR I'm cooling with the end and just eliminate like the i/o cover and the easiest thing to do would be just to put a big metal block that doubles as both of the RM heatsink as and in i/o cover just does both because you'd have a ton of surface area for VR I'm cooling and you'd also have the whole aesthetic benefits of an i/o cover right without actually having to resort to a to a piece of plastic like most motherboards do anyway so I'm a big fan of this style of heatsink and it's only handling 3/4 of the overall heat output of the vrm the other 1/4 of the V curve erm is actually dumped into the heatsink up here and that one has a similar profile like it doesn't look like it has a lot of fins but it looks kind of like that from the side so it has a decent amount of surface area as well and you know in the case of the 24 Watts that were throwing at the vrm at 150 amps this is roughly where like the 12 core would max out on say water cooling that would be only 8 watts of heat now I'm not 8 that's way too much 6 watts of heat being dumped into that heatsink and 18 watts of heat being dumped into this heatsink in my testing with the B 450 mortared titanium this heatsink is more than capable of handling 18 watts like the it's not a problem for this heatsink whatsoever 6 watts for this heatsink same situation absolutely not not an issue so yeah like this is not the most efficient vrm ever right like if we compare this to some of the other motherboards the x5 70 motherboards I've covered this is actually quite an awful amount of heat for just 150 amps but if you throw a big enough heatsink at it and you spread the heat out in a clever way you don't need a stupid efficient vrm right there's kind of two ways you can design a good cooling system or you can design efficient vrm if you design your really efficient vrm you can throw the heatsinks out the window potentially if it's efficient enough you don't need heat sinks right if you're vrm isn't efficient enough you need to get clever with your cooling solution and that's kind of what MSI has done here and it doesn't like it doesn't even need to be super elaborate like this is still basically just a little an aluminum block with some fins cut into it so you know it's not like state-of-the-art heat sink technology right there it's just that big block of aluminum with a lot of surface area turns out works pretty well especially when you don't try to dump all of the vrm heat into it and you spread it over an even another block of aluminum so you know the 12 core I would be really surprised if this motherboard struggled with vrm thermals when overclocking the 12 core and potentially with the three five two zero one MSI does give you the option to change vrm switching frequency so if you have the 12 core you might find that you have so much thermal Headroom that you can actually just like raise the the switching frequency a bit to maybe get slightly better overclocking by reducing the vrm output ripple so yeah like I'm a I'm a pretty big fan of this this VR I'm considering that it's unlike a low-end motherboard now anyway moving up to like 16 core current draw figures like a hundred and seventy amps and this is keep in mind this is all overclocking this is not at stock if you're running at stock the AMD's TDP is like 105 watts so if we assume that AMD actually law-like agrees to the laws of physics which they don't because they're the most like the fun fact most x4 70 motherboards override the 2700 X's TDP from 105 Watts to like 130 ish so that's why 2700 X's don't run on their rated TDP it's because the motherboards tell them hey it's fine to pull 130 so the 2700 X does but uh like they still add stock you wouldn't be looking at like these kinds of current draw figures that's very much overclocking 175 amps you're gonna be looking at about 30 watts of heat output for the vrm which would translate into about 7.5 watts of eat on this heatsink and about 20 2.5 watts of heat on the other eat sink which I think should still like the this is approaching I think the the limits of what this heatsink can handle but depending on how much air flow you have this should still not be a massive issue to deal with so yes the 16 core could probably run on this motherboard just fine as well and then going all the way up to 200 amps which would be a completely maxed out 16 core you'd be looking at about 38 watts of heat so you can see at this point that like the increase in heat output is getting pretty drastic for every step of the way because well the rme efficiency curves look something like this or wait right or heat output four phases look something like that so we are now getting into this area because this vrm is really not meant for handling a ton of current like these these are halfway-decent MOSFETs but they're not incredible and so at 200 amps this we are I might say it's pretty pretty close to maxed out the heat sinks should you know you'd be looking at close to 30 watts on this one which I'm not sure how well that'll handle it this one will handle that and close to 10 watts on this one which 10 watts on this one I don't think is actually a problem 30 on the other hand is a lot of heat so I'm not sure how that would work out for that but uh yeah that is like maxing out a 16 core so obviously not something this like this is not something I would say the motherboard is really meant for and you know you can't always just throw a fan at the heat sinks that tends to take care of any VR and thermal issues really really quickly because fun like if you have an a IO the airflow around the vrm tends to be non-existent if you have a tower air cooler you still generally don't actually have that much air flow over the VRM or what airflow you do have might be like use it up air that has gone through an like a freakin heatsink right so it's already hot from the cpu so yeah but throwing a fan somewhere near the vrm like potentially what would make sense is to put like a fan that sits like right here right and blows air up through like under the the vrm heat sink and just channels it at the top of your case that would potentially work really really well but you know like if you're sticking a 12 core on this motherboard I'd well no 16 core 12 cores as I said earlier like 612 core should be fine 16 core you might start needing to get creative with like fan you know placing a fan around the vrm so anyway that's the vrm efficiency and I just realized that I forgot to mention what all sets this motherboard is on so each phase is made up of a single high side MOSFET and a single low side MOSFET high side MOSFET is a 4c 0:29 and from on semiconductor this is actually a pretty solid high side MOSFET but what really what I really like about this vrm is that low side because for like the thing is this is a 4c 0 24 n right yes it is and if this is a 2.8 million RDS on low side most fact and the reason why this is important is a lot of other cheap motherboards go for like for millions RDS on and a very very very large portion of the heat output of your erm is caused by P equals I squared times R so this is heat out current resistance of the MOSFET right so if you are at 4 milli ohms like that like literally it's I squared times 4 instead of I squared times 2.8 well zero point zero zero two eight vs. 0.004 right because milli ohms but anyway you get the idea so this is actually a pretty major improvement over a lot of other mothers like as far as low and multi low end motherboard MOSFETs go this is a really nice low side because they tend to be terrible in a lot of cases so yeah and that's why this movie are em you know which like it's still not super efficient but it can still and it's not that different from like the erm on the x4 70 gaming plus it can still just about handle you know the 16 core and it should have no problem with the 12 core because of the quite clever cooling system setup that MSI has here so anyway let's move on from the VRM to the memory section for the memory and topology we're looking at a daisy-chain layout so and we can actually see that on the back of the board which is kind of neat in my opinion like I'm always a fan of anything that you can just look at and be like oh that's what it is cuz yeah so this is a daisy chain and you can see it most clearly like right here right so you can see this trace comes in hits this pin then it goes on and it hits that pin and that tells you it's a daisy chain because while it goes from one limb slot to the next stem slot and if you have a daisy chain topology then the top like this topology basically favors to dim configurations in general you can like it really depends like there's a lot of BIOS tuning you can do to like work around the downsides of daisy chain so the main problem with daisy chain is that if you put a dim slot in this you have two Dame's on the same channel like that then the timing for signals going to this Dame is a little bit different from the timing for signals going to that Dame and that causes like overclocking issues right that's what restricts the oil potentially limit the maximum memory frequency you can run on the flip side like if you just have one de min daisy chain it actually works really really well so if you have it on the the second name slot like that that actually works really really well with daisy chain so this motherboard should be great for like 2 by 8 gigabyte memory configurations should overclock amazingly well on this 2 by 16 kind of depends on really depends on the memory sticks and how well the motherboard actually supports said memory stick cuz there's kind of like 2 by 16 is a kind of weird configuration also I don't know how well 16 gigabit memory chips overclocked so these things get strange at that point but assuming MSI supports whatever dims you are using properly this should actually work really well as well compared to say 4 by 8 because 4 by 8 is just inherently not supposed to work as well on a daisy chain as a 2 by 16 should but there's BIOS stuff that can also happen that will maybe make 4 by 8 work better than 2 by 16 but generally Daisy changed in favor 2 by 16 and then you know there's 2 by 32 but 2 by 32 is like a huge question mark because I don't know any like I've not seen any testing done with that can memory configuration yeah I plan to do some testing of my own for it but you know like it's gonna be a while before I managed to do that and I don't yet have any x5 70 motherboards so I don't know how that's gonna work out on x5 74 by 16 on the other hand is also a huge question mark because it's super depends like it's like 2 by 16 except with like 4 by 8 problems added on top right like that's the thing is just like it's a mess so yeah but more does daisy-chain so it should prefer these two DIMM slots and at least if you're running 2 by 8 it should overclock really really well and then for the other higher capacity configurations it kind of depends like hopefully there's going to be some other Board reviews covering the different memory configurations that work well on each motherboard but that tends to take forever to test and I don't really know of any reviewers really doing that and I don't want to do that myself because as I just said it takes forever to test though I do try to sometimes test it myself a bit anyway so yeah that is oh I forgot to mention the SOC vrm and the memory RM but the thing is like that gives you an idea of how important they are so the SOC BRM as I said earlier it's two phases the MOSFETs are QA thirty one one one and six is from Ubik semiconductor and their dual NFS so highside and low-side integrated into one package I have no data sheet for these it doesn't really matter that much because the system on a chip of horizon doesn't really pull that much power but it's just like yeah I couldn't give you more information on these if I try it because I literally don't have any more information than that and then for memory power we are looking at a single phase with two high side MOSFETs and two low side MOSFETs which actually this is one of the more powerful single phase memory VRMs out there 4 X 5 70 motherboards it also completely doesn't matter because it's mostly down to what you do between the memory sloths and the CPU socket with ddr4 ddr4 doesn't really pull that much power so yeah this like it's a single phase it's got nice it's got the same MOSFETs as your V curve erm but I wouldn't you know focus on it too much because it's mostly going to come down to the middle the bias of the motherboard and the trace layout of the motherboard which fortunately I can't tell you for sure that this is good but it is a daisy chain and so it should work really well with two by eight and then everything else is just kind of like what does the bios support best I'm not really concerned about the vrm for ddr4 it doesn't pull enough power so yeah that is it for the for this video so thanks for watching like share subscribe leave any comment oh wait I should have done like a conclusion well yeah that that's that's it for the video you know the MSI x5 70 gaming + which is a low-end x5 70 motherboard that does not make it cheap it just means it's like at the bottom of the product stack 4 X 570 from MSI I think it's like the second to the bottom of MSI's product snack there's one other motherboards that like even lower end than this and yeah I mean you know you should handle the 12 core just fine 16 core should also work but the VR I'm calling when I actually get a bit of a workout at that point and yeah so that's it thanks 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 directly there's the gamers Nexus patreon and if you'd like to you know support us by buying like some merch there's store dog gamers Nexus 9 it where you can pick up things like mod mats and other gamers Nexus merchants oh I forgot should have probably written that into my script properly but uh yeah so that you know so if you would like to support us that that would be really awesome if you'd check that out there's links to both down in the description below and if you'd like to see more content from me I've got a channel called actually hardcore overclocking where I do more overclocking stuff so that's it for the video thanks for watching and good bye