Gadgetory

hey guys build Zoid here from actually hardcore overclocking and today we're taking a look at this thing which doesn't have a name as far as I'm aware but this is one of the boards that was used for the 28 core unlocked overclockable Zeon demo that in well not much of a demo with more more distraction from thread Ripper 2 but yeah I don't know what they're actually planning if this is going retail or anything but we are gonna take a look at this board because it is insane and huge thanks to Paul from Paul's hardware for actually sending in the pictures of this because this is one very very special motherboard right here so before we get into the erm actually now let's start with the VR I'm because that's really the highlight of the this this entire thing this giant line of phases up here is the VCC in before that this video is brought to you by the cable mod vertical GPU adapter a universal kit that lets you add a vertical GPU amount to almost any enclosure the vertical GPU adapter positions video cards further back from the glass than most stock vertical GPU mounts aiding in thermals and also easily sockets into the PCIe expansion slots of compatible cases the adapter kit is brand new and makes it easy to show off video cards even in cases that don't include a stock vertical GPU mount learn more at the link in the description below and I'm not gonna count these out here because there is 28 of them and it would take a while but so this is a 28 phase as far as the inductors and the power stages go so you have 20 inductors and you have 28 power stages but I do not know if it actually interleaves 28 phases on this side of the board there are evidently no quadruple errs but they may be located on the back of the board I just don't know if it does run quadruple errs then it'll be International rectifier $35.99 s because those are a really small compact quadrupling chip that works with international rectifier parts very very well-liked technically speaking you can use it with other chips as well but if you're using international rectifier power stages and Internet and an IR voltage controller then it just makes sense to go with IR quadruple errs so the voltage controller is this chip right here which is a three five two zero four one and that is it goes up to eight phases it supports plus two as an option so you can also run it as a plus one but it has to stay eight phases total so you can do like a 6 plus 2 or a 6 or 7 plus 1 and you can of course do any phase count lower than that here it is configured for a 7 plus a zero and then I don't know about the the quadrupling situation now the actual power stages in the vrm right here are international rectifier 35:56 is now these are not the most powerful power stages that you can buy from international rectifier these are just 50 amps whereas they do make a 55 55 35 55 which is a 60 amp part but gigabyte has seemingly a huge amount of 35:56 is because they've been using them on high-end boards since x99 so i assume they just bought like a ton of them in bulk and they've been just and and so they just use them everywhere for their high-end boards and you know it's really not a problem that this is just a 50 amp part when you have 28 phases though interestingly enough this crazy phase count is not the highest phase count with the most powerful power stage that even gigabyte has made gigabyte has actually in the past made a motherboard with the 32 phase V core and 35 55 or the 35 to 55 s predecessor which was the 35 50 I'm not 100% certain about that right now but so this isn't the highest phase count motherboard that gigabyte has ever made but it is the most powerful vrm that gigabyte has ever put on a board and the reason is simple because while they did make a 32 phase vrm in the past and that was a z77 board so yeah that's right gigabyte decided that a 4 core Intel i7 3737 70 K really needed a 32 phase of erm with 60 amp hour stages but nonetheless that we are is actually weaker than this one for a very very simple reason in order to accommodate that one onto an ATX motherboard gigabyte had 16 phases on one side of the board and then on the other backside of the board they had another 16 phases so you basically had a power stage PCB power stage sandwich which is completely uncool about if you actually want to use the full capacities of each of the power stages because each power stage at 60 amps output would produce around 12 watts of heat and basically you'd have a little 2400 watt you know 24 watt heater sandwiching the the PCB in this footprint and there was since half the vrm was on the back of the board there's only a heatsink on the other side and it would be completely uncool about which is why on this board you know you get the monstrous heatsink right here but also why the vrm is actually like crammed onto the same size like it is here because there have been boards where they've done twenty eight phases twenty four phases twenty eight phases thirty-two phases it's been done before but it's never actually been done in a functional way where the board could actually max out all of its phases it was done more as a you know but basically as a marketing stunt where it's like hey there's 32 phases on here they're not actually that powerful because of their thermal density but there is 32 of them but this does work the this is that this is fully capable of powering the monstrosity that is a 28 core Xeon CPU with an unlocked multiplier because that's exactly like that's pretty much what Intel's done here and the thing is so you have the 28th core Xeon and the the easy comparison here is the 14 core I nine so I have a seven 940 X and I've already tested it you know I've been chucked it for Cinebench and a bunch of other benchmarks and I know for a fact that if you're running Cinebench 15 on the 14 core at say 4.8 gigahertz which my chip is not the best there are chips out there that'll do 5 gigahertz at the voltage that mine needs 4 4.8 but for 4 point gigahertz I need 1.3 5 volts at which point my chip consumes for 540 watts from the power connectors and we will get to those eventually so my chip uses 540 watts for 4.8 gigahertz 1.3 5 volts now it is possible that Intel bend these eons like crazy to get a chip that does 5 gigahertz at 1.2 volts however I would like to point out that the probability of you having like the probability of every single core on a 28 core CPU being able to do 4.8 gigahertz well 5 gigahertz at say 1.3 volts is a lot lower than 8 on a 14 core CPU just because you have more cores so the the probability that this CPU was actually running 5 gigahertz at a reasonable voltage very very unlikely but until I heard about the chiller I thought until I actually got away with that but now Intel inde adult water cooling and the thing is that means they were definitely pushing unreasonable amounts of voltage the other thing is Cinnabons 15 on a 28 core CPU clocked to 5 gigahertz finishes so fast that it's not really much of a stress test like the fact that you finished Cinebench is really not much of an achievement when it takes a couple seconds so the so for the demo systems the CPUs were probably pushing somewhere you know if we go with the 28 core up here for let's say if it just what you know if it just scaled up from my 14 core then we're talking about 1080 watts of power but if we went with say 5 gigahertz and a voltage bump to something that you know it like that this would possibly be what it was configured to unfortunately there's not much information on you know the configuration well 5 gigahertz one point 4 volts you'd be looking at around 1200 watts which you know not a huge jump in power draw but still a hell of a lot of power now if you ran something like prime95 you'd be looking at actually like 20% or even percent more power than what Cinebench does because Cinebench really isn't that heavy because it doesn't use AVX instructions acceleration and yeah and also it finishes quickly so the the five gigahertz Cinebench demo wasn't really that you know biggest stress test here nonetheless the vrm you need is absolutely insane and the thing is you could probably get away with 1200 watts on something smaller than this so maybe they were running even more voltage than that it's really hard to say like there's no information on these systems and and so but we are definitely talking about power draw numbers in excess of a thousand watts if they had managed to bend something that did five gigahertz 1.2 volts you could probably see it doing around 800 watts but well at least for Cinebench under prime95 it would still hit a thousand but with the fact that they ended up using a chiller I'm inclined to believe that they didn't get a you know uber gold CPU which does five G on one point two volts which with the high core count is extremely unlikely so this vrm has to push a crazy amount of power and so let's go over how it actually does doing that so since the 28 core Xeon uses the fully integrated voltage regulator which is basically a very very high frequency buck converter built directly into the silicon of the CPU and optimized for basically converting two volts into well converting your core vault like the the conversion it's good for is basically a 600 milli volt drop or like a 500 milli volt drop it's not really like it's not a fully-fledged it's not super flexible it really doesn't like doing big voltage drops or very small voltage drops its optimized very specifically for a certain range and if you go outside that range the CPUs behave weirdly but basically for the convenient for convenience sake I'm going to assume that the entire VCC n was two volts because it makes my life simpler also because the datasheet actually ends at 2 volts so if you go beyond that you you get a mess and two volts for one point 4 volts 3 core is actually acceptable even for 1 point 3 5 volts peak or it is a reasonable voltage to run you probably actually want to run a bit more than that but nonetheless 2 volts has to get so all of this this crazy amount of power has to get out of this VR I'm at 2 volts and that leads to some insane current draw figures so starting at the 600 amps that the demo system might have been pushing for Cinebench we're talking about a vrm heat dissipation of about 77 watts this heatsink starts making a lot of sense though honestly this heatsink looks big enough to cool a CPU and this vrm would probably do that 600 amps so well not necessarily fully passive but with a some airflow you know it would should not have a problem with that because this is huge and it has a massive power plane sitting behind it so that this all this empty space but here that all acts basically as a heat sink for the power stages so 600 amps we're talking 77 watts thanks to CPU right there now 800 amps which you know let's say prime95 or if you got more unreasonable cooling than a water chiller than 800 amps definitely achievable you know we've seen the we've seen the 18 core CPU do a thousand watts on liquid nitrogen so 800 amps output for this vrm on on let's say well I think dry ice you'd probably be looking at dry ice because phase-change cooling would run into some major issues with just the amount of heat that these that 28 core Xeon would put out it would overload basically most phase-change coolers that I've seen obviously like it would basically require somebody to build a very very big custom unit that as far as I'm aware nobody has anything in the power capacity that 28 core Xeon would need so 800 amps you'd be looking at about 125 watts of heat coming out of the VRM and a thousand amps at which point you know the at this point the the power supply starts being a problem because you know to 2 volts thousand amps output we're talking about what to more than 2,000 watts coming into the VRM as it would produce about 175 watts of heat so you'd be looking at like 2200 watts input power that would overload every PSU ever like that well maybe not some of the crazy mining specialist you know mining only power supplies but any normal power supply well normal super flower has built a 2000 watt power supply for the European market before the mining craze well this would still overload that so one thing I do wonder about this vrm is with this power connector arrangement where they have two of them up here and two of them down here I do wonder and also you know separate input filtering chokes I do wonder if the power plane for this vrm is split and by split I basically mean that half the vrm gets okay that's not half is it it's really hard to guess we're half on this thing is because it's so big but half the vrm would be getting 12 volts from one from one set of power connectors and the other side would be getting 12 volts from the other set of power connectors which on a motherboard that's actually not normal on GPUs your 8 pin and your 6 pin should not be in parallel but on motherboards europe various cpu power connectors are generally going to be in parallel in fact having them I've not seen a motherboard where they're where they're different power planes but here having them on different power planes would make a ton of sense as it would mean that you can run two power supplies in parallel for this thing which you'd want to because you need to source in two thousand watts of power for the CPU the other thing is I'm not aware of any power supplies with two eight four eight pin power connectors for four-seat like 480 PS eight pin power connectors so this board might actually feature dual PSU compat capabilities and built into it which that's a pretty cool feature in my opinion and I actually asked about I actually asked if ROG was considering doing that for regular X 299 since X 299 is or any kind of capable of like tripping over current protection unlike a 1200 watt power supply but here here it's not really optional in my opinion like if if you want to really hammer one of these MOT CPUs when overclocking you're gonna need two power supplies cuz they don't make anything bigger than 2,000 watts and these CPUs could pull more than that anyway so 1000 amps 175 watts of heat this heat sink the the this heatsink you know keeps showing why it why it's this big and then for a thousand two hundred amps which technically speaking these are 50 amp power stages so you should be able to push 50 amps through every single one of them assuming this heatsink is able able to keep up I'm gonna but I don't think it is able to keep up because at 1200 amps you'd be looking at 250 watts of heat output that's like a GPU right there that's like an entire graphics card this seems to be in the same size as a GPU heatsink you know but I wouldn't really like so past this point I wouldn't really want to go because as you can clearly see the scale like the the power increase gets bigger and bigger going from each of these values so from like 70 from 77 watts to 125 that's about 50 watts then from 125 to a 775 that's about 50 watts and then past this point it actually gets nonlinear well it it's never linear but it starts really ramping up as you go from 175 to 250 and then from 250 you'd be looking at like over 300 watts for the next 200 amps so at around 1200 amps I'd say is the limit for this erm and 2 volts that per do you know that translates into about 2400 watts of power capability now the 28 core should actually get to that at least not continuously it might spike to that but it shouldn't be able to pull 2400 watts sustained partly because of cooling concerns but partly also like if you just assumed that you didn't have cooling issues if you looked at the 18 core the 18 core wouldn't like the the eight you if you had a 36 core right you could you could maybe hit 2400 well now like 2,000 watts average this is not a 36 core this is a 28 so it shouldn't actually you know it shouldn't be a UH I shouldn't actually get even necessarily well 2,000 watts it might be able to hit but above that def I I would be very very skeptical and actually even 2,000 watts would be hard to hit because the the 18 core maxes out at around a thousand watts for liquid nitrogen overclocking and so you know this isn't Plus like this isn't literally twice an 18 core it's more like 55 percent more than an 18 core so realistically even on liquid nitrogen you're probably going to land in a current output somewhere in between these two so it's not like the this vrm is it is ridiculously powerful and in fact it should be which is good because you don't really want to you know you've never in extreme overclocking you don't want to be overclocking on the edge of what the vrm can do because that leads to unexpected shutdowns unexpectedly dead motherboards you know those kinds of things so it's nice to have some Headroom this definitely has some Headroom but it's it's insane it is absolutely insane and you know what it's as far as I'm concerned it is at least nice to see a 28 phase erm where the 28 phases actually freaking work like these are laid out in a way that they will and have a heatsink big enough that you can actually utilize like use them to their full well don't necessarily full capability but a lot like you can actually make use of this because there's a lot of mother boards out there which would have you know on paper the specs would be similar in terms of what components they use and what kind of what phase count they have but the way the vrm would be laid out and the cooling the vrm would be given would be completely inadequate for handling these kinds of current outputs so yeah absolutely crazy motherboard right here no no the highest phase count but definitely the most powerful motherboard I think I've ever seen it might even be the straight up actually this is definitely the most powerful vrm I've ever seen on anything ever because even like the Supra you know even 1080 T is 980ti Zin 780 Ti switch 780 ATT eyes were notorious power hogs like those guards would easily hit 1500 watts power consumption on liquid nitrogen well even those you know that they would settle for a 14 or 16 phase VRM 980ti is very similar to the 780 Ti in terms of power consumption again you wouldn't see them above 16 with more than 16 phases and then there's this thing which is just absolutely insane because Intel lost their freaking mind and it is really really cool that they did because this is from like an extreme overclock as a hardware enthusiast this is freaking awesome as as far as practical uses go this doesn't have any as far as I'm concerned I can't see any good reason to get this or even to overclock it to the point where you would need a vrm this big because your CP like this VRM is gonna be you know on a normal cooling system this vrm is gonna be serviced like really underused because the this is this is this is designed basically to run this on liquid nitrogen which makes me wonder if Intel was originally planning to demo these on ln2 or if they plan to do an L n 2 demo sometime in the future because this board would certainly be capable of doing as impractical as it would be to do so yeah crazy crazy vrm right here and with the the power connectors each of these for a continuous power for continuous power draw a single eight pin is good for 480 watts but with extreme overclocking what you need to keep in mind the time time matters and also how much air flow you have you can actually if you point a fan at your cables your cables can handle more power because they're getting cooled similarly if you have you know air flow over your power connectors they're getting cooled they're not gonna they're not gonna burn out on you when you push them beyond their recommended specifications and also if the benchmark only lasts a couple seconds well it takes time for a connector to overheat and melt so as long as you don't run anything that lasts say half an hour well okay half an hour might be pushing it but usually it takes like 10 minutes before you see you know see your like before you start seeing thermal issues so and also well sometimes a lot longer than that but you know 10 minutes would probably be the upper limit for how long you could run a benchmark while say pushing 600 watts into one of these or maybe even 700 so the the time the length of your workload also matters when it comes to considering the power connectors for a daily system as ridiculous as it would be this this is plenty capable for extreme overclocking it would you know you'd be riding the edge on the power connectors which is actually why the the other board that was used for demoing the ROG one that one had six power connectors around the sieve for the CPU vrm I prefer that approach that I think is a better that I think is definitely the better option for a liquid nitrogen overclocking a one of these twenty eight cores eons but for for this right here like the this would still work especially considering as I also mentioned it's actually kind of unlikely that you would see the CPU pull more than 2,000 watts continuous anyway or even 2,000 watts continuous but is it's really hard to say without actually like having any hard you know data hard test data to to go off of so that's that's that now then let's cover some of the minor vrm is rather quickly so this right here is VCC well I'm assuming as VCC si again I there's no information on this we got shown pictures and some some crazy Cinebench scores but no actual details so this I'm assuming is VCC si based on the fact that this is where VCC si is located 4 X 299 and this being a you know is sky like Z on it should be very very very similar to X 299 CPUs since those are also technically sky like Zeon's just branded as I nines now and on a smaller die but it wouldn't really like well it could be VCC io honestly this could be either VC CSA or VCC IO it wouldn't really matter what you put one of them if until decided to rearrange how the pins are laid out in the socket then you could switch them around but I'm just gonna go with this being VCCS a the voltage controller for this is a 3 5 2 0 4 and that is a 3 + 1 phase voltage controller and it's being severely underused here because there's just one if IR 3553 in the single phase VC CSA which is fine because VCCS a really even even here wouldn't need to push that much power it should actually mean it should push more power than it would need on say on regular sky like X because this has more PCIe K uh more PCIe and more memory channels but it shouldn't be hugely different and this like a single-phase IR 35:53 ona on a skylight deck system is already massive overkill so here it's just it's still actually overkill just not quite as much now that memory power is a ridiculous three-phase as seems like the trend is to just put a phase for every you know every channel here so you do get a three-phase right here for V DDR and that's controlled by this chip right here which is again a 3 v 2 0 4 and it's actually running in 3 plus 0 this time and this time around instead of 1 plus a 0 and the power stages are again international rectifier 3553 s honestly this erm would be more efficient if it was a single-phase instead of 3 because even with 3 members like even with six sticks of ddr4 at least non-ecc ddr4 I'm not sure if like the super high density ECC sticks pull more power but consumer-grade ddr4 which I assume if Intel is going to make this because this is overclockable so I'm assuming they're gonna strip it of ECC capabilities and limit how much memory it can address to you know push it away from their server from server people from their server come out the customers so for regular memory sticks this is massive overkill because like even with 6 slots right here if they were all occupied and running at like 1.5 volts you'd still be only looking at like 8 amps output and 8 amps is like just about approaching the peak of the efficiency curve for one of these not for 3 of them so for 3 of them this is actually really this VM is running pretty inefficient because there's too many phases should but well you know it's fine because the heats spread across more phases and ultimately your vrm efficiency down here doesn't matter when you have this monstrosity on the motherboard so that's the memory power this right here I assume is VPP I am not sure about the details on that it's a supporting rail for ddr4 then we get what I assume is VCC IO which is the same exact story as VCC SA except I can't locate the voltage controller for that it might be this that kind of looks like it could be a thirty five thirty thirty-five to 0-4 but not 100% certain there and up here on the other side of the board you get more VDD R and another VPP Faye's right there so basically the rest of the board is pretty you know pretty standard well the the three-phase memory power is unique to this platform as normally you would see well at most two phases for memory power but one phase per channel is also a thing it's just it kind of depends on how high-end the motherboard is so now it's a it's a pretty you know if you ignore the monstrosity that is the VCC and this is a pretty normal motherboard you know if you just ignore the the socket and the the VCC and vrm now some other interesting things to note there's RGB headers on this thing there's also two postcodes but that that's kind of you know that's really that's kind of a given because this is a prototype board using four you used for like like this is probably you know an internal engineering sample which they're actually using to test the platform so the fact that it has postcodes is kind of just a given because that's handy to have on a prototype board isn't it but there are RGB headers which is just like well really odd like that that is that is concerning because I don't think they are like the people who designed this board I don't think they put those there just for you know having RGB lights on in the lab that this motherboard spends most of its time in this this seems like Intel actually intends to one day ship this because there's really no reason for there to be more RGB down here and this audio section looks like it's been ripped right off of a regular maintaining gigabyte board there's also a BIOS which but I'm gonna say that that's you know that kind of comes with this being a development board though it is socketed the BIOS chip is in a socket so this is kind of optional for you know a development board like this but it is still there but mostly those RGB headers in that audio section it just have me wondering like we might actually some see something that isn't this because I don't think this is even a TX it does seem to be abiding to some motherboard form factor but it's definitely not ATX and so we might actually see this thing in like quotation marks retail you know as retail as something like this can be because it is so ridiculous but yet there yet there's our GB headers so it seems like they actually intend to go ahead with one of these for normal users because this doesn't look like they this doesn't really look like they took a server board and smacked a giant vrm on it this looks more like they they just built made a monstrous motherboard that you know is just absolutely freaking insane so this this is a thing this is what Intel needs to get a 28 core Xeon to do five gigahertz without blowing the vrm to pieces which that Xeon would actually like if you took that 28 core Z on and just overclocked it on water or at least ran it at the settings that Intel was demoing it at it would probably blow up most x2 99 motherboards there there's a few motherboards which would just about survive it but most of them would get obliterated which is why things like why this exists and why the ROG dominus board exists because well regular X 299 and server boards especially not server boards wouldn't handle this because server boards work with CPUs that have a TDP limited to 300 watts and so they can get away with an eight phase-- or a six phase even but this this this doesn't have limits this is the very definition of removing all limits here but this is just ridiculous and it really makes me happy as an enthusiast to see it even if I think it's also completely impractical and ridiculous it's the this this is like this is like the the liquid what liquid nitrogen is to CPU cooling this is to CPUs and motherboards like that's what this is because this is completely insane and awesome so yeah that's it for the video thank you for watching like share subscribe leave any comments or questions down in the comments section below we if you'd like to support what we do here with gamers Nexus then there's a link to the patreon down below if you'd like to see more overclock more extreme overclocking focused type content then I have a channel called actually hardcore overclocking where I do that so that's it for the video thanks for watching and good bye