Gadgetory

hey guys build Zoid here from actually hardcore overclocking and today we're gonna answer the one great question does the Maximus 11 hero have a four phase or an eight phase and the answer is I guess you'll have to good spot to put the I to break here Steve before that this video is brought to you by NZXT is new h 500 case which we recently found to have an impressively effective cooling setup that is entirely negative pressure when stock the h 500 is the successor of the s 340 and s340 elite offering high build quality that's all steel and glass and kale management features that are also a top class for the $70 compact mid tower case age 500 is a part of NZXT Zanu H series lineup which also features options from Mini ITX micro ATX and full ATX builds learn more at the link of the description below how do I the answer is it's a 4 no seriously it is a 4 and I'm actually really surprised that Asus decided to like go for a four phase and I had a very long discussion about this design decision from Asus with Elmore who used to work at Asus until like a couple days ago so what is going on with this VR I'm well this block right here is of course V core and then this this block over here is a GPU power so we're just gonna call that V GPU and the V core portion looks like a 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 phase except for the part where this voltage controller is an ASP 1400 and the ASP 1400 doesn't do eight phases it does four plus two I think well entirely sure about if it's plus 2 or plus 1 it but it's probably plus 2 because that's really not that more that that's not an exactly rare configuration for a budget voltage controller this really isn't like the Asus high-end part is the ASP 1405 and this is the 1400 so this is the the cheaper voltage controller that Asus uses for all of their cheap or motherboards so we already have some cost savings here so Anri GPU is there for probably a two-phase now the week or vrm doesn't use any doublers so you do end up with a vrm that is basically groups of two groups of two like this and that means it's four phases and ASIS in their defense released these lovely scope shots which show that the new four four phase has much better transient response than the old extended eight phase because and by extended they mean that this had doublers and so let's let's just write out what these different VRMs were so the old one was an ASP 1405 alright so the nice expensive voltage controller from that's probably from international rectifier going into an IR 3599 that's how we know it's probably from international rectifier going and that IR 3599 was going into an IR 3535 it's how we further confirm that it was a problem like this is probably an IR chip so that's a 35 35 and that would finally output to as F that F 906 small set from the dual and fat from vishay semiconductor that would finally shove like and that would switch current into the 400 nano henry inductors that Asus likes to use and these are important here because when you put your inductors in parallel stuff happens to them and and here they're not in parallel because we do have the doubler so that that's the old design the new design is a case of a SP 1400 into to 630 9s and those then output into to 400 nano Henry doctors and the thing about this setup is that well by having the inductors in parallel like this and that then goes off to vcore so this is like the one phase of the the new design and this is this is one phase of the old design and the thing about this new phase with the two 400 nano Henry inductors in parallel is that effectively you can just ignore that and say they're 200 nano Henry's so their inductance gets effectively cut in half there is a little bit of an issue that there's like the RDS on of the MOSFET in the way from them being completely in parallel but you can more or less ignore that because the RDS on is so is so very low so you effectively end up with an inductance of 200 nano Henry's and the thing about having a lower inductance is that the higher the inductance of your inductor is the more it resists changes in current and transient response is all about not blocking changes in current right it's it's about your ability to go from 45 amps output to 193 amps output as quickly as possible so less inductance means better transient response so that is already an advantage in favor of this for phase design in this test that asus has released right this and this mind you is not a CPU running at 45 amps and then 193 amps this is a synthetic load which is why this looks so very clean because normally if you have a CPU running this is going to be a horrendous mess but anyway so you know you go from that 45 amps output 193 amp output and you know having a lower lower inductance on your phases helps with that transition quite significant so already this 8 phase is losing the the battle like as far as being designed for maxing out your transient response well this should go like that should just be replaced with 200 nano Henry inductors instead and that would improve the transient response here a little bit as well now the other thing that asus points out are like asus says they're getting rid of the doublers because doublers introduced some delay to your pwm signal so the asp 1405 when when the asp 1405 sees that you've gone from 45 amps output to suddenly a lot more you know 193 amps output it basically goes and towels pulls up the PWM lines and tells all of the phases to try turn-on as quickly as possible and the $35.99 is in the way of doing that because the the signal took Pole the phases hi has to go through the $35.99 which delays it a little bit because there's some logic in the $35.99 and then it goes to the 35 50 35 and then to the ZF 906 now this is another and so asus is like okay we eliminated the $35.99 and therefore we've eliminated the delay introduced by the doubler which is why we're getting this huge improvement in transient response but do keep in mind not the same inductors and the other thing worth noting is the Zeff 906 is really slow like really freaking slow this chip in its own data sheet for 10 volts gate-to-source so way more drive voltage than asus ever uses and like I talked to hell more about this apparently they drive everything with 5 volts but anyway with 10 volts get to source and you know one ohm of RG so resistance on the gate which incidentally is the typical resistance of the gate of this MOSFET just normally that's just kind of how much resistance it has this thing takes 35 nanoseconds to turn on the $35.99 adds about 50 nanoseconds to of like well 10 to 20 nanoseconds of delay to a signal depending on what kind of signal you're talking about like more than half the delay in this system is from the MOSFET I mean I'm sorry but what like you know if this if this spike is caused by a you know 50 nanosecond delay like this under Xu is caused by a 50 nanosecond delay total then you could probably get rid of a good chunk of that delay by just changing that MOSFET or even better get rid of the driver and the mosfet replace it with an integrated you use the same sic s 6:39 power stage that would be the fairest comparison basically what you can see in these scope shots what here is that the old scope shop is showing a vrm design that really isn't optimized to get the best transient response right it really isn't like that what doesn't seem to have been the main concern of anybody when they were building this VRM because if it was they could have done a lot of things to get better transient response without having to get rid of that doubler like there's a lot of things I could have done they could have reduced the output inductance they could have actually you could keep reducing that output inductance the reason why you use a higher inductance inductor is that it improves your output ripple but if you're using a doubler and then while actually if you just can't like if you get a ton of phases right crank up your switching frequency then you can use really low inductance inductors and it doesn't make as much of it doesn't cause as much of a problem because you have a lot of phases interleaving and that inherently reduces your output ripple without relying on a huge amount of inductance but well Asus decided like Asus has a ton of these 400 nano Henry inductors and they just kind of use them everywhere so yeah I kind of like that I'd consider probably a cost-saving measure as well but basically this is not a fair comparison this vrm design has you know it's like the 3599 puts some delay definitely it definitely adds some delay but so does the driver so does the MOSFET you're using like the delays caused by this combination right here are different than you know what what these have and it favors these just because integrated like the the great thing about power stages is that they can turn on much much faster because the silicon turning on your high side MOSFET is on the same die has the high side MOSFET so you you can get rid of a lot of the parasitics that are in the way of turning on a high side MOSFET really really quickly like the wire that you're connecting to the gate of the high side malfete that you know makes it harder to drive it the inductance of that wire makes it harder to drive it like just power stages have huge advantages when it comes to being able to turn them on and off really really quickly so in the old design is just like you could get rid of the 3599 in there and it would probably still like it would almost certainly still lose on a on a transient load response test just because of how it's built so not a fair comparison though it is worth noting the new design definitely has better transient response and because of the ZF 906 is so bloody slow this new design actually manages to maintain the same vrm efficiency at 500 kilohertz whereas this one if you run it at 300 kilohertz is actually worse efficiency at 200 amps output than the new one so like I can totally like I can see why the 3599 was in the old design it was there to you know get good enough efficiency out of the Zed f9o sixes because these these aren't great but the the new design you know comparing it against the old design just isn't really fair to the old design because the old design was evidently never built with considerations of like running a ninety nine hundred K and just just worst in every way possible really the only real advantage is that you know it should have a lot less input ripple because it does have the higher inductance inductors and higher and more phases but you know they they'd also be running it at a lower switching frequency to keep the the power loss and the ZF 906 is down and so ultimately your input and output ripple might actually end up being the same on the old design compared to the new design just because these sock oh well they're just not really what I would like the thing is I would just not use this MOSFET fur for a motherboard application like the high side is really really slow and really really low RDS on which is like great except for the part where like your primary goal with the high side MOSFET is to make it fast right like it's all about speed the faster it can turn on the less power loss you get especially at lower output voltages so admittedly like yeah just different different very different priorities essentially between the old design in the new design and the new design you know prioritizes transient response and try and prioritize this cost savings because the funny thing is this is cheaper than that and $35.99 s cost zero point four six dollars and Asus has stopped using $35.99 on the entire Maximus 11 lineup of motherboards there's not a single motherboard that I'm aware of from Asus that uses $35.99 s which means and also with the RT X 2020 series of GPU there there's no doublers on those either so Asus can basically stop buying a $35.99 S going forward and that's a huge cost saving right like massive cost saving so it's basically a case of like oh yeah we're saving a bunch of money and it just so happens that our new vrm design is better at transient response than the old design which really doesn't seem to have been designed for that in the first place it's like whoa what an achievement you've saved money and improved transient response great that still doesn't change the fact that it's a four phase and it does have all of the downsides of a four phase compared to an eight phase-- like for example the fact that when one of these phases turns on you get a 50 amp like because let's say let's say this VR M is pushing 200 amps output right combined across all of these phases if it's pushing out 200 amps one of these phases turns on that is a 50 amp spike that the input filtering componentry has to deal with like whereas if they were still using doublers that spike would be 25 amps because instead of you know having one 50 amp block turning on you'd have 25 amps separately so this would turn on that would be a little 25 amp spike and then the the next phase would turn on and that would be its own little 25 amp spike and that puts a lot less strain on your input filtering circuit input filtering system then you know a four phase similarly on the output you would have less output ripple if you just had more phases and yeah overall it's just a case of like this is a four phase now it is still relatively efficient it's really not that bad in efficiency but that's mostly down to the s I see 6:39 is just being freakin amazing compared to while these so you know that's that kind of seems to be the the logic that Isis went with is like Oh our new power stages are so much better than what we were using before that we can not use the doublers will still get perfectly good efficiency our input ripple will go up but we can deal with that with just better input filtering componentry or arguably the input filtering was overkill for the old design and so they didn't need to redesign that because this sure looks like what they've been running for every motherboard for a while like I don't think they've changed anything about the info filtering setup you know save some money transient response for improved input ripple gets worse output ripple you can compensate for with switching frequency as well as with output capacitors like you can just try redesign the output filtering and that could fix that as well which is rather like that's easier to do than you know fixing something like your transient response with with capacitors that's actually quite hard but yeah it's still a four-phase it's still a four-phase and you know and with it comes all and it does at least take like that they do still get some advantages that an eight phase-- would have like because this has you know eight power stages in it it does spread the workload over a power stages but it's not balanced so essentially they're they're like normally what you would do when doing this kind of setup is you'd like been your power stages so that they most equally match each other in terms of own resistance because there's going to be some manufacturing variance between them and if you put one power stage that's like a lot lower resistance than another one then you know you'd have problems well you'd have one pushing more current than the other but basically you have less than ideal efficiency with this less than ideal a ripple situation but uh but you still get the benefit of like okay so we spread the the heat output across more or less eight components not quite perfectly evenly but pretty much evenly there's not going to be that much variance between them there will be some but no you know extreme amounts and yeah so you you have something that's that's a four fate like it's a it's a massive for face that's like the best way to describe it because each of these si si 639 s is a 50-amp dr moss so you effectively like have a hundred amp peak output capability phase and you have four of them which is uh like that's just kind of silly sure like you can do that there's nothing really stopping you from doing that it's just you know just not an eight it's not an eight phase-- so the end result here is that in terms of erm efficiency this vrm also doesn't win any awards because well the the new new power stages are great but there's not quite it like there's other board vendors with just more phases and more phases generally means easier time dissipating the heat easier time getting higher efficiency right like admittedly Asus could have probably put like three power stages next to each other there's really nothing stopping them like I actually said like why don't you just put three of them next to each other and they're like yeah we could we just don't feel like doing that as well I guess eventually Asus will will will do that as well at that point I really hope they bump up the the inductions of their inductors because at that point it'd be cutting one third and then at that point they might start having an output ripple problem though they might also go like oh yeah but are trying to get response I lost an even better so screw it anyway output efficiencies so 500 kilohertz switching frequency which is a huge advantage over the old design like the old design would have been 300 kilohertz oh well 300 kilohertz max because if you want much past that it would get really inefficient and if you wanted to run it efficient like more efficiently you could have gone down to like 250 but anyway 500 kilohertz here 5 volts drive the RV and 150 amp and then like the the datasheet for the s IC 6:39 suspect in 1 volt output and I've scaled it up based off of fishin C to 1.3 volts output which is kind of worst-case scenario scaling because generally power stages get a bit better with with higher output voltage but it really depends on how they're designed so like you could in theory it would be possible to design them that they have peak efficiency at 1 volt output and it just gets worse from there so anyway 150 amps output these this vrm would produce about 13 watts of heat at 1 volt and about 17 watts of heat at one point 3 volts for 200 amps output you'd be looking at about 20 watts of heat and 26 watts at one point 3 volts possibly less 250 amps output and also this is like 9700 K 8086 K 8700 K completely maxed out this is 99 hundred K pretty much maxing out any kind of cooling system so 250 amps output you'd be looking at you know 30 watts at 1 volt and about 39 watts at 1.3 volts and then 300 amps output you'd be looking at about 40 watts at 1 volt and 51 watts at 1.3 volts and 400 it doesn't go up to 400 it goes up to 360 amps because while these are 50 amp hour stages they do only the the datasheet ends at 45 amps output which is pretty normal for most high-end power stages is just like practically speaking pushing the rated current through a power stage is not practical so that's something to keep in mind you know and the end result is that you can these are I can only go up to like 360 amps here it's 360 amps output 1 volt 63 watts and 1.3 volts you probably be looking at around 82 so yeah this this definitely doesn't win any vrm you know awards for vrm efficiency if they put more power stages in it they they could have improved the figures a bit they wouldn't even need to increase the phase count but I guess they'd start running like they'd have to relay out the board a bit to accommodate all the extra all the extra power stages and the other option they could have gone for is like a 5 plus 2 phase controller but at that point they'd have to upgrade the controller to something more expensive and yeah they're not gonna do that if they're saving money by getting rid of $35.99 yeah I don't think they're gonna be upgrading the voltage controller so yeah I mean it's not winning any awards for efficiency it's not terrible either right like this fall's pretty much in line with the asrock taiichi ultimate board it is just worth noting that the taichi ultimate probably has a better heatsink than this it also has I'm not sure if it actually has more surface area but like it really like you know if you have the same heat output as your competitor then you better hope you have a better eat sink because if they have a better heat sinks are winning so that's one thing to keep in mind and yeah it's just efficiency wise you know it's not no incredible the other thing is I with these efficiency figures I am assuming completely even load load spreading across the the power stages which while that would you know like imbalanced loading of the power stages would maybe were like decrease the power efficiency by a couple percentage points as well so that's another thing to consider is just like there's no current balancing on this thing other than like hopefully they matched up the the power stages pretty well or that there wasn't too much manufacturing variance between the power stages so yeah is it's a four-phase it's not the most efficient thing ever it does get really great transient response but they could have probably just done better on the old design anyway I'm not impressed and especially at like $300 that Asus charges for this motherboard it's just like I know for a fact there are other boards that have more efficient VRMs I know for a fact there are a bunch of boards with more phases than this vrm like way more phases like some of them have like three times as many phases that are like out of phase with each other because they use doublers and aren't trying to save money on you know low-cost voltage controllers and getting rid of chips that cost less than half a dollar though admittedly once you spread that over the fact that Asus is dropping the the doublers off of their entire lineup it starts making sense that you know that's that's a pretty significant cost saving and basically like ultimately I think the the Asus claims to the great transient response like you'd really have to test this in the real world like you'd have to take this motherboard and compare it against a bunch of other motherboards with like the same CPU and try work all of the motherboards down to like like you'd have to have a ho Silla scope hooked up to it at the same time and just like compare the the output on every single one of the boards and just see which motherboard ultimately you know can run the lowest of all run the chip at the lowest voltage and I honestly don't I'm not sure that you would see a huge difference the the one thing I've noticed throughout testing a lot of motherboards is once you sort of like once you get a four phase and then go past like admittedly that was with like seventy seven hundred KS and and like eighty seven hundred KS once you had four phases you kinda were good enough for quite a lot of the higher current outputs but then the ninety nine hundred K pulls more power than any more current than anything before it so you know it might turn out that this this decided design decision by asus know in the real world is actually a fail like somebody would have to actually test it and just see like which of the existing motherboards can go down to the lowest voltage I have a hard time like I don't think this this big improvement in transient response in the real world will actually translate quite the advantage that these scope shots may make it look like it would so also it's like also the other thing is you have to consider that everybody like no as far as I'm aware I don't think anybody has a vrm that looks quite light like far as I'm aware a lot of these like the other Z 319 boards don't have a VR em that looks like this so yeah I mean I can like it's it's mostly a cost-saving thing it's a cost-saving thing because they they save on the $35.99 s the transient response you know they've improved that but I mean there there was ways to improve that without getting rid of the bloody doublers so it's just like I don't know you know you you need to test this in the real world efficiency wise it's not exactly groundbreaking and at the same time you know asus has some of the more aesthetic oriented heat sinks out there so yeah you know testing needed and actually for vrm thermals we already know for a fact that this is one of the hottest running motherboards in the $300 price category and I'm not surprised like this is like because the thing is like even within the same efficiency they just have the heat spread of cloths less components and that already hurts your vrm thermals so yeah I'm I'm not impressed I'm really not impressed with what Isis has done here then again Asus rarely manages to impress me with their VR M's most of the time because most of the time asus has an approach to the RM design that's very much a case of good enough right like they've had the same eight phase VR I am on their high-end desktop motherboards since x79 and I'd argue that 4 X 299 it's really not good enough but hey that didn't stop Isis from keep reusing it over and over and over and over and over again and I also don't think it's good enough for X 399 either but they used it there as well so yeah that's kind of that anyway let's cover some of the other stuff on this board since we do have just about enough time to do that so VC C IO vccs a and our located down here you have a clear CMOS and flashback on the rear i/o BIOS flash back on the rear i/o there the extra 4 pin power connector is a optional your 9900 K is going to be uncool Abul before you max out your single it--the in unless you deal it and like run liquid metal maybe send down the die you really will probably you know max out your cooling system before you max out the pin power connector you have a postcode up here you have some troubleshooting LEDs below that these are color-coded which I really really like because a lot of other board vendors what they'll do is they'll put them in the same color and then one of them lights up and it's like well I don't know which led it is because they're they occupy three you know like half a centimeter of space on the motherboard so it's really hard to tell which of the four LEDs lit up if it's not one of the one of the not one of the ones on the edges and they're all the same color when they're glowing you know you look at it and it's just like well I can't see anything the LED lit up and it's blinding me so it's nice that Asus color codes these because that makes it much easier to figure out which one which ones going off you have a power button reset switch to phase vrm from memory power this is a standard asus memory vrm they've been using it for years as well controlled by asus favorite asp well that's another one of those rebrands but ASP 1103 we've been seeing this chip for ages and ages and ages from Asus going down the board we also have a retry button down here and a memo case which I don't understand what this is supposed to achieve apparently it allows the board like it disables and enables the motherboards ability to retrain which seems really stupid because motherboards tend to get stuck in real like boot loops when you let them retrain forever I would have much preferred if they had kept like like if this either had a safe boot button or the old or the old memo ke button the old memo okay boss and want you what would what would it what it would do is if you would get bad memory settings you'd hit the memo okay button and it will load up it would basically wipe your memory settings and load up some really nice safe presets whereas this seems to just be kind of like train until it works and hope for the best which generally tends to be a terrible idea because boards tend to not like a lot of boards when they get stuck on training they're they're stuck on training they don't tend to ever figure out what's wrong so not a huge fan of that especially because the retry button will help like it gives you the retraining capability anyway like you can just use that and also that's like a hard reset button oh yeah board doesn't have dual BIOS because you know Isis doesn't doesn't do dual BIOS for a lot of they're cheaper boards which this isn't even cheaper but the thing is Asus really considers like for Intel motherboards and the z3 nine like Intel motherboards from Asus $300 price tag that Asus considers that mid-range which is why I you know there's they expect you to use this with like a 9700 K and the vrm kind of reflects that as far as I'm concerned because at least at 150 amps output it really like you know it's producing very little heat whatsoever so yeah that is the Maximus 11 hero it is a four phase it's four plus to an Asus might want to call it a twin eight phase but the fact of the matter is those phases aren't out it like there's only four signals out of phase with each other I don't know what other things could be out of phase here but there's only four of them you know that that's kind of the point of having phases that they're out of phase if you're gonna be shoving one PWM signal into two power stages they're not gonna be out of phase with each other you can't call them separate phases that's like if three phase power was made with one sine wave on three different wires and that's the sine wave was in phase with each other like that's basically what what they're saying like no it doesn't work like that so yeah that is it for the video for $300 I really think this is I mean you know I guess you get the Asus tax for Asus BIOS I guess because that's that's one of the things where ace is still absolutely dominates is probably the BIOS but you can learn a gigabyte BIOS you can't fix the VR hand right like you're not gonna be like you're not gonna be replacing the VR I'm on board you can also well you can tolerate asrock BIOS as far as I'm concerned like I don't have a problem learning it it's just janky as hell to use as far as I'm concerned so yeah that is it thank you for watching like share subscribe if you have any 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