Gadgetory

on the screen now is a list of current and relevant chipsets for our audience this is primarily to establish the point of view of why we need to clarify what each of these provides there are a lot of chipsets with similar names now with different socket types and similar features so we're here to define first of all what a chipset is in TLDR fashion with a later piece to explain the actual chipset differences one by one before that this video is brought to you by Thermal Grizzlies high-end thermal paste and liquid metal Thermal Grizzlies cryo knot is an affordable high-quality thermal compound that doesn't face some of the aging limitations of other pastes on the market cryo not has a thermal conductivity of 12.5 watts per meter Kelvin focuses on endurance is easy to spread and isn't electrically conductive making it safe to use on GPU dies thermal grizzly also makes conductor not liquid metal which we've used to drop 20 degrees off some temperatures than our dee-lighted test by a tube at the link in the description below as for what a chipset actually is it's basically a glorified i/o controller and this is calling back to a GN article from 2012 but basically we described it then as the CPU of being sort of a disembodied brain and the chips at being a spinal cord the chips that carries all of the i/o on a modern computer they used to be split into multiple parts will go over momentarily Intel calls its chipset a PCH or platform controller hub while AMD goes with the more generic and definitely correct term of chipset so easy to tell them apart they are functionally the same they just have different acronyms or names in the case of Intel the chipset is the center of i/o for the rest of the motherboard it's responsible for assigning IO lanes the devices like SATA to general-purpose PCIe devices Gigabit Ethernet and two USB ports both Andy and Intel unified the old Northbridge and Southbridge into a single chipset the Northbridge was previously responsible for communicating with PCIe and memory and the Southbridge communicated with SATA and ide usb firmware chips PCI legacy devices and audio and about half of those are legacy devices now so legacy legacy devices these days all of these devices talk to either the CPU or the you by chipset also different in modern times the memory controller has now been moved to the CPU becoming an integrated memory controller for both AMD and Intel Intel's IMC and AMD's SOC system-on-chip determine whether memory slots can operate in dual channel or quad channel configurations control the memory clocks and manage DRAM refresh as writing and reading operations and have some security features related to memory a modern chipset looks more like this is e 370 block diagram from Intel Intel connects its chipset to the CPU via and interconnects called EMI or direct media interface which was most recently revised in 2015 to use for PCIe lanes connecting the CPU to the chipset directly this can become a limiting factor in some extreme i/o scenarios like those were multiple nvme raid SSDs might exist in a system if you look carefully at the diagram you'll notice that GPUs are able to bypass DMI and the chipset both as the CPU hosts its own PCIe lanes that are assignable to graphics devices in this example we have 16 PCIe lanes and total available from the CPU we can highlight the left side of the outputs from the z 370 chipset again connected via DMI it's to get a better idea of other i/o these are all for i/o devices in this scenario we have 24 pcie 3.0 lanes 6 SATA 6 gigabits per second ports options for dozens of USB ports and integrated mac and gigabit ethernet connected via an sm bus and PCIe by one all these devices are known as high-speed i/o devices and they use HS io lanes as intel calls them but it's the same idea on AMD just last branded for Intel chipsets motherboard makers get a fixed number of HS io lanes that they can pull from the chipset and assigned to different devices same idea again with AMD just different naming for those lanes the motherboard makers can decide how to assign lanes to some extent on both and the end Intel platforms and when decided to do that for instance one motherboard maker might decide to allocate more lanes to SATA or more to something like USB fewer to USB or a PCIe slots and so forth as for graphics and PCIe off the chipset this is a common point of confusion for people with Intel starting off it's impossible to peel off more than four lanes for a PCIe slot from the chipset so all of those PCIe graphics slots typically are coming from the CPU and then technically you could pull some of the PCIe lanes from the chipset to fuel more PCIe slots like in some of the mining motherboards for example where they just have a bunch of by one or by four slots the thing is with multi-gpu like with SLI and Vidya mandates a by eight minimum for SLI to work so if you only have four coming off the chipset for a graphics device it's not going to work with SLI in gaming it worked fine for use cases where you don't need sli you just need a lot of GPUs again mining being irrelevant an easy example for that so the most you get out of the chipset for graphics is four lanes but the CPU has its own lanes that communicate directly with the graphics devices and they bypass DMI DMI again being four lanes going to the chipset so you're gonna bottleneck there no matter what anyway in intense IO scenarios as for the rest is e 370 comes with 30 HS io lanes just as a quick example with 24 that are assigned to PCIe USB SATA and other devices like Gigabit Ethernet 14 lanes are assignable by the motherboard manufacturer they're more or less generic lanes that the motherboard maker can decide what to do with and note that Intel PCIe chipset lanes again can't be assigned and greater than by 4 to any device so that's always going to be your limitation a manufacturer couldn't pull eight PCIe lanes from the chipset again to make that very clear because it is a common point of confusion back to our diagram Intel also uses SPI over the serial peripheral interface bus to bridge the chipset and firmware trusted platform modules and XTU whenever you flash bios with a new version that's communicated down SPI and into the physical firmware chip finally on the right side of the Intel chipset diagram we see additional IO support for raid and Intel Rapid Storage Technology or rst you'll notice that memory doesn't directly communicate with the chipset instead because modern CPUs use integrated memory controllers or IMC's the memory has a direct line to the CPU just like the primary GPU does this is much faster and eliminates painful latency that would be encountered otherwise AMD's modern Rison chipsets aren't too different from Intel's the functionality and objective remain the same although the specific implementation is a little bit different and these X 370 chipset block diagram looks like this one will highlight the blocks and interconnects as we go just like we did with the Intel one the CPU still hosts its own pcie 3.0 lines for direct GPU communication just like Intel's configuration but Rison has more PCIe lanes on the CPU we have a total of 16 lanes for pcie 3.0 graphics devices 4 lanes for nvme m dot 2 devices and 4 lanes that the user can never directly use because those communicate with the chipset like Intel the CPU has an integrated memory controller of its own or system-on-chip more appropriately for AMD and that allows a direct line to the memory from the cpu desktop horizon supports dual channel configurations for memory whereas thread reverse supports quad channel configurations for the chipset AMD allows some motherboard manufacturer of flexibility here just like the z 370 chipset by giving assignable lanes that can be switched around to other devices if a motherboard maker is building a smaller board or wants to down cost the board they can also remove some devices those lanes would just be left unused the chipset can support up to 8 pcie 2.0 6 SATA 6 gigabits per second with raid support 2 USB 3.1 gen2 6 USB 3.1 gen2 1 and 6 USB 2.0 separately note that all of andy's current rise and chipsets allow overclocking whereas Intel's overclocking is feature locked to the Z series and x-series will leave you with the most common chipset differences and an explanation of naming schemes Intel's names include q bh z and x chipset prefixes without getting into all of the details Q and B boards were originally meant for business though B has been assimilated by gaming boards H was meant as an affordable mainstream board with an H 10 H blank 10 so H 3 10 H 2 10 and an H 3 7 th 270 and so forth board option Z chipsets are the performance series and primarily differ and unlocked over login support X chipsets are incomparable to these and support gdt or high-end desktop CPUs like the 79 80 XE 18 core CPU and these chipset names primarily include a B and X prefixes and these B series and x-series chipsets are officially unlocked for overclocking and primarily differ in price B Series boards tend to be a bit cheaper and X series boards tend to be more focused on overclocking but that's not always a hard and fast rule you need to check each individual board as for the real differences again without getting into really the heavy details on these for this video it's mainly the HS i/o lanes and the amount of them specifically on the Intel chipsets and a bit on the AMD ones so as you look at B versus H versus Z there'll be some differences especially depending on generation of processor where one might have 24 lanes one might have 30 or something like that and those lanes again it's not PCIe necessarily it's just general purpose lanes can be assigned to lots of i/o devices so whether or not that matters to you depends on how much I owe you need the other main dividing feature is going to be overclocking for Intel on the Z series and the X series being somewhat of a shoot-off where it's just high-end desktop and of course is unlocked for overclocking and these supports unlocked overclocking on both of its mainstream and top and chip sets which would be the B series and the X series and if anyone's getting confused here note that in tante they both have B series chipsets they both will have Z series chipsets as they and these pushing one soon and they also both have X series chipsets so they are completely incompatible of course you wouldn't be able to put an Intel processor into an AMD CPU so if you're asking if if this is like brand new never built a computer before question and you're asking what's the difference between B 360 and be 350 difference is one supports Intel and the other one supports AMD so obviously beyond that the differences don't matter a whole lot I just pick the one that fits the CPU first figure out the rest later and then finally another important note here is that the chipset does not mean anything with regard to board quality it might be kind of a toggle between overclocking or not but beyond that you don't know if the board actually overclock swell just because it's a z series board there are plenty of Z and even x3 seventy boards that look the part or even priced the part but have awful VRMs and other components that would assist with overclocking they might be lacking a clock gen for instance on some AMD boards so it's a lot more than just the chipset if you're trying to buy something for specific purposes obviously look at the whole picture we publish vrm analysis videos as do other people like builds ide who works on them for us and those BRM analysis videos will help you figure out the rest of it beyond just the chipset difference and again this is kind of a really beginner level thing but a lot of people will just go towards the Z series or the X series boards simply because it seems like well they're the best technically they are the most feature filled chipsets or should at least carry that appearance but again doesn't really mean a whole lot beyond that it depends on the individual board the motherboard makers still have a lot of control over their boards boards impact performance really heavily and it's a common misconception that they don't so be careful about what you're choosing and of course make sure the memory support is fitting for the memory you're choosing and that's a different topic for another video so that's it for now last major thing to clarify PCIe graphics lanes primarily come off of the CPUs so kind of one over that a few times but just to really make it clear because a lot of people ask that one our asked yen series so that's it for this one is always subscribed for more go to patreon.com/scishow and exit stops out directly go to stored on cameras nexus net to pick up one of our anti-static mod mats they are available now and shipping as they are ordered so if you're building a new computer and watching this because of that maybe our mod mag can help you out thanks for watching I'll see you all next time