Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed now recently I checked out the vrm design and thermal performance of our number of high ends in 390 motherboards or priced around $300 us now of the bunch the gigabyte is at 390 horas Master impressed me the most as Rox said 390 Taichi ultimate was also quite good MSI's meg z2 390 ace that was a little bit lackluster still a good board but didn't impress me as much as I thought having come from the godlike and then we had the Oh Suze ROG Maximus 11 hero which also disappointed me a bit based on the results seen from previous assumed other wards the Maximus 11 hero was the worst performer of that comparison the thermals weren't horrible but the well given the price I suppose the performance was quite disappointing and then there was the whole issue with is it an eight phase-- or is it a four phase motherboard turns out it is a four phase with double components so still quite a powerful vrm though because of the design it did run a bit hotter than expected seuss have their reasons for why they've gone with that particular design they believe it is better so that's something we have to dig into in the future but yeah that's that at the moment a sous have said it was a mistake that it was advertised as an 8 + 2 + 2 phase vrm in the US that was a mistake by the US marketing team so they're now rectifying that and once they do hopefully I can get an official statement for them and I'll pin that on the previous video and that will hopefully put it into that issue and hopefully we don't see any twin 8 phase marketing BS from a sous in the future anyway with the mystery of the twin 8 phase erm mostly solved we can move on to some more testing and I do plan to test pretty much every single Zed 3 and on your motherboard at least every single one I can get my hands on a few of you have requested we test out the EVGA models unfortunately we don't really get EVGA here in Australia and despite the fact that about 40% of our viewership do come from the u.s. EVGA don't seem that interested in sampling us so maybe we can convince them in the future but as of now or for now we've only got the four main brands that we're going to be checking out so on hand we have the asrock zed 390 pro 4 this is a 130 dollar US model and I have taken all their heat sinks off the boards and have them putting them back or haven't put them back for this part of the video so you're seeing the boards mostly naked doesn't really matter I suppose next up we have actually will go to where we got the MSI board let's go with that as next because that's also $130 u.s. so I'll do them in order of price actually I'm not doing them in order a price scrap that anyway but the msi board next said 390 pro note said 390 a pro that's that board $130 then we got the cheaper sport here the gigabyte Zed 390 UD looks to be one of the better boards of the bunch again no heat sinks on it but yeah 120 dollars seems like a pretty good buy that $120 and then the most expensive of them all the asou prime Z 390 P now a sous well this is an entry-level board they don't seem to do entry-level pricing quite like the other three brands and therefore this is a 150 dollar US motherboard so quite expensive for what it is but we'll get to the results in a moment now you might be thinking who's gonna pair a sub $150 u.s. motherboard with a $500 plus us core I know and processor and well that's fair enough I'd say anyone buying or at least trying to buy a brand-new 1900 K processor today isn't going to pair it with a board price south of $200 u.s. however what if you've only got the budget for a core i5 r i3 processor today an affordable Zed 390 board with basic features seems like a reasonable solution and it should mean in a year or two you can pick up a 90 under okay on the sale or secondhand and slot that into your existing is that 390 motherboard this is a fairly common scenario people buy what they can afford now in the hope that they can max it out and upgrade in the future without having to upgrade their entire system after all the four entry-level motherboards that we're looking at today all officially support the 99er okay so it's not unreasonable to expect that some users might eventually end up using this processor on one of these motherboards question is how well do they support the power-hungry eight core processor before we get to the results let's just quickly go over each board starting with the gigabyte Zed 390 UD this board uses the ISL six nine one three eight controller and from it five pwm signals are outputted for the vcore these signals are then each doubled using the ISL six six one seven phase doubler giving us ten phases for the high side MOSFETs we have on semiconductors for C ten N and on the low side for C 0 6 n cooling the board's vrm are a pair of reasonably large anodized black aluminum heat sinks that properly finned but they aren't just aluminium blocks either and both are secured to the PCB using plastic push pin clips next up we have the asrock z3 90 pro 4 and this board uses the up9 5 to 1p phase controller though this time we have just four pwo signals for the vcore though each is again doubled this time using U P 1961 s phase SS giving us eight phases in total as for the MOSFETs on the high side we have so no power SM 4337 and on the low side SM 43:36 so not a bad configuration for a budget board though you do still need to cool at nazarov seems to have forgotten that little factors they've stuck on these smallest heatsink you're likely ever to find on his m390 motherboard I reckon the Intel IHS would have done a better job of calling these MOSFETs the heatsink weighs in at just 24 grams and that's pretty pathetic considering gigabyte swacked 108 grams worth of heatsink on their entry levels at 390 board next up we have their sous Prime at 0 90 P and things don't look that much better here sure we've got some heat sinks both much bigger and combined tip the scales at 57 grams but the vrm design itself is it's pretty rubbish as usual as sousou's using their rebranded asp 1,400 c TB controller and as usual at least for the majority of their said 390 range they're taking just four PWM signals and they aren't doubling them so then we have a four phase with a doubling of components like gigabyte they are using on semiconductors 4 C 10 n for the higher side and therefore C 0 6 and for the low side there's just less of them in total and not even half as many phases given that this is by far the most expensive of the entry-level boards just say that I'm disappointed with what Asus are offering here doesn't really cut it anyway lucky last we have the MSI z3 9 ta Prohm this is a pretty nice looking board on the surface we get a nice big heat sink over the V chord vrm this monster weighs you know 170 grams so it is the biggest heatsink of all the entry levels at 390 motherboards that said the vrm itself isn't super impressive like asrock msi is using the U P 9521 P phase controller and they are also taking just four PWM signals however unlike asrock they aren't doubling them so this is another for phase V core vrm on the high side we have a pair of SM 4337 FETs on the low side two sm 4503 FETs so it'll be interesting to see how this motherboard performs ok so that's how the boards compare on paper I'm just quickly before we get into the results if you would like to know exactly how I've tested these boards in each configuration please watch the previous video in this series I'll provide a link in the video description it'll probably be a timestamp to where I actually explain how I test on the testbed and inside the case but I won't go over all that here like I said I'll just put the link as it takes me quite a few minutes to get through all that so we'll skip that and we'll get straight into the results so again if you want to know about that check the link in the video description ok so here are these stock 9900 k results with the board's installed inside the Corsair crystal 570 X with plenty of fans and direct airflow over the vrm all testing has been conducted with an ambient air temperature between 21 and 22 degrees thermals have been measured using k-type thermocouple ZAR measuring the MOSFET surface temperature labeled as top as well as the underside of the PCB and please note the internal mosfet temperatures are at least 10 degrees higher usually around 20 degrees higher so there is quite a difference there however we don't use the readouts from stuff like hardware info because well some of these boards give you that information and it's not always accurate there's offsets and things like that so it's not a great way of comparing motherboards anyway keeping the internal temperature in mind which will be higher you really want to keep the surface temperature below 80 to 85 degrees as that would mean an internal temperature around 100 degrees these components are usually rated to handle up to 125 degrees but that's the thermal cutoff and you'll want to stay well away from that efficiency is also very poor at those temperatures you're basically killing the components and well degradation is rapidly accelerated please note there are two test configurations for the gigabyte is Ed 390 UD as this board seems to over volt the 1900 K quite badly with the current f3 bias that we use for testing despite being the best board on paper with what looks to be the best or close to the best cooling and actually provided the worst results however during the test I noticed the 99 okay was being fed one point three eight volts which is far too much even for a 5 gigahertz all core overclock I have notified gigabyte of this issue and in the meantime I've set the voltage at one point to 6 volts to match the Isuzu Prime the M result though under load was about 1.2 to 5 volts the MSI asrock boards ran between one point two eight and one point two eight eight volts which is a bit higher but that's what they do on auto anyway we should probably just discuss the results so the lowest peak MOSFET surface temperature was recorded on the MSI Zed 390 a pro and just 52 degrees that said the back side of the PCB hits 75 degrees which is certainly getting up there the reason for the huge variation is due to the fact that MSI boards have a massive heatsink that does a really good job of removing heat from the surface of the FETs especially when there's plenty of airflow to capture however because the MSI board only uses a four phase veeram the components do generate quite a bit of heat and that's absorbed through the PCB and then isn't dissipated very well and therefore builds up to around 75 degrees the result you see here now the gigabyte Z 390 UD dropped an incredible 20 degrees when running the 1900 K at one point two to five volts opposed to the one point three eight volts and this 11 percent reduction in voltage has a profound impact on how hot the very gets so while the gigabyte board is a poor performer right now they should be able to address this with a future BIOS and that will make it one of the best although the MOSFET surface temperature was 9 degrees hotter than what we saw in the MSI board the pc temperature was 11 degrees cooler and that is very significant the asustor primes at 390 P does reasonably well in this test with MOSFET surface temperatures climbing just a few degrees higher than the gigabyte model though the PCB temperature was 10 degrees hotter then we have the asrock Zed 390 pro 4 which quite frankly sucked the vrm design as we saw earlier isn't bad but the tiny little 24 gram heatsink is a complete joke we're seeing surface temperatures around 80 degrees and although this board it doesn't report vrm temperatures I suspect the internal temperature is up around 100 degrees so that's basically a fail in my book we've got a stock 99 Enrique in a well ventilated case in a cool room and the vrm temp using k-type thermocouple is reaching 80 degrees the results you see here are reported after the load test I give the board's 10 minutes to cool down and then I report the current temperature the MSI Zed 390 a pro cools down the best likely thanks to its massive heatsink and we also saw the PC temps came right down as well then with a bit of voltage tuning we set the gigabyte board also comes down to a similar temperature to that of their sous and as ROC models that said stock using the f3 bias had only cooled down to around 40 degrees okay here are the test bench results with no direct airflow and you might be wondering what all those red bars are about basically these indicate invalid results the MSI asrock and our sous boards all suffered varam throttling which down clocked the 1900 K from 4.7 gigahertz to around 4.2 gigahertz the Isuzu Prime's ed 390 P began throttling after 6 minutes at which point it had already reached a MOSFET surface temperature of 100 degrees the asrock said 390 pro war began throttling after seven minutes when the surface temperature reached 90 degrees and the MSI's ed 390 a pro throttled after eight minutes hitting just 67 degrees for the surface temperature I left the boards all running for the hour-long test but because we were verum throttling these boards didn't get that much hotter though they did continue to run at dangerously hot temper now the gigabyte Zed 390 UD using either the optimized voltage settings or the auto voltage configuration did manage to avoid erm throttling that said it probably should have throttled as the 1.38 volt configuration got insanely hot with a MOSFET surface temperature of just over 100 degrees even with the optimized voltage we're still seeing a surface temperature of eighty degrees which is around a hundred degrees for the internal temperature so really all boards technically failed here as the surface temperatures were just getting too high that said the gigabyte Zed 390 UD is right on the edge and since it didn't throttle and it maintained this surface temperature after the hour long stress test whereas the MSI asrock and a sous boards would have all gone up in smoke I'll give gigabyte a pass on this one ten minutes after running the hour-long load test these are the temperatures we were faced with gigabyte didn't cool down that well though the results are still decent the big heat sink on the MSI Z 390 a pro saw a cool down the most rapidly on the open air test bench while the asrock and a sous boards also did quite well despite the fact that it was really only the gigabyte board that didn't fail this test miserably normally I also provide a series of overclocking results but given the stock performance I wasn't expecting much from these entry-level boards with the 99er ok at 5 gigahertz as expected the sous asrock and msi boards all failed this test they are the suffered verum throttling issues almost right away or they crashed completely giving us the blue screen of death the asrock and the swords couldn't maintain the 1.3 volt 5 gigahertz overclock and would crash while the msi board quickly overheated the gigabyte Zed 390 UD did technically pass this test without any verum throttling at all but again with MOSFET surface temperatures of around 80 degrees it's a questionable pass for comparison I have included some higher-end Zed 390 boards that I've already tested and as you can see there is quite an extreme difference in the vrm quality and idle the gigabyte board did cool down nicely and here it is comparable to the Maximus 11 hero then just to see if I could get the gigabyte z3 9 AUD to verum throttle I tested it on the open air test bed and let it cook surf temperatures hit 101 degrees and highway info was reporting a very intemperate of 126 degrees and yet the board never throttled within 9900 K obviously that's a fail and even the Maximus 11 hero is borderline too hot in this test as the internal MOSFET temperatures and knocking on the door of 100 degrees impressively even with no airflow the Gigabyte said three Niner UD did cool down to a reasonable temperature after 10 minutes of course it failed the load test but it's good to see when placed under extreme load that it's still able to cool down quite quickly well I think I think it's fair to say that the entry level is at 390 motherboards or a bit of a scam I know that's a harsh way of putting it but I can't for the life of me understand what the point of these motherboards is the gigabyte ones reasonable but the rest of them yeah I don't get what the point is in my mind the entire point of the Zed 390 was to signify or show that motherboards donning this particular chipset were locked and loaded ready for the 1900 if we look at previous Zed 370 models we see that the bulk of them the lower end models from MSI gigabyte of Zeus asrock they all featured for phase V RMS and most of them will really struggle have actually done some testing and found they really struggle with the fully unleashed 9900 K which is the out of the box and not the 95 watt TDP limited power limited setup that we have actually tested on the channel anyway and we could take gigabytes range for example of the 370 boards the Auris gaming seven that's probably the only board that should be ok for long-term use rendering and whatnot with the 900k everything else is really going to struggle and yes certainly wouldn't be an ideal solution for the new 8 core processor so we already have low-end affordable 370 motherboards we don't need low-end affordable Zed 390 motherboards that's not the bloody point of the Zed 390 chipset now I didn't mean to have this motherboard there I actually did I got this board by mistake I was taking a look at this born as well but I can make the comparison that I was going to make anyway so here is the actual MSI board that I've been meaning to talk about or video but I've been pointing at these air 370 board but this Zed 390 model has the exact same erm so this is the board we tested in the video here's the older version we've got the same for phase V RM this one has a few extra chokes and a bigger heatsink and for that you pay $10 more possibly worth paying $10 more I don't know not really the point because neither of these boards are really capable of taking full advantage of the ninety nine hundred K and well yeah I suppose those buying a night star okay now looking at buying of these boards but as I said earlier video make it a year down the track you've bought this board to use a core i3 or a Core i5 and now you want to upgrade and you 10th generation Intel stuff probably won't be compatible with this platform so your only option would be to get a 19-hour okay and unfortunately doing that it's going to put the board under a lot of stress and not get the most out of the 1900 those boards don't need to exist because you can spend well a Susa so hide it you can spend about I think it's only about $40 more 40 to $50 more and you get a board that's super capable from the gigabyte range got doublers and all that good cooling works really well really high-quality ISL chips in fact it is only gigabyte who took this opportunity to update their Zed 370 arranged with a fresh new lineup of 390 boards now you could argue that well they were in most need of an upgrade their Zed 370 boards weren't particularly good but it is great to see them correcting that previous mistake with a stellar range of 390 motherboards that said even gigabytes entry-level board and while their entire entry level line up everything priced below 170 dollars us is kind of a make-do situation with the 9900 K so the vrm seen on this board is then copy and paste it on to their more expensive $140 and gaming X and M gaming models as well as the 150 dollar gaming SLI so it's not until you pony up 100 and $70 us for the Auris elite that you're really getting a high quality vrm that's more than capable of tackling the 99 rek so i think it's time to face facts tim has a lego addiction and entry levels head 390 motherboards just shouldn't exist and on that note I am gonna end this one if you did enjoy the video be sure to the like button subscribe for more content and if you appreciate the work during our box then consider supporting us on patreon that enables us to buy motherboards such as this one for testing so very helpful and much appreciated anyway thank you for watching I'm your host Steve and I will see you again next time