Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unbox today we're checking out the vrm thermal formats of a few high-end z3 90 motherboards not this many I will eventually get through this many and many more but today we're just doing four we're looking at fairly high in boards from a sous asrock MSI and gigabyte they're all priced around $300 u.s. now before I jump into the test results let's just quickly go over each of these motherboards have a look at the cooling and then of course the very layout and design I'll start with the Taichi ultimate rabbit forever here it's quite a heavy board so this is as rocks most premium Zed 390 board currently costs 290 dollars u.s. and it offers some really neat features you've got ten gigabit networking so yeah some really cool stuff on board but of course we are here for the vrm covering the components are two slabs of aluminium with a few slots cut into them to help maximize surface area and capture a little more airflow you wouldn't want to rely on them too heavily so hopefully we have some higher quality components on board removing four spring-loaded screws the heat sinks come up and we find some pretty typical looking thermal pads what I'm more interested in though are those ten five by six millimeter power stages which make up the V chord v RM these are Texas Instruments ESD eighty seven thirty five zero power stage is rated for up to 40 amps but are 90% efficient at just 25 amps they're connected to an IR three five two zero one controller and eight phase-- controller though here just five phases are used each of then double using an IR three five nine eight phase double are the actual vehicle configuration looks like this here we have a combined peak current capacity of 400 amps or 250 amps at ninety percent efficiency and this is certainly far more than you need to run a kora 999 hundred K at five gigahertz for example so the azrog Zed 390 type cheat ultimate as a very salt looking board and I'm very keen to see how it performs but before we can do that we have three more boards that we need to check out and the next one I'll list is the msi z3 90 ace this is a 270 dollar US model and I believe it is the cheapest of the four boards we will be looking at in this roundup I've skipped over the msi godlike since it's well it's pretty stupid overkill it costs a small fortune and I suppose above all else it is a limited run deal so yeah a limited edition motherboard that then makes the ACE MSI's real flagship Zen 390 motherboard and well it's a pretty decent looking board the heatsink design is very similar to what we saw on the asrock board you get two slabs of aluminium that are connected using a heat pipe and then there's a few slots cut into them but yeah it's far from a finned heat sink the heat sinks are also attached via four screws though these ones aren't spring-loaded and you get the same kind of thermal pads underneath I should note though that the larger of the two heat sinks is almost completely encased in a plastic shroud which is used to cover the i/o headers on board we again find the ir35 2:01 controller and this time six phases have been dedicated to the vehicle each face is again split using an IR three five nine eight phase doubler giving the ACE a twelve phase vcore BRM unlike the godlike we don't have integrated power stages but rather separate high-low FETs for the higher side MOSFET we have the 4c 0 to 9 and and for the low side the 4c 0 to 4 n so for each phase we have one of each component these are on semiconductor MOSFETs the high sides rated for a current capacity of 46 amps and the low side 78 amps which I believe gives the phase a peak current capacity of 46 amps on paper that a should be a little bit better than the Taichi ultimate but of course we will have to go over the results in a moment and see what's what flowing out though we have another board to check out and it's probably the best-looking board of the bunch also by far the heaviest and it is the gigabyte horas Z 390 Master or I think it's actually the gigabyte Zed 390 or ass Master my rule about just 2 words it's getting abused a lot with these product notes but anyway gigabyte has been I suppose you could say down and out now for some time when it comes to there our hem game we sort of saw pretty ugly scene there with their be 450 boards their new ex 399 board wasn't bad but still not as good as we would have liked to have seen but I think they're about to change all that with their new range of Z 390 boards gigabytes entire range of Zed 390 motherboards looks really impressive and I will be testing out the cheaper models right down to the absolute cheapest model on the channel very soon today though we have the Zed 390 or s master a $290 us model that looks incredible this is a motherboard that impresses from top to bottom and the vrm is no exception nor is the vrm cooling actually let's start with the cooling at first glance I have to admit the board did did trigger me a little bit gigabyte has covered almost the entire heatsink or the larger heatsink in plastic and this really made my eye twitch when I first saw it they do seem to be using the plastic as a shroud to direct airflow or through over the heatsink which I suppose isn't bad I do question how well the heatsink behind the i/o panel works but ultimately the thermal results will speak for themselves so I can only be so critical at first glance oh the cooling doesn't really look that impressive in fact it looks quite unimpressive you get what appears to be two aluminium bricks with a few slots cut into them what we've seen on some other heat sinks and then they're connected via a heat pipe so what we're lacking here are some proper finned heat sinks however if we spin them around to the opposite side we do actually find that they're kind of like hybrid heat sinks we find some real finned heat sinks that are integrated into the backside of the aluminium slug airflow still looks as though it will be limited as the opposite side the side without the proper fins doesn't feature that many cut out so you can only flow so much air through this heat sink and of course the top of it is covered in plastic but anyway it is an interesting design this hybrid finned heat sink design so we'll have to see how it performs now removing the heat sinks is quite a large operation as the backside of the board features a massive absolutely massive heat spreader or backplate I suppose and it's not just there for show this thing does remove heat from the back side of the PCB using thermal pads under the verum components and it works incredibly well anyway with all the heat sinks removed to find another variant rolled by the ir35 2:01 and here we are taking six pwm signals from the controller for the vcore vrm those signals are then each doubled using an IR three five nine nine phase doubler creating twelve phases each of which is connected to an IR three five five three power stage these chips are rated for a maximum current output of 40 amps with a peak efficiency at around 15 amps but will deliver over 90% efficiency at 25 amps even at just 25 amps you're looking at a combined output of 300 amps so needless to say the gigabyte board has some serious Headroom built in okay so the last board we have on hand for testing and this sort of four-way high end battle is the isuzu ROG Maximus 11 hero and I actually had to buy this board as seuss weren't too keen on us getting one for testing so yeah I've just gone and bought one of course they might like being what it is of the four boards here this is the most expensive one in Australia not in the US it's the same price as the I think it's the as rock and Gigabyte boards but yeah it's five hundred and forty dollars Ozzie quite an expensive motherboard but thankfully we have a lot of loyal however a box patreon members and well they allow us to buy Hardware like this one we have two so big thank you to the patreon members for allowing us to buy the Maximus 11 hero for testing I really wanted to test this board out for a few reasons firstly it's the only high-end Zed 390 board to pack a four-phase VRM and boy oh boy did I cop some flak from the Isuzu fanboys it seemed when I pointed that out in a recent video actually it's not up for debate as to whether or not this is a four-phase board well it's not really up for debate because it is a four-phase board but if you argue with the Zeus fans you would be led to believe that maybe it's not a four-phase board so I guess it all comes down to what you class as an actual phase a sous called this a twin eight phase design there are four signals each going to a pair of power stages so it's then a doubling of components I suppose which is we've seen this before in short 28 phase is marketing BS again we've seen similar things in the past from gigabyte neighs rock and they have copped a serious amount of flack for it so I'm not sure how a soos is getting away with doing the exact same thing or at least how they think they'll get away with doing the exact same thing I'm sure a soos fans will wise up to what's going on here sooner or later as far as I can tell this is what the vcore verum looks like the ASP 1400 CTB controller is likely a rebadged ir35 2:03 or an IR 3 5 2 0 1 doesn't really matter as there isn't a second controller so at best you'd be looking at a six plus two phase configuration but because we have 10 power stages in total 8 for the via varium it's taking 4 PWM signals from the vehicle and 2 for the eye GPU each signal for the vcore is going to a pair of vishay si si 6 3 9 power stages each rated for a 50 amp maximum current capacity and at 90 percent efficiency around 25 amps these power stages are running in parallel so they do share the load but it's not quite clear how well load balancing works but we do know they are switched on more regularly than they would be in an eight phase-- configuration assuming the same frequency and therefore will generate more heat the main issue here is that a su is not being honest when they claim the hero as a 10 phase board using an 8 + 2 design it's a fad for phase and nothing more a soos aren't doing anything special here we've seen a doubling of components on many boards in the past the hero also seems to want to run in a 95 watt limited configuration even with the power limit removed will reduce the uncor ratio - times 43 rather than x 47 used by all the other boards I've tested the board with the default times 43 which I won't be showing the results for that because that's unfair to the other boards but I have tested that and it does reduce power consumption by a small amount and therefore it also reduces the vrm thermal build-up but for all the testing I will be forcing the cash or encore at 4.7 gigahertz rather than the default 4.3 gigahertz at the tries to runner anyway a soos has gone with a very basic heatsink setup which is comparable to what we saw on the asrock and msi boards so I'm very keen to see how this thing performs to apply load to the system I'm not using a power bug type program like prime95 for this test I want to choose a real-world application something you might actually run on these boards for an extended period of time so I went with a blender workload that takes the 99 Herrera and hour to complete so the load results are reported after an hour of running the blender workload and then the idle is taken after a 10-minute cooldown period there are two tests in total first we'll be looking at stock results so out of the box 9900 Kay performance without a 95 watt limit in place then a 5 gigahertz overclock using 1.3 volts both tests will be conducted twice once on an open-air test bed with no direct airflow over the vrm then we have a second test configuration inside the corsair 500 d with 3 120 millimeter intake fans in the front to 120 millimeter intake fans in the top and a single 120 millimeter exhaust fan in the rear so the top mounted fans are pushing airflow directly over the board's vrm heat sinks then calling the CPU is the corsair h 115 i pro which was mounted in the front of the case to record the temperatures i'm using a digital thermometer with k-type thermocouple x' i've placed multiple sensors on the surface of multiple power stages to measure the temperature across the VRM and i'll be reporting the highest value i'm also reporting the highest temperature i was able to record on the underside of the PCB for the MOSFETs this means I'm measuring the temperature directly on the top of the component between it and the thermal pad and not an internal temperature which is bound to be a little higher still with all boards tested under the exact same conditions that will give us a clearer picture of how the VRM temperatures compare and just finally I'm not reporting delta T over ambient instead I maintain a room temperature of between 21 and 22 degrees I have a thermocouple sitting next to the test system monitoring the room temperature and I have a special thing called climate control that maintains a target room temperature and thanks to the way my office is insulated and designed it works very well it's important that I'm actually able to test this way and not use delta T over ambient doesn't work too well when I am measuring performance as a high room-temperature will negatively impact performance today we are just focusing on temperatures so it's not such a big deal but when I was running these benchmarks or these thermal tests on these motherboards I was actually running benchmarks and performance benchmarks with applications and whatnot and I may show that data in a future content piece anyway we're already over 2000 words so I'd better get into the results first up we have these stock 99 hundred K results on an open air testbed with no direct airflow the Taichi ultimate provided the best result here cooling down to just 42 degrees 10 minutes after our hour-long stress test had ended the Auris master also did well dropping down to 43 degrees and the underside of the PCBs highest temperature recorded was just 39 degrees MSI's ace wasn't quite as good but certainly not bad and then we have the Maximus 11 hero which only cooled to 52 degrees making it the hottest of the bunch not a terrible result but it was 10 degrees hotter than the asrock board okay let's move on to see how things get under load so it appears as though the Auris master comes into its own under load here the VM peaked at just 53 degrees and in fact after just 20 minutes the temperature had maxed out and from there it maintained of the 53 degrees that you see reported here the Tai Chi ultimate also does very well pending 57 degrees now I have to say I was a little disappointed to see the MSI ace reaching over 60 degrees or just over 60 degrees immediately this is still a great result but it is a very big step back from what the godlike is capable of then we have the Maximus 11 hero which peaked at 70 degrees making it by far the hottest of all the board's tested that said this is still a very acceptable temperature given that there is no direct airflow over the board though having said that this is also a very cool room and remember we are measuring the surface temperature of the components and not the internal temperature which is bound to be at least 10 degrees hotter it's worth noting though that the asou and gigabyte boards do share the same price tag and yet the Auris master did run 17 degrees cooler under these test conditions moving on I threw the boards inside the corsair crystal 570 x and again the case was configured with a top mounted fan at blowing over the motherboard CPU socket area in other words it was feeding the verum heatsinks with cool air I'd say this is very much a best-case scenario and no pun intended and what we have here is a well ventilated case that I'm not saying the 570 X is a high airflow case but with the fan configuration used here there is no shortage of cool air couple that with the reasonably low ambient air temperature and we have the perfect environment for a motherboard and it's a vrm at idle all boards ran well under 40 degrees and remember these results are reported ten minutes after the hour long stress test interestingly the underside of the tight she remained quite a bit hotter than the topside and this wasn't an issue seen on the other boards moving on under load the Taichi again gets quite hot on the underside of the PCB and in fact quite shockingly I measured the same temperature on the underside of the board as I did directly on top of the hottest power stage the underside of the Maximus 11 here I was much cooler despite similar verum component temperatures still with plenty of airflow the assess board ran at a reasonable temperature though it was gigabyte who delivered the goods running an impressive 11 degrees cooler so good stuff there but I think it's now time to do some overclocking okay so out idle on an open testbed with the 1900 over clock to 5 gigahertz we see very similar attempts to these stock results and that well that makes sense we're really only adding a little bit more voltage at this point that said the Taichi is now hotter on the underside of the PCB which is something we saw previously in the load testing but not the idle test still with the exception of the Maximus 11 hero all boards seem to operate between 43 and 45 degrees so let's see how these boards handled after an hour long blender stress test doing so didn't actually raise the temperatures that much from the stock results we see an increase of about 5 to 7 degrees the Gigabyte Norris board saw a 5 degree increase while the MSI and Asus boards increased by 7 degrees so nothing really alarming here that said though these results don't tell the full story at least for the asou sport again the gigabyte MSI and asrock boards all peaked after 20 to 30 minutes and beyond that point they were able to maintain the temperatures you see reported here the Maximus 11 hero it reached 70 degrees at about the 40 minute mark and by the end of the test was at 77 degrees however it was continuing to slowly increase in temperature the ambient temp remain the same but ever so slowly the vrm was getting hotter and hotter so I went back and retested again and after three hours it hit 84 degrees and I believe at that point it had stopped increasing in temperature but this will require even further testing but of course all this testing does suck up a lot of time for reference I also rechecked the asrock Z 390 Tai Chi ultimate and after two hours it was still reporting these same 66 degree peak temperature so thermal build-up doesn't appear to be an issue for these other boards so that means if you plan on placing your 9900 k under full load for very long periods of time this is something to be aware of in that case I highly recommend the Gigabyte horas master also keep in mind this isn't necessarily a worst-case scenario for the V RMS they could certainly face much more abuse in a poorly ventilated case or a hotter climate or god forbid both moving on to what I can see that a best-case scenario inside the crystal 570 X we say after 10 minutes of idle all four boards are nice and cool the surface temperature of the components on the tire actually the coolest while the underside of the PCB is the warmest the underside of the hero is also quite warm as is the surface of the components at least relative to the other boards then once again we find all four boards perform very well inside the crystal 570 X with plenty of direct airflow of course the Gigabyte Zed 390 or s master is an incredible standout here and after what we've seen in the previous verum tests looking at X 399 and B 450 motherboards this is a really surprising result for gigabyte it has to be said on the other side of that though it is an equally surprising result for a soos it seems a soos and gigabyte have traded places ok so some interesting results and overall no real duds amongst these 4 motherboards some models were certainly better than others and just to clarify by dad I mean there were no you know alarmingly high temperatures or failures of any kind previously when testing B 450 motherboards we the flagship gigabyte and a soos models hid unacceptably high temperatures while the as rock and MSI boards did very well and then with the x3 99 boards a soos and msi did very well while gigabyte and asrock didn't do quite as well at least when overclocking the 32 core months that is the twenty nine ninety WX and for that test that was actually our extreme stress test so we were using a bit more voltage than necessary but that's kind of the point of an extreme stress test I wasn't actually able to conduct an extreme stress test with the core I $9.99 or okay and I simply couldn't keep it cool I'd have to delete the thing a file down the silicon and bring an even bigger open-loop cooler not exactly out of the box testing that so what have we learned we've learned that the isuzu ROG Maximus 11 hero is beyond a shadow of a doubt a four phase motherboard a fat four phase motherboard but a four phase mother bought all the same it works well enough but is without question inferior to all competing boards of a similar price and I suspect a number of boards that are even cheaper will be better namely those from gigabyte I'm also aware of other media outlets and even some pro overclockers who have managed impressive over clocks with the Maximus 11 hero but make no mistake there are better options out there and all of them are easier to overclock with getting the Maximus 11 hero stable at 5.1 gigahertz with my sample was seriously difficult and actually required more voltage than the other boards that I've tested the use of a four phase verum means poorer voltage regulation more ripple and hotter operating components compared to what we've seen on the 10 and 12 phase boards tested here it's actually pretty hard to believe you're getting this vrm for the same price as this vrm but that's the situation when comparing their sous and gigabyte Zed 390 motherboards I should just note that if you are gaming and not placing all that cause under a full load for extended periods of time then honestly all this doesn't matter too much any one of these boards will get the job done and should live a long and happy life that said if you're placing all that cause under full load for hours on end and you're doing so on a rig your basis then I'd simply avoid the Maximus 11 hero but most of you though I suspect it's fine still having said that if you're willing to spend almost $300 us on a motherboard there are at least three much higher quality much better options in my opinion and none of them lie about their varium phase count if a sous just came out and said the Maximus 11 hero is a doubled up for phase board and they think that's better for X reasons I wouldn't really have an issue with that but lying to their customers and their fans just isn't cool and while it seems well seems quite evident that some are soos fanboys I might defend them no matter what this is still a four phase motherboard no it's a it's a twin a phase you gigabyte as rock and/or MSI shell anyway enough about the Maximus 11 hero it is what it is it's not a terrible board it's just probably not worthy of the asking price at least in my opinion personally I would be getting the gigabyte master such a heavy motherboard and yeah before you seriously go and try to call me a gigabyte shill down the comment section below just sit down and relax maybe watch some of our previous motherboard videos before passing that judgment and if you can't be bothered watching our previous videos and you just want to go ahead and drop a comment saying we're this the absolute worst shields and fraudulent people on worse for I don't know whatever you guys come up with something negative you should just probably know that in a very recent content piece we did name at the asou ROG X 3 9 zenith Extreme as one of the best of the best original x3 99 motherboard and said that it's still one of the absolute best alongside the MSI Meg x3 energy and creation and I should note that a soos didn't provide us with that sample either if you care about overclocking and erm performance then I highly recommend you check out the gigabyte Zed 390 or ass master really amazing board that one I'm I'm just quite stunned by how well it performed given our last few VRM tests the asrock said 390 Taichi ultimate that's another very solid board really nice board that one and it would be my number one pick if you wanted to use the 10 Gigabit Ethernet because obviously that makes it a really really good value board then we have the MSI z3 90 ace yeah that's another solid offering it's a little cheaper than the other three boards but not by Anik significant margin I think it's about $20 a US didn't really stand out to me as being really special in any one area and to be asked I was hoping it would be a little more godlike and then it turned out to be our next up I'll probably test out the cheapest Zed 390 boards by looking at the MSI Zed 390 a pro yep that's it there yet the Zed 390 a pro that is correct I wasn't sure if pro was meant to be on the end so I've got this board obviously on hand already I have the obvious drag it over here it's off to the side the asrock said 390 pro 4 another pro board for the entry-level I would also like to take a look at the gigabyte Zed 390 UD there's quite a few boards up here still out of shot so I'll be testing that one as well and then I will most likely have to purchase the asou said three 90p I believe that is the cheapest seuss board but yeah I have to buy that one so I've got the other three boards which I can start testing now or order via seuss board early next week get that on hand and you know that's another one we can thank the patreon members for for supporting the channel and allowing us to buy hardware to test and that is going to do it for this one I hope you guys enjoyed verum testing of a thermal testing rather of these four motherboards some interesting results like I said no real duds but certainly some boards were better than others if you liked the video you know what to do subscribe for more content if you would like to see more videos just like this and if you appreciate the retro hara boxed and want to support the channel more directly and allow us to do things like buy motherboards then consider signing up to our patreon account you'll also gain access to our private discord chat where you can chat and you also get access to a monthly live show where you can listen a team and I chat and chat in the live chat so just a whole lot of chatting if you become a patreon member thank you for watching I'm your host Eve see you next time