Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed now ages ago MSI and gigabyte mailed over there refresh x2 900 motherboards design take advantage of the sky like X refresh I suppose although the hype around that series died down faster than a modern triple-a title anyway quite some time ago now I got the MSI Meg X $2.99 creation this rather big heavy motherboard here I got that along with where is it it's this one here the gigabyte X $2.99 horas master and that's also a big heavy motherboard anyway I got these i unbox them in our unboxing boxes series and at the time a good many of you requested that I do some vrm testing and well me being the excellent host that I am it only took around 4 months to make it happen anyway in the meantime a soos also sent over their new X 299 refresh board the X 299 deluxe 2 so I've added that to our three wave erm thermal test battle yeah that can be the the title of the video anyway let's check the boards out shall we the new msi Meg X 299 Croatian is the most expensive x-29 motherboard to be featured in this video priced at $600 u.s. it is mighty expensive and it's certainly the most pricey x 299 bought msi offers that said gigabyte and a sous do have more expensive models but we won't be looking at those in this video we'll get to those boards in a moment I did introduce them already but yeah they do have more expensive motherboards this isn't the most extreme most expensive X 299 motherboard out there but it's certainly one of the most extreme for now let's just quickly go over what the creation has to offer included on board is a beefy 13 plus one phase VRM though please note it's a 12 phase of vcore vrm also included is 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet along with a gigabit port plenty of USB 2.0 ports Wi-Fi module four PCI a x 16 slots 3 m dot 2 slots with cooling plus an expander card support 4m2 drives and a thunderbolt card providing Thunderbolt 3 40 gigabits per second ports that provide up to DisplayPort 1.2 so in terms of features it's pretty well got everything but for those of you throwing in an 18 core core i9 79 80 HZ or 99 ATX see how well does the verum handle overclocking and does it keep its cool under heavy load on paper things look good it features an IR 3 5 2 0 1 phase controller and from that six signals are output it to half-a-dozen ir35 9 9 phase SS creating a 12 phase VRM MSI's use TD a21 for 7 to power stages and these are the same 70 amp parts that they featured on the impressive x3 19 own creation though they're a 16 phase V core verum configuration was used cooling the power stages is a very modest looking black anodized heatsink which is connected using a 6 millimeter heat pipe to an equally modest looking anodized black heatsink nothing particularly fancy here and there's no kind of active cooling present so it will be interesting to see how well the crashing fares in the thermal testing their sous prime X 299 deluxe is currently retailing for $500 u.s. and that makes it $100 cheaper than the msi creation though there are some noteworthy differences between those two boards before we get into that I should just quickly point out this isn't the most high-end or most premium X 219 our motherboard that a sous offers that would be the rog rampage 6 extreme Omega and we recently looked at the X 399 version of that board and also had a really long name that no one remembers getting back to the prime X 299 deluxe to a sous has managed to one-up msi by including five gigabit ethernet along with a gigabit port you also get a Wi-Fi module plenty of USB 3.1 ports but just 2 m dot 2 ports as Zeus does sell an expansion card separately but it cost $90 so if you include that in the price then the asustor msi boards effectively have the same retail price still in the package you do get a few cool add-ons such as the fan extension card to this little module allows you to connect and control up to half a dozen case fans and it also includes 3 RGB and three thermal sensors so that's pretty neat but let's talk about the vrm a soos calls this their 12 plus 2 power stage design but it's not a twelve phase vcore rather it's a six phase using a doubling of components but there's no double as used and this is a pretty common design thing from a soos now so what we have here is an ASP one four zero five pwm controller which we've always suspected is a rebadged IR three five two zero one anyway as was the case with the MSI board six signals are taken from the controller however each signal isn't then doubled instead it's hooked up directly to a pair of ir35 five power stages each rated at 60 amps so in total there's still a dozen power stages but whereas the msi board has 12 phases a susur's only has six a soos believes they are better off avoiding doubles as they introduce the latency and higher transient voltage drop but at the end of the day all we really care about is how hot the vrm gets when overclocking and we'll explore that in a moment for now let's look at the gigabyte X 299 Horus master by far the cheapest of the three boards is gigabytes X 299 or ass master coming in at just $340 u.s. it's always half the price of the MSI crashing yet despite that it is a really massive motherboard that's jam packed with features onboard you get three m2 ports with cooling four PCIe x 16 slots two point five gigabit wired networking along with a more standard gigabit port Wi-Fi high quality audio and wealth all this just goes on so in terms of board features it does a good job of matching the more expensive models from MSI and a soos the board also looks great and incorporates a heap of nice design features such as a dual bias with a socketed BIOS and then you get all the connector armor stuff on your PCIe slots the DIMM slots and the power connectors you also get a full sized heat shield on the backside of the board it's more of a heat spreader than a heat shield whatever but it does have thermal pads to extract built-up hate on the underside of the PCB the vcore vrm is controlled by the is l69 one 3/8 controller and like msi honest ooze gigabytes taking six signals for the vehicle Oshin but unlike a soos they have opted to use ASL six six one seven phase doublers to create 12 phases this time we find ISL nine nine two to seven power stages which are rated for 60 amps helping to further reduce verum operating temperatures is an active fan that's hidden away under the i/o cover gigabytes also used to proper fin heat sinks and like the other two boards we find the two heat sinks are connected via a six millimeter heat pipe I have to say while the heat sinks on the soos board looked quite good I reckon gigabytes heat sinks look as though they'll work the best okay so it's time to put the board's to the test and as usual I'm going to use blender the load results are reported after an hour-long stress test of running our blender workload non-stop and then the idle is taken after a 10-minute cooldown period to record 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 so this means I'm measuring the temperature directly on top of the component between it and the thermal pad and not an internal temperature which is bound to be a bit higher still with all boards tested under the exact same conditions this will give us a clearer picture of how the vrm temperatures compare okay so first we have these stock 79 80 X 80 results inside the corsair 500 d test case here all the board's performed very well keeping verum temperatures well below 70 degrees at least this was the maximum recorded surface temperature of the power stages the Sue's Prime actually provided the best result at a mere 53 degrees the creation was just 4 degrees hotter and then the Gigabyte board was another 6 degrees hotter and that was quite surprising I have to say then placing k-type thermocouple x' on the back side of the PCB below the power stages it was again the gigabyte horas master that recorded the highest temperature again I was very surprised by this particularly given it has that massive backplate complete with thermal pads okay so now we've overclocked the 79-80 XC to 4 point 5 gigahertz using 1.2 volts and i've adjusted the load line calibration of each board so it held this voltage throughout our testing here we see some pretty drastic changes from the stock results the msi creation for example around 15 degrees hotter hitting a peak of 72 degrees but it was their sous x to 9 Deluxe two results that were the most shocking here the boards varium temperature increased by an incredible 43 degrees peaking at 96 degrees this doesn't seem possible given what we saw from the msi board but I'll get to that in a moment for now let's talk about the Auris master here we saw a 31 degree rise in temperature from the overclock and this resulted in a peak temperature of 94 degrees it's not great but it is a pass if only just now after initially finding the asustor results a bit hard to believe I went back and retested resetting everything including the thermal probes just started over a few hours later I found the exact same result a peak temperature in the high 90s it seems to me as though the enormous current requirements of the overclocked 79 80 Hz is pushing the su 6 phase very well out of its efficiency window and as you can see this just results in really high operating temperatures and things aren't any better on the underside of the PCB either and interestingly we see no change in temperature for the MSI board meanwhile the Assuan gigabyte boards were a little bit hotter the gigabyte board is particularly surprising here as I did find late last year that gigabyte z3 90 motherboards with the large thermal backplate really excelled in this test but here the x2 9 horas master appears to see no benefit from the backplate so that's very disappointing well there you have it the results really do speak for themselves that said there are a few things worth keeping in mind while the MSI X 299 creation was by far the best performer when it came to erm thermals and it was even very easy to overclock with it's worth keeping in mind that I was testing with an 18 core 79-80 XC and all the boards did past all our stress testing and all that stuff without any stability issues any crashing or really any issues at all so what I'm trying to say is if you don't plan on purchasing an $1,800 u.s. processor and something like the 10 core core I 998 20x for example for $900 more you seek then blowing $600 plus on an X - 9 hour motherboard isn't exactly required of course if you're intending on overclocking any of the 14 16 or 18 core parts to the max then I do highly recommend looking at the MSI X 299 creation there seuss prime X - 9 Deluxe didn't really impress me much particularly for a 500 dollar motherboard the feature set is decent but in a few areas it does come up short even compared to the much cheaper horas master so I'm struggling to find a reason to recommend it beyond the fact that a soos does do an excellent job with their BIOS for me the gigabyte x2 9 horas master really impressive just $340 u.s. it is hard to beat yes it does have an active fan and the vrm components aren't the best they're certainly not bad they're just not the best but again you're not paying top dollar either overall the build quality and board design was excellent the feature sets impressive and it did handle the overclocked 79 80 XE without showing any signs of instability it just got a little hot under the collar doing it overall the msi Meg x99 creation it's a beast and I really do highly recommend this motherboard for anyone looking for the ultimate ex $2.99 board although the Asuza rog rampage seeks extreme omega might also be worth checking out but i i'd certainly pass on the the deluxe ii board that i've moved over to the side there then as an affordable sort of all-rounder i suppose you really can't go past the gigabyte x2 9 horas master and that is going to do it for this one if you enjoyed the video be sure to the like button subscribe for more content and if your pre-shot we do have our own box then consider supporting us on patreon thanks for watching I'm your host Steve and I'll see you next time