Gadgetory

welcome back to tech yes City and this is a little bit of a weird one because this is a Z 390 motherboard and it's coming out a while after XIII 90s already released and I was put under NDA for it so if that gives you any indication then maybe Intel's refreshing chips this year so yeah there's that but anyway as work with this board this is the phantom gaming seven they have the ascetics pretty much the main focus and it's pretty interesting because they've got the input/output shield pre-attached now to the board itself and I must admit this is a trend that is welcomed in the industry I do like this personally it makes it look clean makes it look flush and when you install it you don't have to worry about forgetting IO shields honestly the amount of use builds I've come in to where the people don't include the IO shield when they sell the motherboard is so numerous and this will definitely eliminate that problem for future generations of used PC parts hustlers but with that aside as with any tech yes city motherboard review will go from top to bottom with this thing starting with the vrm and here they're using a PWM controller known as the Intersil is l69 one three eight with the MAS driver being the Intersil six six one seven eight for the actual vrm power phases they're going with an eight plus two phase power design where the eight phases are doubled and for the high and low side MOSFETs they're using vishay SSC six three four and also si si six five four MOSFETs for the chokes we've got magic sixty AB chokes and then our capacitors we've got twelve K's from Nietzsche con this is attached to a heatsink that weighs in at about a hundred and sixty six grams though when I put my ninety nine hundred K to five gigahertz at one point three six volt and yes I know a lot of you guys in the comments are telling me about how your ninety nine hundred K gets the five gigahertz at a lot lower voltages this is an NGO sample and it did kind of lose the silicon lottery can't even boot at five point one gigahertz so it's a good thing for testing multiple VRMs however because it is like a worst case scenario and in this case mine will juice over a hundred and eighty watts have five gigahertz and this in turn will stress the V RMS so I was happy to report that it did pass this stress test the V RMS however did get a little bit uncomfortably hot as I would say I like to keep it down under 90 degrees for the surface temperatures when I put the IR camera over it this was going up to 98 max with a 25 degree C ambient environment the heat sink is doing a great job with that getting the 72 degrees C so if you do put a fan over it it will cool extremely well so the V RMS decent will handle a 5 gigahertz overclocked off your more serious about overclocking may wish to consider the Taichi or the phantom gaming 9 which comes equipped with a better vrm then moving on to the onboard audio this was very interesting because this is I keep saying in every review is like usually yeah well on board alia keeps getting better and better this does have a slight improvement but there was a catch there using the realtek ALC 12:20 solution though does require a creative driver to get it to function at 100% so if you don't install the creative driver there will be noticeable noise past the 2k frequency range and also the crosstalk will introduce some leakage with the default driver though once you install that creative driver not only do you unlock the Sound Blaster cinema 5 software package which is actually pretty solid for DSP especially if I want to play some RPG titles it does add a level of immersion but after we installed this driver the line was looking in the main frequencies pretty much perfectly flat there was a little bit of a roll off after 10k this depends on the maker and how they want you to perceive the sound and under 20 Hertz we had 20 to 10 Hertz having only a point one decibel drop off it was so minimal that you would see the line looking a little bit awkward but really nothing to worry about when we've got 10 to zero Hertz looking lights got a minus one decibel roll off so basically the onboard audio solution is really good and the crosstalk after you installed the driver is literally going to minus 90 DB at a hundred volume level so it doesn't have that problem where I've seen a lot of motherboards in the past year especially have a leakage problem after a volume level of 90 under the mic import this has got a clear amount of noise suppression so it is great if you want your mates to hear you easily while you're playing games but on the same token if you want to do anything professional in terms of recording I'd suggest getting a different solution so your voice isn't getting nerfed that is depending on how strong the noise suppression is it will take a frequency out of your vocal range and make your voice sound essential more tinnier than otherwise would anywhere going through more of the features on this board we've got three PCIe 16 speed slots on the surface there looking at the rear of the board you can see that once in x16 slot one's an x8 one's an X 4 and then you've got X ones in between also PCIe nvme 3.0 X 4 you get two of those slots so you can raid 0 nvme m dot two drives if you wish to the board itself also over SATA 3 supports raid 0 1 5 and 10 so it does have a lot of features in terms of what you can do off the onboard chipset itself they're putting the speeds and the temperatures to the test pass with flying colors also USB 3 speeds are fine and you get a jewel Nix solution where one of those solutions is the Intel I to one night and fee the speeds tested out fine on that and then you get also a real tech 2.5 g solution so a little bit faster than your one g solution and coming in as a budget choice so I guess it doesn't cost as much as putting 10 G on board so that's an as rock-solid solution especially if you've got those NASA's that support three gigabit transfers look at the rear of the board you get HDMI and display out you also get two USB 3.0 gen 2 one of those being a Type C one of those being a type 8 and I do apologize this the new terminology is sending me a little bit crazy there was no need for the name changes that will grow with it as it seems to be printed everywhere on the box and you also get two USB 3.0 gen ones as well as your front USB 3 outs you get two of those as well as a Type C out moving the Azeroth's bias nothing's really changed here but on that note nothing really needs to change it's got all your easy support for overclocking you've got the advanced features for overclocking as well as internet flash for your BIOS so if you don't want to go to a website and download it through Windows you can do it via this method you've also got fantastic tuning software which enables you to control each of the port hubs you do get five PWM controlled fan headers on this board and you can control the RGB within the bias via the 5 volt addressable RGB header you've also got two 12-volt RGB headers on board two to control RGB but I have noticed asrock have been adding more options to the polychrome RGB software where the North & South Bridge of this heatsink do get RGB features integrated from the get-go and it does look very subtle very easy on the eyes as well as giving them motherboard a little bit of extra flare though will point out so far that this is my favorite solution for RGB control in the bias where you don't have to load up any software in Windows which can impact performance I have tested some of this RGB software from other manufacturers and it can impact CPU performance so if you guys want RGB control but you don't want anything affecting your games then polychrome is currently the best option in my opinion and in closing some of the last features to go over you get a power and reset button at the top a doctor debug led down the bottom so you know if there's a BIOS read out problem with the board you can quickly diagnose it and there's the option to add an m dot to Wi-Fi if you need Wi-Fi on your motherboard but with all that out of the way we are now moving on to the most important thing with an enthusiast tech product and that of course is the price tag 195 USD I will update the description with the AUD pricing because I currently can't find a tag on that at the moment but at this price tag you get everything in between on a motherboard it's got a nice thick PCB decent vrm amazing onboard audio dual necks the ability to raid 0 nvme x 4 speeds and also of course the updated ascetic and RGB bling and I must say this is one of my favorite looking as well boards that has come through here to date and also I do welcome that new edition of the integrated i/o shield I think it looks really nice really handy to have though although this board does look like it has everything I will say one thing and that is the V RM itself is a mid-range solution so if you are looking to go real high end on your overclock so you want to go for a 5.2 gigahertz overclock or you have a 9900 K that's as bad as mine then you may wish to step things up to like a phantom gaming 9 or a Taichi or a Taichi ultimate where there are equipped with more phases and a slightly better vrm this one however will handle 9900 K overclocks at 5 gigahertz fine though if you do want to step it up then keep in mind that this is kind of like a mid-range vrm solution and of course everything else on this board is high-end I do like the 2.5 g solution for the NIC as well really nice to touch and that onboard audio is just simply phenomenal and you guys hope you enjoyed today's video if you did - be sure to hit that like button for us also let us know in the comment section below do you like what as rocks done here with the aesthetics and all the feature set or would you rather them take away from that and just simply go for a and vrm at a mid-range price love reading your thoughts and opinions as always and without said I'll catch you in another tech video very soon peace out for now but