Article here: www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3162-evga-x299-dark-motherboard-vrm-thermal-review You might also like our ASUS Rampage VI Extreme VRM test (Ft. Der8auer!): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-0qYHWAnvXv8.html
wow wow wow, what! Did I hear you say it has fins on the VRM block!? That just isn't done these days, did they go nuts? Or did I just step into an alternate universe or something? lol. I want that on an AM4 board with ALL the memory slots. And great vid GN crew. B)
960 Pros will 100% throttle without airflow. The speed drop is fairly large too. Most users will never run the drive at 100% long enough to throttle, but if you have 2 drives and move a few 100GB around the speed will drop off at the end. Also 10GBps network work transfers will throttle them.
Motherboard designers of today go for form over function, ten years ago they did things other way around. I personally prefer the look of a plain old heatsink over some stylized RGB monstrosity that doesn't do what it's supposed to, thumbs up to EVGA for not being idiots with their X299 board.
Agreed. Just give us a nice colored PCB (black, white, gray), make a great motherboard without gimmicks (RGB, "armor" on the motherboard and every slot), and youll have my money every time.
Can't they just put a stylish piece of plastic on top of the heatsink with optional fans on the side, just like with a CPU heatsink? Would look pretty nice: images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91vFvo7RVBL._SL1500_.jpg
$$$$$$$ I can only assume using a small piece of aluminum, is quite a bit easier and cheaper, then actually having to design and fabricate a heat sink for your new shiny board.
seems to me like noctua, and others, should start looking into creating heatsinks for popular motherboard vrms. i mean, monoblocks are starting to actually make sense, why not do the same for those who prefer air cooling.
I don't think motherboards are quite as ubiquitous as cards are, since there are no "reference" motherboards like there are reference graphics cards. You'd need to have a -highly- modular system to fit a heatsink to more than one or two boards, and that takes development. I think a better solution is to come up with cheap plastic brackets that let you mount a fan or two onto the heasink easily to cool your aluminum block of choice.
Exactly. I had both an Asus Strix X370 and Asus Prime X370 boards in my hands at the same time. Different vrm config on each so the mounting holes for the heatsinks are in different spots. Maybe you could create heatsinks with multiple mounting holes but that is lots of development work with low return considering the low number of people even concerned with vrm temp. If you're concerned about vrm temp, pick a case that has a direct air path through the area. An intake fan mounted high in the front, rear exhaust, maybe a top mounted one. If you're controlling the fans off the MB set the top intake and rear exhaust to adjust speed according to vrm temp, by default theyre usually set for CPU temp. If you're really concerned take your chunk of aluminum off the board, put it in a padded vice, then take a thin bladed saw and cut into it to make some fins. The additional surface area will aid in cooling especially with some airflow over it.
that's why i compared them to monoblocks. you don't see them universally either. it would likely be just for the higher end popular boards. the idea could be complete failure, never know unless you try. to be fair, i always expect negativity as responses. your fan mounting idea is good too.
I think he means watercooling monoblocks and gpu waterblocks exist for specific products so why not air cooling heatsinks. Personally would love that however I doubt the manufacturers wold want to considering it would only be for a very small niche market.
Monoblocks are specific to a particular motherboard and it's a fairly low volume product that gets a slight sales bump from water cooling owners saying "why not" and upgrading their build. But monoblocks are a machined part, it's easier to make a limited run as the only setup is the fixture holding it in the cnc machine and it's more likely the fixture can be reused to make multiple models of monoblocks. A heatsink is either a casting or the heatpipe and fin arrangement. These require tooling that is more specific to a particular model and it's less likely the tooling can be reused increasing cost. Plus I think the market for upgraded air cooling for vrm is lower than for water cooling but with no options out there it's hard to tell. Maybe it would be profitable for specific motherboard models. I'm just stating the obstacles standing in the way of aftermarket options for vrm air cooling upgrades.
Those little VRM 30mm fans are probably from 1/10 scale RC car. They are used on the electric speed controllers. Guess what they are cooling? Small VRM under finned aluminum heatsink :D
I agree with Steve, I like how the heatsink looks on this board. It looks good and actually works. More mobo manufacturers need to do go back to doing this. I remember buying an X58 Sabertooth back in the day because it had good components and a 5 year warranty, same with my PSU. There are a great deal of enthusiasts that care about function over form and they need to make that the 'in' thing again! There is definitely a market for it.
Yeah, EVGA is doing the same thing with their video cards too...guess they actually learned something from the whole ACX overheating fiasco, and made a company policy to go overkill on heatsinks
Not to mention, look at the orientation of the effing power connectors! I mean seriously, it only took 2018 years for EVGA to break ground on sideways connectors. OMG that was my deciding factor for buying this board! I can't begin to explain how much I cannot stand the massive 24pin connector sticking straight up. Not to mention, the recess into the MB! I can't say enough about this board!
You know what looks good? The pretty graphics on my screen when I'm using the computer. People don't buy computers to look at them, the only reason people give a shit what their motherboard looks like outside of specific enthusiasts is marketing. Make shit that works.
Teth47 Yes but those enthusiasts are the people who are going to buy an x299 board for the shiny new core i9 they bought, However that is no excuse to put looks over something so important like vrm cooling. And I mean vrm cooling can be done to look good and preform really well just look at this board imo it looks really good preforms well.
You guys should do a video about horizontal tower coolers (like the be quiet's Dark Rock TF). Does it help VRM cooling? Does it caus a mess with the airflow?
Please cover x299 ram scaling in production workloads (and TR too). The explosion in core counts this year could make more ram effect scaling in Premier, ect.
I'm still running my EVGA X58 with an i7-920. It's on 24/7, just streaming video in my workout room 1-2 hours a day, but it's like the Energizer Bunny.
MEGA PROPS to EVGA for figuring the proper orientation of the 24pin power connector and even going as far as to recess it into the board. BRAVO! This was my deciding factor, been waiting for this to happen for 2018 years!
This kind of heat pipe designs on motherboards were very common about 10 years ago, but the reasoning is Intel was still using FSB, and the memory controller was in the north-bridge instead of the CPU, so the motherboards 10 years ago do need a cooling solution. But I never expect this problem to come back in a x299 motherboard.
I remember when medium end boards had copper heatsinks to the VRM and southbridge even with cooling pipes instead of RGB lights and naked VRMs. I had an chepo Asus with a P35 chipset for my C2D CPU, for like 110€, with copper heatsinks and pipes.
This board is made for extreme ram and cpu overclocking. Both of those things dont work really well on AM4 or X399. But I agree that every consumer board from Intel and AMD should have a neutral color theme like this board.
Gotta say i totally agree with you on the heatsink. It looks great. A heatsink doesn't have to be a block with some pitiful excuses for "fins" to look good
A long time ago i won an EVGA Athlon 64 motherboard with an nvidia chipset from the actual evga office. These days EVGA doesn't want anything to do with AMD.
I'm happy evga chooses quality over fashion and fancy looks. I just wish they would do it for amd, but you cant get everything. But good guy Evga for making a good quality product.
Let me add that for the most part EVGA is going after the hardcore enthusiasts that are looking to go for LN2 with this board so at those extremes the fans may be useful
Bravo fab video. For the 2 people who disliked doesn't love pc master race or the channel. Brilliant guy, brilliant channel. Keep up the good work man.
IMHO I would rather have had the fans and that shroud mess removed and it been just a nice passively good heatsink.. Proper case fans would have worked just as good or better and added no additional noise.
The Asus Zenith Extreme x399 has a fan under the IO shield which also helps cool the VRMs. Not as much of an issue on x399, strange the same design is not used on the x299 version of the board.
You can design a nice looking heat sink just ask Be quiet or Cryorig. Mobo manufactures should just partner and get some good heat sink and blower fans to cool these critical parts.
Just pointing out something. Capacitors don’t need heat sinks. If your capacitor is heating up in such a way that you need a heat sink, it is probably not doing it’s work anyway. Heat in capacitors come from a high ESR, a type of series resistance. High ESR is something you do not want in a capacitor for this application. If you were to have the capacitors contacting the same heatsinks as the MOSFETs and the inductors, they would actually heat up (they used to be cooler than the heat sink but now you’re transferring heat from the heat sink to the caps). As you know, hot caps are no good. Best regards! Ivan
Yes, you’re right. Sometimes you can avoid it by using thermal relief on the pads the capacitors are attached to. But it will increase the series resistance because it’s not a solid connection to the planes.
This would be the perfect board if it had all 8 RAM slots. I get that it's better for RAM overclocking but unless you're pushing like 12 M.2 SSDs in RAID 0 you don't need more than 3200MHz
Brian Crowe Acolyte Asus WS x299 Pro seems to me like it resolves all earlier asus x299 VRM issues as well as featuring 8 DIMMs on standard ATX size :)
How much taller is the fan+heatsink config? Will it interfere with thinner but wider CPU heatsink, especially if the CPU ones are the asymmetrical design that lean closer to the IO side, left VRM fan? Is it taller than the usual tall ram heatsink and therefore could potentially cause trouble for radiator mounting in chassis that only has the top fan/radiator mount offset from the MB rather than dedicated space up top for rad?
They are just server case fans. I heard Nogtua makes _slightly_ quieter ones but they still get pretty loud under load. However, I wouldn't ever complain about fans. Hopefully other manufacturers take cues from this and use a heatsink. (And ASUS should be supplying replacement VRM heatsinks for free! Bastards...)
Thank you Thank you Thank you Steve........and Thank you Thank you Thank you EVGA. I am an AMD Man to the Bitter End but it is important to get the Motherboard Manufacturers thinking this way. I despise the Glits and Glamour of of the RGB Light Shows that are all to common in Motherboards these days with the ROG Boards being the biggest offenders. I'm coming around to the idea that Vendors determine the price of the boards based upon the RGB LED Count. Also please ask the Mobo Manufacturers to return the 7 Segment Post Code LEDS to ALL boards not just the high end boards. Steve can you please send more than a little positive reinforcement to EVGA for this board and endorse that other Motherboard Manufacturers follow their lead. I'm particularly thinking next year when the 400 Series Motherboards are designed for the Ryzen +/2 at least one of the top end boards emphasizes Function over Form.
But the dark color does mean higher out of the box thermals due to light absorption! White is the future when you want to avoid these intense heat spikes from rare scattered starlight rays in your basement at night!
I always wonder if this mental attention to detail is really necessary, sound normalisation, thermal couples on every solder joint or so it seems and a blimmin wind tunnel but then again, nobody else does it and detail gets you places because there's always that one guy that wants the niche information
Isn't the 960 series fairly limited for sustained speeds by heat dissipation? Seems like the PCH fan would be particularly suited to something like that, particularly if you're doing video editing or similar disk-heavy tasks.
I feel against fans directly embedded onto my motherboard. Those things will get in the way of case and cooler. Plus they will make noise. There are also only so many fan power slots on a mobo. My current mobo has about 4 or 5 and that's counting the cpu fan.
BUT BUILDZOID MADE VIDEOS SAYING HOW REGARDLESS OF THE MAX TEMP RATING FOR VRM'S THEIR MAX CURRENT RATING IS VERY DEPENDENT ON THE TEMPERATURE. EVGA MADE IT WORK AT 65 DEGS IN ORDER TO LET YOU PASS MORE CURRENT WITHOUT THE MOSFETS DYING
I was struck by the comment that the flash likes to be warm and that too much cooling actually shortens its life. I just built a custom, wall mounted air cooled system. I put a heatsink on my Samsung NVMe drive and it stays between 38 and 44 C. Is this too cool?
