hi and welcome back to a new video a few days ago we had a discussion going on on my Discord Channel about the most expensive c790 board that you can currently buy and to my surprise it's not made by Asus because typically you would expect them to have overpriced motherboards but I had to find out that it's from auros AKA gigabyte it's the c790 extreme X I paid € 1,320 for the board itself loan so that's already quite a lot if you think about that in theory for that amount of money you could buy a c790 board plus 4900 K plus a memory kit then yeah that's going to be interesting hetner is my long-term partner which I use to host my own website and also hwbot with hundreds of thousands of servers in operation hetson is a leading hosting provider and data center operator with their own data centers in nurenberg and falstein in Germany and also h in Finland besides their high performance dedicated servers with great support they also offer powerful Cloud servers at a great price the CCX line offers Cloud servers with dedicated vcpu that can stand up to any project at the best price performance ratio on the market check out the link in the description below to find out more about header's CCX cloud service so here we have the board and one thing I want to point out it's the same as when we tested the c690 Godlike from MSI if you have a board which is basically the most expensive you can buy then I will also judge it from a different standard than like judging a let's say 300 or 400 motherboard because with this kind of price tech at least I personally would expect Perfection and I think you would probably do the same so that's why I will take things a little bit more serious than what I would usually judge when it's like a cheaper board let's quickly talk about the accessories that are included and I have to say I'm kind of surprised how little you have included considering the the price of this board for nowadays boards so we have a USB deck which is basically a USB audio sound card whatever but I have no clue about audio stuff at all so I cannot judge if this is a good thing or not apart from that we have a Wi-Fi antenna and a ton of adapter cables like this one which is basically essential it's like um yeah the board connector to just normal fan connectors because the board doesn't have the normal fan connectors so those are kind of mandatory it's not really an accessory it's something you just really need same goes for those RGB cables and like the onboard header and uh yeah then you have USB headers and the Sata cable and then you have a heat SN for MDA 2 that's it that's everything that's included and then there is the the manual which is surprisingly little they claim they want to reduce the used amount of paper and that's why they have this like short start guide that contains a lot of QR codes so you get to the latest version of the manual I think it's a good thing to do so but then on the other hand I mean you have so much plastic and plastic packagings inside if you would really care about the environment so much you would maybe start with getting rid of those yeah plastic packagings instead of yeah trying to save a few pages of paper so here we have it the AOS c790 extreme X it's extremely white that's the first thing I notice it's quite a big board probably not server standard but I guess they also call it E8 TX so it's definitely wider to the right which means that you will have to check if this board will fit into your case certainly if you have a small case could be compatibility issues so make sure you check that up front as you can see all of those like protective films are still on the board I still have to peel them off first thing that you will also notice that this is a four dim board which is certainly going to be interesting especially considering what kind of memory compatibility Aros or gigabyte is officially stating and that's why I decided to also order this 8,000 c38 32 GB kit from gskill which is also quite expensive I think like 260 270 but it's officially listed in the QV list of this motherboard so at least in theory it should work right by the way why is there Lucky from MSI on the M2 heat sink now with all the protective films gone we can look at the beauty of this board I mean that obviously depends on the personal preference but if you like all those like shiny surfaces and Ultra Clean look with everything covered then this might be a board for you I'm personally more a friend of like aluminium surfaces because they're not as sensitive when it comes to like scratching because on here even though I already peeled off the protective films I would usually recommend not to do so until you're fully done with the build because I think this surface even if you just like slightly scratch it with your let's say pcie power cable for example during yeah assembly then you you will straight have scratches in the surface it's probably even more problematic on the region up here which is basically a huge LCD and the LCD sits on top of a big heat sink I'm not sure how much this is going to affect or impact the cooling capability of the board but if you just look at the surface area of the heat sink I think this could be pretty nice then there is also this thing on top which is an additional I would say cable Hider thing so it's just a piece of plastic feels a bit cheap but I think it's a good thing to have especially if you're done with the cable management like you have your CPU fans attached like the EPS cables you can add this on here just add it with magnets and then it also hides the cabling on top so that's just a nice little extra because I think the entire like design speech of this board is that you cannot really see anything like everything is hidden underneath some sort of like heat SN or cover and this kind of design language is also what you can find on the bottom of the board because because typically I would say on a traditional motherboard then you would still have a lot of connectors like USB and all of that on the bottom and that's why we can find all those connectors on the right and that's also why you need those adapters that I showed earlier that are included with the board and this also just depends purely on personal preference and also on the case which you're going to use because those angled connectors like 90 90° and already keeping in mind that the board is a little bit extended towards this direction it might make yeah compa more of a problem but then on the other hand if you have enough space then for example the 24 pin connector will make your cable management much better because you don't need a 180° band and only a 90° Bend so in the end it just depends on the case you're going to use if this is going to be better or worse just make sure that you check that up front for the PCI slots we have the top one with some kind of like a quick I don't know quick release something like that so that's quite convenient quite nice I like those features and then on the bottom one you don't have it which means I mean this is pretty much hidden in here if you ever have to release a card on here because I just tried it I just plucked the graphics card and tried to release it like behind here that is really difficult like accessing this thing from the back and releasing the card that's going to be a problem so if you have a card that has like an extended back plate good luck getting it back out so I will equip it with the 8,000 megat transfers sticks and also our 14900 K since we're running uh 5 SSD in there and we also have this big heat syn included might as well also use it before we continue with anything else we will first update the BIOS because you can see on the top left the version the board came with was F2 which is quite old and I'm going to update this to the most recent version what about gigabytes control center I haven't used it for several months so let's see if they improved it or how it works today well good start so if I'm new to this and I want to start a tutorial where do I click nothing works I can only skip great okay so yeah I have to press the question mark after pressing skip that doesn't make a lot of sense so I think there is a tutorial but like the navigation just doesn't make sense okay back to the main screen so if we want to start a tutorial here yeah it actually works so we have the navigation bar on the left then there is like homepage different buttons and then tutorial homepage Pro produ I think there is an R too much um okay but technically there is a tutorial you just first have to skip the tutorial to get to the tutorial doesn't make a lot of sense so let's just try whatever they advise us press check and then install whatever they want me to install oh wait no n nine yeah nine ah to sh okay so before you press Start um make sure that you uncheck like like Norton why why is this automatically selected I hate stuff like that I have bad feelings once again about gigabyte control center so I just went to RGB Fusion I did a restart after installing everything where is the display like already this is extremely confusing so those are RGB scripts from what I understand correctly this is also like the placing of this is all Maximum confusing cuz it like this could be the location of my memory sticks like the g- skill sticks this is probably the chipset thing down there where is the screen why is everything on here missing I don't get it so I just installed the gigabyte performance library but that seemed oh where is this coming from now I will just because I have no clue what this is I mean I cannot imagine that I will need the smart backup feature to get the display to work not sure what this is but I will just install all of this now and see if it helps as you can see everything apart from Norton is installed if we go back here this is still something is off here and I still cannot click on anything when it comes to the display also I didn't find anything display related in any of the other like submenus so yeah not sure also not sure why this is like partially German partially English this is also pretty obscure like if I go to settings everything is English like fan control everything is English and then I go to like I don't know fan control here and then you have like random German translations and like the Gen 5 nvme Drive sits an idle at about 45° C which is a great temperature because I know from experience without heat SN it would throttle down in Windows even in idle that's the kind of temperature that you would probably see or expect during gaming something between 50 and 60° celsus depending on the airflow of your system and also the placement of your graphics card the biggest problem though we can see in GPU with our RTX 490 only running with X8 PCI Express Lanes after removing the bottom cover we can see even more m.2 slots and actually this one would make more sense for a normal user because this slot is also directly connected to the CPU but it's not connected over pcie Gen 5 which means that it's not going to steal any kind of PCI Express Lanes because it's natively connected to the CPU whereas this slot is basically sharing the Gen 5 Lanes with the top pcie slot right here all the other slots are directly connected to the chipset and may also be used that's always a problem with Gen 5 drives on c790 because most of the boards just use the top slot for the Gen 5 drives which then shares Lanes with the GPU which is something you usually want to avoid because I would say most of the people are gaming with those rigs so you cannot have both like top speed for the drive and top speed for the GPU at the same time you also cannot have the best cooling because even if you would say okay I will just stick to a Gen 4 drive and put it in the slot right here that's connected to the CPU you would be limited by the cooling of this and you can imagine if you apply four Gen 4 nvme drives in here this is also going to be quite warm especially under load so the best solution would be to take this slot right here this piece and move it to that side this way you could decide if you want to use the Gen 4 from this side and have it natively connected to the CPU or use Gen 5 you just have to flip around the SSD but in either way you could make use of the big heat sink for best cooling of your SSD the downside though would be that you would lose one nvme slot but I think that should be fine just having four in total and just a quick look at the connectivity in the io Shield we have the ignition button which is usually to power up the board without powering up the CPU so for example if you want to fill up your custom water cooling Loop that's quite useful Q flash plus button so you can update the BIOS without actually running the board then Wi-Fi 7 that's probably the most advertised feature when it comes to the like c79 refresh boards we have 10 times USB 3.2 type A and also dual type- C AKA those are Thunderbolt 4 ports also 2.5g Network and 10g network there are also those holes in the io Shield which according to the gigabyte marketing material that you can find online this should be able to reduce your vrm temperature by 7° c not sure how that's going to be possible we will try to figure that out for that I want to take a closer look at the cooling and the heat Sy solution underneath which means that we will have to remove the back plate the back plate on the back side is nicely made with those edges definitely gives the board extra stability and probably also a bit of cooling that's something I really like I removed the io panel with the display inside first of all that's a nice piece of tech so really good looking but then I mean let's take a look at those like tiny holes again you can see yeah you can see like five shining through here and then if I turn it around it's a little bit difficult to do with one hand but you can also see four in that direction the rest you cannot see because the rest of the holes basically the entire top row is covered by the plastic of the yeah of the display not sure how this is going to help you decrease the temperature by 70° C but let's see now let's get back back to the positive side of things which is definitely the heat sink and also the PCB quality overall that's something I have to highlight with gigabyte boards not sure how they do it but if you look at the PCB and the way it looks and feels it always has this like very high quality touch to it that I really like about the gigabyte boards and also this heat sink it has so much surface area I don't think you will ever have any kind of issues with it the only downside is probably that the yeah the majority of the top fins is going to be covered by the screen not sure how much this is going to impact the temperatures something maybe we want to find out but apart from that probably if you have a little bit of air flow in the system that should be really good what a massive and also beautiful heat SN can see it's forming contact with the inductors and also the power stages however you can already see a little bit that the imprint is a little bit uneven so it's probably not making the same kind of contact to all of them now look at this beautiful array of power supply it's basically 24 faces for CPU vcor whereas always two are active at the same time so basically 12 phases that are double populated so always two power stages two inductors two like capacitors are active at the same time but it's yeah it's just Overkill this is going to be perfect for any kind of scenario with those 105 amp stages even like xlc no problem whatsoever now one thing you could maybe talk about a little bit is that those two power stages in the center don't have perfect or maybe no contact at all to the thermal pads in the center and also let's pay attention to the entire left row and the top one the top power stage does not make contact with the thermal pad at all same goes for the top row the power stages the total left one also does not make contact with the thermal pads the two power stages in the corner right here they don't make contact with the cooler because the cooler is simply Too Short at least in the corner right here so it would have to extend another like 5 mm here and here to form contact with those power stages and then I mean it's a 1,300 EUR board so you could argue that you expect Perfection that is up to you to judge from my point of view just the technical observation I don't think that's a problem because the majority or like 100% of the heat can easily dissipate it from those power stages through the PCB that's no problem whatsoever as long as the PCB is cold enough it can easily cool the entire power stti stage so if one power stage doesn't make contact then the heat can be dissipated through the neighbor contact basically and I don't see that's a problem but that's up to you to decide we quickly have to talk about the memory topic again though we just have to keep in mind that this is a for them board and there's also an interesting video from bullset about this recently that you might want to check out where he's rambling about this entire topic because on the qbl list of this board you can find up to 8,266 the highest retail kits I could find in Germany available were 8,000 so and it was already quite expensive but that's on the QV list of this board and yeah it should be interesting to see if this kind of memory speed actually works on a Ford board but I also have to say that at least subjectively it seems like the 14th gen imc's have been improved a little bit over the 12th and 13th gen so it's maybe it works out better on these sports but it doesn't necessarily mean only because the memory is on the qvl list that it also always works out for you because keep in mind if you have a CPU with a bad IMC it might not boot let's check what the board is going to do with the 8,000 MHz on the memory how nice is that and it also didn't take like I don't know like three Cycles or whatever it was just like I applied waited 20 seconds and we have the 8,000 megga transfers amazing yep I'm really impressed by this board how well and smooth it could handle those very high memory frequencies that was absolutely amazing I also want to highlight that I tested this with the stock Intel ilm because I didn't want to put any kind of disadvantage on gigabyte if it wouldn't work let's say with a contact frame that's something I still want to test in addition so I'm going to put this on for better CPU thermals and then check again if it still runs the 8,000 this is also the updated version of the thermog grizzly frame the 13th and 14th gen much easier to install can just use this uh key and just tighten with the like the shorter side for I would say a norm noral mounting pressure and I also used the stock screws they're also longer ones included if you need them because some boards have different like PCB thickness and different back PL thickness so you might need longer ones but if you can use the stock ones just use the stock ones this bordering comes to memory is a lot of fun is absolutely amazing again 8,000 boots so quick and all the way through and again as you can see here in Windows you can see that the 14900 K is staying below the defined power limits P 1 is 280 PL 2 is 4,95 still the CPU consumes only 220 which is causing it to have a very good temperature below 70° celius and that's probably because gigabyte is following the Intel specs at least when it comes to the current not sure about the power because that would be lower like 253 if I remember correctly but it seems like the yeah the ICC Max is defined correctly that's why the CPU is staying quite a lot colder consumes less power and yeah has good efficiency or at least better efficiency okay um yeah that's memory unstable interesting so even though it all booted fine seems like it's not stable under load currently I'm stability testing with CCH R23 I already finished one run of 30 minutes I'm in the second half of the second test so it's about 45 minutes of constant High load I lowered the memory clock as you can see to 7,800 so far no problems at all this is running pretty stable the only thing that's a little bit odd is that in between I'm not quite sure why at a certain point it stopped reporting temperatures and some clocks you can see that the VR is just reading 0° celi it was at a Max of 60° C so I'm not not quite sure what bucked out here at least if we take a look at our monitoring display on the motherboard we can see that it reads out correctly because you can see a vrm temperature currently of 61° c and that should be pretty much in line I have to say this is also kind of an expected problem and I also want to highlight that I put back the Intel ilm to double check I can easily boot 8,000 but whenever I run cine bench like three four times it would start crashing so there is some kind of memory instability and if you're a customer buying exactly this then you are left with a problem where it's pretty hard to identify what actually causes this first assumption might be that the memory kit is unstable which just from personal experience at least with those G skill sticks is quite unlikely then it might be the IMC of the CPU which is likely because Intel lists a Max of 5,600 for the CPU and we are trying to run 8,000 so that's quite away from spec and then they also list that it's running up to 8,266 that is quite enthusiastic for a four dim motherboard and that's why I would personally advise first check what you're looking for if you're looking for very high memory speed then just get a two dim board like the ton from gigabyte I'm pretty sure it will handle High memory speeds much better than this one or just get the Apex one of those boards that have two dims those run much better and I also want to point out that this problem is not gigabyte or like Asus or MSI exclusive all of the vendors suffer from this because you have tolerances in everything in the board manufacturing process the PCB then of the CPU of the memory sticks I mean if they're properly bent the memory is probably not the issue but you never know what kind of IMC quality you have on your CPU and that's why if you get a for in board like this it's probably just much better to get a lower memory speed like 7,200 maybe up to 7,600 could work on the 14th gen but if you want to avoid trouble just get lower memory speed it will work just just fine it will work a lot better and you're also going to save a lot of trouble and money because typically if you invest in a kit like this this with 8,000 you pay a ton of extra for a very little extra of performance there is this recent video from Bulls where he's explaining all this much more in detail also talking about different boards that you can get some additional info about this entire topic if you're looking for it I just wish they would like all the board vendors would be more transparent when it comes to advertising those very high memory speeds because I think it's very quick to be very disappointing for the customer imagine if you bought an 8,266 kit for this board and you just have no way of getting it to run you're becoming very frustrated I'm not sure what you're going to return first maybe memory kit maybe CPU maybe motherboard and then you have a disappointed customer who might not even know what the cause of this is because you're advertising up to 8,066 and you're already stating like in a small disclaimer that there might be some differences but you're not even telling the customer what this difference might be like is it the IMC quality of the CPU and how to even identify that that's just yeah it's always a problem with those High memory speeds with the help of Makita I'm currently building this small air tunnel thing because I'm currently testing the vrm of the board for 30 minutes to see what kind of Max temp it will reach and then I'm planning to add this small thing to the io Shield to basically pull air through grew and see if this then in some way allows to lower the temperature after about 23 minutes of cin R23 load the vrm temperature didn't change anymore and it hasn't been changing for like 5 minutes so I guess it reached the max we see that the CPU is constantly pulling just below 280 watt because I unlocked the power limits in BIOS which also explains why the CPU is constantly running into the thermal limit but the vrm temperature is absolutely beautiful I mean look look at this sitting at 73° C with zero air flow that's perfect so I have my air tunnel attached to the board and I'm going to repeat my test again I tested just above 20 minutes Under full load you can see it's the same scenario same kind of load that is applied to the CPU and we see yeah 2 to 3° cius lower temperature so those 2 to 3° cius low temperature could maybe be explained by those holes or maybe because my like air time is not perfectly sealed off and it's pulling a little bit of air here and there and also underneath the board which certainly helps the temperature so yeah I would love to see how you can kind of justify and test 7° Celsius lower temperature through those like few tiny holes inside the io Shield pretty sure that's not the case I would yeah I would think that it's more a case of marketing instead of actually helping anything to the temperature let's get to the conclusion of the c790 ours extreme X which is going to take quite a bit I guess but I will try to keep it as short as possible let's start with the overall build quality of the board which I think is amazing it feels really nice high quality everything is covered looks brilliant also has Wi-Fi 7 which is what comes with I would say the refresh c790 boards I want to highlight that I like that gigabyte is running the right default settings for the 4900 K so that's nice because you're not running into like 350 or 400 watt power draw what you have on some of the other board so it's correctly configured and if you want to you can unleash the 4900 K unlock it so you can pull whatever you want if your cooling allows it but at least stock it's following the correct Intel guidelines now let's get over to the price because I paid 1,320 for this board and after testing the board I still didn't figure out why what are you actually paying for because if you compare it to the AOS Master X there is not a big difference the AOS Master X obviously is not like nicely covered in all of the details but still just technically speaking it covers most of what this board covers for less than half the price the Aros Master X um it also has 10g Network it also has Wi-Fi 7 in addition it also has a display port so the Aus Master X is probably even better if you ever have to like debug the board and you want to run the igpu of your 4900 k then it's something you can do whereas on the extreme X you don't even have a connection for display port or like HDMI so I don't know and then the master X it doesn't have the LCD and it has four Less faes on the CPU power supply but I mean that's still going to be fully sufficient so I don't know I still don't know why you're paying this much for this board let's talk about QV the entire like memory thing generally speaking gigabyte is over promising and under delivering which is something that you can also expect from other main board vendors because they all run run the same policy they all try to max out their like memory advertising speed and then it could be exactly what we experiened you buy a very high-end memory kit maybe 8,000 or 8,200 and then you try to get it to run and it doesn't work which will lead to disappointment and I mean if you spend € 1,300 do you want to experience disappointment probably not wouldn't it be much nicer to just advertise like 7,600 and then surprise your customer if it works out that on some boards you can maybe run 8,000 and if it doesn't work out it's not too bad but this way it's just not nice and I also want to highlight again this is not just a problem for gigabyte but also the other main board vendors you can have the same there if they advertise High memory speeds let's start with some marketing points first of all the holes in the io Shield not sure how gigabyte wants to like lower the temperature by 7° celius with those tiny holes in there where half of them are blocked doesn't make any kind of sense I mean we kind of had the best case scenario where you have no no airf flow here at all and then we use a fan to pull out air and even then we lower it by like 2° celsus which could be by just a bit of air like passing around here and on the top and maybe on the bottom so yeah 7° C never going to happen then they are advertising Nano coating on the fins which according to gigabyte is lowering the temperature by 10% if you use temperature and percent I'm already going to go wild because that's something you just don't do like what Fahrenheit Celsius Kelvin like what's the reference and then yeah like just just never do percent in temperature that's something that should be forbidden then they also claim that the cooler has 10 times more surface area but like like more than what like no cooler like the previous cooler there is no reference so that also just it's not helpful whatsoever now let's talk about the main feature of this board which is probably the LCD because apart from that it's not that much different to the Aros Master X and then the screen leads to a lot of disappointment generally speaking the screen is nice because you get all those visuals of like CPU temperature VM temperature and then for example fan speed but like in my case if you would use the Corsair environment for example it's very unlikely that you're going to populate all the fan headers and then it's like three times cycling through all the fan headers that display zero RPM like system fan 1 2 3 4 5 and then like pump speed and everything shows zero RPM so it's a lot of wasted potential and then you think okay let's maybe install the gigabyte software and fix this but you cannot select anything you cannot modify the screen whatsoever which is so much wasted potential it's unbelievable for the price of € 1,300 and I couldn't even adjust the color imagine buying this and you want to have like a black and red themed PC and and you cannot even fix the color what is this like for the price it's a complete joke and it's just because of the software every single time I use the software I'm hugely disappointed I think last time I used the gigabyte software was with like 4080 and 4090 cards where they had LCDs and they had like RGB features none of them were working it's the same again here and then like the the software is bloated with a lot of additional features that you're probably not going to use you don't even know what they're supposed to do you install everything and it still doesn't work yeah that's just it's unbelievable really and if I would be a normal customer buying this board I honestly speaking I would return it like you if you cannot even adjust this which is probably the main selling point of the board what's the point of buying it just get the ARs Master X instead and you will be much happier because there is probably not so much software that can disappoint you you might want to use some RGB headers but they might work apart from that yeah probably if you want to buy a gigabyte product as long as you don't have to use their software it's fine but this way yeah disappointing pretty disappointing thanks for tuning in till next time [Music] bye-bye
