(groaning)
- Oh my God.
That's right, ladies and gentlemen.
It's finally Zen4 time,
and what better way to celebrate that
than a sponsored video from AORUS
featuring all of their great new products
that support Zen4.
I hope it's great. It's gonna be great.
We're gonna build a computer, which is not necessarily
something we always do on Short Circuit.
It's not something I have done on Short Circuit,
so I'm pretty excited.
I'm told that there is quite a few pieces in this crate.
Aw, look at that!
Wow!
Oh, it's very sharp. It's just like ...
Wow. They didn't deburr this aluminum at all.
(laughing)
All right. Well, I'm gonna steal this, I think.
I'm gonna put this in my car.
"Hey, Short Circuit. Christmas has come early,
and we bestow upon you the latest in our line of
AM5 motherboards.
Obviously, the party wouldn't be complete
without some friends to play with,
so we included those, too."
Friends?
(rain and thunder)
Friends?
Oh there's lots of ... There's lots of goodies under there.
Let's start with what's on the top, though.
We've got two AORUS X670 motherboards.
We've got their X670E AORUS Master.
That's going to be the EATX big dog, flagship board.
And the X670 AORUS ELITE AX.
This is just a standard ATX form factor.
We've got some RAM in here.
This is a 32 GB kit,
so 2 by 16 of 6000 MegaTransfers per second DDR5.
We've also got an AORUS Gen4 7000 series SSD.
They will be having Gen5 SSDs coming out soon,
which would be perfect for this platform,
but unfortunately, we weren't able to get that in time.
Still, this is gonna be super ...
(box falling to floor)
fast.
You know, I'm starting to understand
why he drops things so often.
It's hard!
Especially when wonderful people like AORUS send you a box
full of so many goodies.
How are you not going to drop at least some of them, right?
Ooh.
Now this might look like a normal power supply,
and for most intents and purposes it is.
I mean, it's a modular power supply.
You've got your connectors for your motherboard, your CPU,
but what you've also got is a high-power 12 volt connector
for new graphics cards,
specifically PCIe Gen5 graphics cards
like the upcoming RTX 40 series
as well as the new Radeon graphics
that are going to be coming out, presumably,
in the next couple of months.
This connector specifically allows up to 600 watts
of power draw, but what's also important is
the internals of this power supply are designed
to handle much higher power spikes
than previous power supplies, which is going to be important
on these super high power draw cards,
so if you get one of them, you're going to want to get
an ATX 3.0 power supply like this one.
This model, specifically, is their UD1000GM,
and you see that PCIe 5.0 there.
That's so you don't screw it up.
Use this with Gen5 graphics cards.
It's 80 Plus Gold. It's comes with a 10-year warranty,
and all of the main capacitors in here are going to be
high-quality Japanese capacitors,
which is what you want to look for in a high-quality
power supply.
Ooh.
This is our new cable.
I haven't actually seen one of these in person yet.
Yeah, look at that!
600 Watts.
And the last thing in our box is an
AORUS Waterforce X 280 AIO liquid cooler.
This thing's got a super sick 330 degree rotatable,
full color LCD display, so you can show
custom text or images on there,
probably like the water temperature,
if that's what you're into.
It's got extra thick tubing along with a
slightly thicker radiator, hopefully to improve
thermal performance compared to your average AIO.
It is going to have mounting for AM5, hopefully,
which is basically the same.
Although I have noticed there is no graphics card in here,
so we're going to need to get one.
There is some thermal paste, at least.
We will be needing that.
And I'm going to find a graphics card, so give me a sec.
What better than an AMD RTX 6900 XT?
This the Halo edition. I don't know if it's really gonna,
like, feng sui with our AORUS motherboard,
but that's what I have.
Look at that gold, baby!
Now that we've got everything out of the crate,
I guess it's time to pick a motherboard.
Now, between these two motherboards,
there's not a huge amount of differences,
but there are a few notable ones.
This is EATX. This is ATX.
The graphics card slot, that's the main 16X slot,
is Gen5 on this board, Gen4 on this one.
This one has two Gen5 M.2 slots. This one only has one.
This one's probably going to cost more.
Definitely going to cost more, but it's more baller,
so I think that's the one I'm gonna use.
This is still going to be a great board.
It's got 2.5 GB LAN, Wi-Fi 6E, great power delivery,
but I usually tend to like the fancy stuff.
(laughing)
This one. Ooh.
PCIe Gen5 on the graphics slot. Nice.
It also has 2.5 GB LAN like the other one.
It's going to have the same amount of phases on the
power delivery, although it does look like they have
a little bit different caps on this one,
probably a little bit higher quality components.
You're going to have a little bit more advanced cooling
on the VRMs as well as M.2 thermal guard,
which is a big heat sink for the M.2.
Wow! They were not kidding when they said this thing
had an M.2 heat sink.
Look at that.
That's got to be enough to cool a CPU!
(laughing) What the heck?
Holy crap!
Brandon, look at that! Look at the VRM heat sink!
That's straight up just, like, a graphics card heat sink.
It's ... they're not even trying to pretend
like this is some pretty thing.
They're like, "This thing needs cooling!"
It's just a giant fin stack.
Holy crap.
I wasn't going to open this board because
we're going to be using this one,
but I just wanted to show this for reference.
This is still no joke. That's a big heat sink.
But that ... that is something else.
Assuming you haven't been living under a rock
for the last few months, you'll already know this,
but if you have, there is a very big change
on the AM5 platform, and that is this socket has pins in it.
No longer is an AMD CPU going to have a bunch of pins
on the back, and you're going to be worried about
bending them.
Instead, they are in the socket, just like their
epic platform.
Interestingly enough, they are using very similar
brackets as the AM4 platform.
You got, like, the little plastic hooky boys
that your cooler grabs onto, rather than having posts
that you mount your own thing through.
I actually prefer this approach because it comes with
an included backplate, so if you're installing an AIO
or a CPU cooler of any sort, and you're not really
experienced, it's a lot easier because the backplate's
already there.
You don't have to fumble through a big bag ...
I mean, there's still a big bag, but you don't have to
fumble and try to figure out what backplate to use.
It's already on there. We just have to take these off.
And I have my trusty lttstore.com screwdriver just for that.
I guess that brings us to our RAM.
This is a 6000 MegaTransfer per second CL40 kit from AORUS.
And then a M.2.
This is AORUS' 7000s Gen4 SSD.
They will be having Gen5 SSDs launch with this platform,
but we weren't able to get one on time, unfortunately.
This is an ultra-fast NVMe 1.4 protocol-supported drive
with read speeds of up to 7 GB a second,
which is really, really fast.
With Gen5 SSDs, you'll see somewhere in the neighborhood
of 10 to 12 GBs a second, so whew.
We've got a lot of really fast storage
coming our way these days.
I love that boards come with this, now.
The M.2?
Boom. It's installed. No little screws to mess around with.
Just a little cute little latch.
Usually I wouldn't be putting a graphics card in
while the motherboard's still in the box,
but I wanted to show you guys a little feature
on a lot of high-end boards like this one.
You put your graphics card in, and you want to take it out,
but it's in the case. You've got to, like, stick a knife
down the back to release the lock.
Well, not on this board.
You just press this little button. It releases the lock.
Pull the graphics card out.
I wanted to show you what easy-latch looks like
on this board.
It's a little bit of a simpler design, just a little bit
of an extended latch, but it does still achieve
the same thing.
It's a lot easier to remove.
You're also going to find that the PCIe slots on this board
are reinforced.
There's a little metal piece over top
that increases the tensile strength by 2.2 times,
which means it's going to be able to support those
big honkin' GPUs with huge heat spreaders, no problem.
One of the problems with AM4's backplate,
despite me liking the backplate being there,
is it wasn't secured to anything, so as soon as you take off
those front brackets, it would just be loose.
Well, it looks like, on this board, the socket on the front
screws in to the backplate, so I can pick this thing up,
and I can shake it around. I can put it a case,
and my backplate isn't going to fall off,
which is frickin' awesome.
Despite me hyping up the ATX 3.0 Gen5-ready 600 Watt cable,
we're not going to be using that because we don't have
those new GPUs.
This GPU just uses two 8-pins, so that's what we're
going to use.
Sweet.
I didn't realize, but this cooler has fan and RGB leads
actually on the radiator itself, so you don't have to
run all the fan cables back behind your computer
and loop it back in from this part.
It's all actually where it needs to be,
which is super sweet.
Look at that! We got a complete system now.
Uh, I guess we can fire it up?
One thing to note, on the new Zen4 platform,
memory training, which is the process of the CPU and the RAM
trying to figure out what speeds it can run at
takes a while, so turning on the system,
we were just sitting there for, like, a minute
before it actually started to post, so don't get worried.
Give it a little bit more time, and it'll probably turn on.
Hey! We're booted!
Shout out to the new Zen4 CPUs having an IGPU.
I think I'm having an issue with this graphics card.
I haven't tried to troubleshoot it at all yet,
but with the IGPU, we're getting output. The system works.
Ahh!
As with any new build, and especially one on a new platform,
there's a few things you're going to want to do
before you jump into Windows and just start gaming.
First and foremost is updating the BIOS.
Now, on this board, there's a special USB port you can use
to update the BIOS without even needing
a CPU, a GPU, anything.
You just need to plug in the 24-pin and the CPU power,
plug in the USB, and follow the procedure
to update the board.
Super easy.
Once your BIOS is updated, you're going to want to
go in an enable AMD EXPO, which is their version of XMP.
That means you're going to get the full potential speed
of your RAM instead of just running at the default speed.
With this specific RAM and board,
by default we're running at 4800 MegaTransfers per second
when we could be running at 6000.
We just have to click enter to enable EXPO,
and you can see DDR5 6000 CL40, and then just save and exit.
After you do enable EXPO, the board is probably
going to memory train again, so don't be scared
if it takes a minute or two to boot after setting this.
All right. That actually took like, 20 seconds,
and we're back in the BIOS, and we see that sweet, sweet
6000 MegaTransfers per second. Super fast.
Another thing you can do in the BIOS to improve your
performance, aside from enabling EXPO, is enabling
PBO, or Precision Boost Overdrive.
It's AMD's built-in feature that allows your CPU
to go beyond it's stock power limits to get a little
bit more performance, so we're going to turn that on.
Now we can play some games.
One of the cool features about these boards
is the GB control center.
Now, in here, we can go in and tweak things like
your CPU frequency.
You can go into RGB fusion and change the RGB.
I've set it to purple on the motherboard and the RAM
to match Short Circuit colors.
You can even go in here and change your fan profile.
Like I want full speed. Uh!
Or I want quiet. Uh.
They also have an SSD tool that can give you some metrics
about your SSD.
We got our GB one in here. It's telling us we have
100% life rating because it's brand new,
and we haven't used it.
It also comes with an update utility, so you can update
all of the drivers, like your chipset drivers,
your RGB drivers, all the different drivers that come
with your motherboard, so you don't have to go
on their website and figure out,
"Oh, which version do I need? This one? This one? That one?"
It just tells you which one and installs them for you.
You just click one button. It's pretty sick!
I want to run a Cinebench run. I haven't seen these CPUs.
Oh! Actually, we don't even know what CPU it is yet.
Maybe we should check.
It's a 16-core, so it's got to be a 7950X.
Wow. Holy (bleep).
Look at that score, Brandon.
That's faster than a 32-core second-gen Threadripper
by, like, not an insignificant amount.
For reference, the previous flagship,
the 5950X scored a 28,500 score.
We're at 35,5000.
That's a lot faster.
These clock speeds are crazy.
It's so insane to think that we just got this CPU,
put it in a motherboard, and it's just chilling at
5.15 GHz.
Like, no overclock. I mean, we do have PBO on,
so it could be going beyond that, but that's just
frickin' nuts.
I got Cinebench running again at a 10 minute stress test
just to kind of see where our temps are at.
We are looking at about 95 degrees at the hottest,
but that's actually not that bad when you consider that
PBO is on.
The CPU is allowed to go way beyond its stock TDP.
You can see we're running anywhere between
200 to 220, 230 Watts. Yeah, 230 Watts peak.
That's a lot of heat, and it's handling it.
All right, so we're gaming in Halo Infinite.
We're running 4K ultra settings, and we're getting
well over 70 FPS, 75 FPS depending on where we're at.
Now, obviously, your FPS on a game is going to be
a little bit more dependent on the graphics card,
but having a good CPU ensures you're making the most
of your good graphics card. That's very important.
Ugh! Look at these frags. Let's go!
Thanks to AORUS for sponsoring this video.
If you guys want to check out their motherboards,
we'll have a link down below, especially for their
X670 models for the new CPUs.
We'll also have all of the rest of the kit
we tried out today in the description, as well.
If you like this video, maybe check out the iPhone 14
unboxing I just did. That was super fun.
Hit the like button. Get subscribed.
And I'll see you in the next one.