hello good people Eber here with Hardware Canucks and today is gonna be
an interesting day because I will be swapping out the motherboard on my
existing X299 workstation PC to something a little bit more robust so if
you do recall about a few months ago I think we did a build sponsored by Intel
featuring pretty much every hind component out there including an 18 core
processor with a lot of with two gtx 980 ti's and just maxed out stuff but
after then I've been using this PC for editing because you know it's 18 cores
who want to say no to that right and one of the things that I've run into is of
course with the motherboard so I've been using or we decided to go with an MSI x2
99m gaming carbon pro AC motherboard and one of the bottlenecks or I guess one of
the issues that we had with that motherboard was the VRMs weren't capable
enough to overclock the 18 core processor because I tried it
but just is to see if I can push it above 3.5 gigahertz or even hit the 3.5
gigahertz overclocking setting but unfortunately I wasn't because the VRMs
just got way too hot and so it just wasn't able to overclock the 18 core
processor fast forward to Computex we were at the EVGA booth checking out some
cool stuff and something really caught our attention it was this guy right over
here the X299 micro ATX version 2 and what's really interesting about this
motherboard is obviously first and foremost it is a micro ATX form factor
but most importantly it features active cooling for the VRMs that means I would
be able to overclock my 18 core processor so the objective for this
video is to keep the components identical so that includes the cooling
solution the case the graphics card the memory and storage stuff exactly where
they are except for the motherboard and we will be swapping out of that
component with this guy so let the teardown process begin but first a quick
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how are I good people so the swapping process is complete but now it's time to
see if the system actually builds because you never know I might have
screwed something up while installing the CPU or the RAM or anything like that
but fingers crossed this actually works here we go it works actually works well
fans are actually blasting a blade but I guess that has to do with I might have
to go into the BIOS and change the fan profile but this is this is news to me
because I always screw up something so this is awesome well after spending the
majority of the day playing around with the EVGA BIOS I was finally able to
overclock the core i9 7980 Extreme Edition processor to 4.3 gigahertz and
1.15 volts now I leave the rest the overclocking settings somewhere in the
video down here so you can actually see those for yourselves but this is
fabulous to me this is great news in my opinion because being able to achieve
that kind of clock speed on all 18 cores consistently is just awesome
I mean being a nerd here it's just it really does show something in terms of
where we are in terms of technology and how far we've come now I did make sure
to run a few stress tests and concerns to ability so the first thing I did was
of course run the Adobe Media encoder test to see if those cloud speeds were
consistent and that was in fact true I did notice I didn't notice any dumb
clocks or anything like that while I was rendering a video which is
great and the only thing that I would mention is that I had my AV x offset set
to 3 so if you're hammering the CPU or in my case if I were to you know stressed
as a CPU at 100% on all 18 cores then I can expect clock speeds to go to 4
gigahertz that's something that I'm okay with moving on to temperatures and I
definitely expected a drastic increase in that department because you know when
you overclock a CPU and the obvious drawback or I guess one of the
compromises if you need to take is the increase in terms of temperatures in my
case I was rendering a 4k video or using Adobe Media encoder and my low temps
were around 50 C at stock settings compared to 78 degree Celsius when the
CPU is overclocked at four point three gigahertz it's not too bad especially if
you think about this form factor because I'm using the X62
a cooler from NZXT and a push-pull configuration so you know getting that
kind of temps and their micro ATX chassis is pretty awesome I also want to
touch base on power draw and this is an important factor for me personally
because I live in Toronto Canada and I pay one of the highest hydro rates so
you know being able to find a system that can be as efficient but also not
consume a lot of power is also something on my wish list when it comes to
building the optimized workstation PC and this is certainly not for that as
you can see under stock settings the system draws around 400 watts and with
the 4.3 gigahertz overclock the system drew around 520
watts which is ridiculous so does that mean that I'll be sticking with this
external PC in the long term no because I do intend to explore the coffee lake
ecosystem which is a lot more power efficient in my opinion but it's also
for the fact that you know with the recent update with Adobe Premiere Pro it
actually takes advantage of the integrated graphics chip on the
processor as well as the discrete graphics card to accelerate rendering
performance so I'm really curious to test out and compare the 8700K to the
18 core processor and see which one's faster and more efficient especially
when it comes to cooling and of course power drop because I really don't want
to pay those expensive hydro rates now that being said allow me to showcase
some benchmarks that I ran on this system with both the stock settings and
overclock settings so I'm not kicking some foot Cinebench at stock we got a
score of roughly 33 57 when compared to 42 13 on the overclocked 18 core
processor at four point three gigahertz again a massive improvement in terms of
performance right over there the same story goes when it comes to blender as
well so I did run the BMW render scene and the system had stock settings took
two minutes and 22 seconds compared to a minute and 57 seconds on the old clock
setting at 4.3 gigahertz I do want to mention that this PC isn't really geared
towards gaming or just external and in general you're much better off investing
that money into XIII 70 series or even the Rison platform because you're gonna
be saving a lot or getting a lot in terms of value so I'd really plan on
running in gaming benchmarks just because it just wouldn't make any sense
but here just for tests purposes Iran 3dmark fire strike extreme
test and I got roughly 13,000 on the overclock setting compared to 12,500
with the stock saying so it's not a drastic improvement right there which is
it to be expected and the last test here is rendering performance in fact it's
one of the reasons why I wanted to switch from the MSI motherboard to the
EVGA board and see if the overclock would actually make a difference in
terms of rendering so I took a 16 minute 4k project in this case it was the
cooler master of hmmmmm case review video you can check it out right over
here if you're interested but I took the 16 minute video and I rendered it to the
YouTube 4k or using YouTube 4 k % with Adobe Media encoder and it stock
settings the system took 14 minutes and 40 seconds to complete that task when
compared to 11 minutes and 27 seconds with the overclocked setting at four
point three gigahertz it is a significant improvement in my opinion
because when we try overclocking on the MSI board we really didn't see a drastic
difference in terms of rendering so this is definitely a win win and I want to
wrap things up by discussing some of the drawbacks with this EVGA x2 19
motherboard the first one is the lack of a multiple nvme inductive slots so this
particular motherboard only comes with one of them so I was I had to sacrifice
my scratch drive that I was using so that was kind of a disappointment the
second being it doesn't come with a USB 3.1 gen2 type-c port so I wasn't able to
hook up my WD hard drive or my W external storage array to this
motherboard now it did come with a type C to type a cable which obviously solves
the issue but if you're someone who uses if you have external devices that use a
USB type-c interface then you might find this a bit frustrating and I cannot
forget to talk about the active cooling solution for the V RMS take a listen to
this
so as you heard that's something that I have to deal with especially during
rendering times I can see or can hear those fans ramp up because you know it's
basically utilizing all 18 cores at 4.3 gigahertz so definitely keep them in
mind don't expect the best acoustic performance if you're trying to build an
ultimate compact extranet system with this particular motherboard it's just
not going to happen so I hope you took away something from this video in fact
it was an interesting experience for me swapping the MSI motherboard with EBG
board I definitely did not expect the system to boot right away because I
always screw something up in between and I have to obviously go back and
troubleshoot but I'm glad everything worked out just fine in fact I'm very
happy with the overclock because 4.3 gigahertz on all 18 course is
unimaginable it's the first time I'm looking at something like this because
it really is awesome but I can't wait to test out the 87 and can of course testy
Coffee Lake platform to see how it does in terms of rendering performance
and compared to this guy right over here so definitely stay tuned for that in
fact if you're interested in this comparison let me know in the comments
down below I'm Eber with Hardware Canucks thank you
so much watching and we'll see you in the next one