re: PC Discussion - Gaming, Performance and Enthusiasts

The hits for the X299 platform disaster just keep coming for Intel, now apparently almost ALL motherboards have serious VRM overheating issues.

So they've went from Kaby Lake having serious heating issues with overclocking at all, to a 20-40% power draw increase over Broadwell for the equiv CPU, with even worse heat issues that AIO coolers can't handle 4.6GHz OC's or higher to now having motherboards with serious VRM issues.

It's nice to see Intel take back the heat/power hog title from AMD though.

Intel should have never moved the launch up, clearly not only were they not ready, motherboard manufacturers weren't either.

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Measuring the front and the back of his AORUS X299 Gaming 3 board, the temperatures read 84.2 and 105.9 degrees Celcius. The heatsinks on the motherboards apparently are not enough to keep the MOSFET temperatures in check. He points out that his ASUS X299 Prime is even worse, hitting those temperatures in just under 10 minutes.

This is made even worse by the fact that this is only at 4.6GHz at 1.2V, which is very moderate for a 24/7 overclock. If it is reading as 105.9 degrees at the back of the board, the temperature of the MOSFET could actually be ~120 degrees Celcius. That is because there is a PCB in between that insulates it somewhat, hence the 105.9 degrees Celcius reading. Also, Der8auer states that this was after 15 minutes of Prime95 non-AVX load. If he used a CPU stress program that actually uses AVX, the temperatures will be even higher.

Apparently, the Skylake-X CPUs are drawing too much for only a single 8-pin feeding it. This results in higher temperatures and can even burn some power supply cables. With the thermocouple probe, the temperature on the 8-pin cable read 65C on an open air test bench. Once inside a 40C or higher case in the summer, those temperatures can climb up to 80 or 90C, which is dangerous.

That is why according to him, he cannot recommend ANY X299 motherboard with only a single 8-pin PSU connector. He suggests waiting a month or two for manufacturers to release new boards with better designs that fixes these issues. It does not matter whether it is Gigabyte, ASUS, ASRock, MSI, etc. No matter how good the VRM design claim is, if it only has an 8-pin power connecter feeding the CPU, stay away from it.

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