Z490 Soon - better than expected.

[Gouhan]

Just looked at all the leaks for Z490 boards and took delivery of the first. I think the NDA for these board announcements lifts next week on the 30th. Actualy CPU reviews though etc should be mid-May.

All the boards are already PCIe 4.0 compliant, which I suppose is expected as Rocket-Lake will still be LGA 1200 compatible and supports PCIe 4.0 natively along with 20 PCIE 4.0 lanes from the CPU. No idea what the Chipset supports though, hopefully X4 PCIe 4.0 link or even better x8.

More interesting though is the support for per core Hyper-Threading on Comet-Lake CPUs.
Should make for some interesting CPU configurations or overclocking. For instance you can turn off HT on the worst cores which should help with clock speed. Keep it on for the best cores. Could make for a for a 16 thread CPU that actually has 10 cores or 12 Thread/ 10 Core etc . Not sure what that would mean for performance, but interesting none the less. Options are always a good thing. Especially seeing that HT/SMT doesn't help games at all provided you have at 8 cores (PS5/XSX gen games may\will most likely change this).

For memory support, IMC is greatly improved, where even mid range boards are doing 4600MT/s+ with relative ease, some supporting or able to support rather, up to DDR 5,200.

Power seems to be massively improved across all the boards. Not only more capable power circuitry, but some rival that which is on current high end X299 boards. Have seen Z490 boards capable of providing over 1,400A for sustained loads.

With Rocket-lake bringing a new architecture to the platform later this year, Comet-Lake will be short lived but will give a nice glimpse into what sort of platform improvements we can expect by year's end, assuming we manage to avert a zombie apocalypse.

I can say for sure we will have a review up only on the 13th of May which is the official NDA lift date.

 

[Gouhan]

NDA for motherboard reviews and CPUs has been moved to the 20th of May from the 13th

 

[iamgigglz]

Have seen Z490 boards capable of providing over 1,400A for sustained loads.

Wut.

 

[Gouhan]

Wut.

Yeah the AORUS Z490 Extreme can put out insane amounts of power. That PWM is probably by numbers, more capable than those found on all X299 boards.
True 16 phase controller as well I think it's the same one as on the AORUS X570 Extreme.
Looks as if GIGABYTE gave up on thier true 16-phase solution as was on the X570 Extreme. Back to an 8 phase system with doublers.

With the 10900K allowed to consume up to 250W in certain Turbo conditions, it's no surprise as those about the right sort of figures for HEDT.
Core i9 10980XE @ 4.5GHZ consumes around that much with no HT. So in terms of improvements to process, I don't think there's any change between Cascade-Lake & Comet Lake at all. Either way, we need serious power these days so these sorts of power configurations are going to be a lot more common. I think MSI, ROG & AORUS have 16 true phase solutions somewhere in their lineup.

 

[douglash]

Yoh! How things have changed a bit.. 1440A is an insane amount of power.. :O

Sent from my LYA-L29 using Tapatalk

 

[iamgigglz]

90A per phase. That’s mad. I’m assuming that’s at something like 1.2v, so like 1700W???
I’m actually confused; in what universe would you want even half that much power going to your CPU? It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

 

[GoukoTenrou]

90A per phase. That’s mad. I’m assuming that’s at something like 1.2v, so like 1700W???
I’m actually confused; in what universe would you want even half that much power going to your CPU? It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Maybe for heavy overclockers?

From what i remember, the new 10th gen i9 will draw a lot of power stock, although I have no idea how people are going to keep them cool.

 

[Valheru]

From what i remember, the new 10th gen i9 will draw a lot of power stock, although I have no idea how people are going to keep them cool.

From the marketing material they claim that the reduction in silicon height will result in better heat transfer as they will still be using STIM and have increased the height of the IHS accordingly (better conductor than silicone). So we win and likely the overclockers to for something like direct die cooling.

But yeah, this is going to be a challenge. I can get my 6950X to eat 250W at 4.4 all core - but there is no way I can keep it cool with the 150i AIO. You need something more exotic: a delid, a lap, liquid metal & open loop.

 

[GoukoTenrou]

From the marketing material they claim that the reduction in silicon height will result in better heat transfer as they will still be using STIM and have increased the height of the IHS accordingly (better conductor than silicone). So we win and likely the overclockers to for something like direct die cooling.

But yeah, this is going to be a challenge. I can get my 6950X to eat 250W at 4.4 all core - but there is no way I can keep it cool with the 150i AIO. You need something more exotic: a delid, a lap, liquid metal & open loop.

Yeah, from what I could find it looks like 10th gen i9 will draw around 250W ish.

Hoping that their new cooling solution works better. I know JayzTwoCents had endless hassles with his 9980xe hitting thermal limit instantly running Cinebench, and that was with a 420 rad custom loop. Although in his case it was because the motherboard was trying to push 1.4V to all 18 cores, so he had to do some voltage adjusting but still runs hotter than you would think.

 

[Valheru]

I can say for sure we will have a review up only on the 13th of May which is the official NDA lift date.

Err...bump? Plz?

 

[Gouhan]

I can't give specifics but what I can say is that the 6 ore parts, that is the i5 series are surprisingly good for gaming at high clocks without drawing too much power.
I know we all want the 10 core part, but games do not scale past 8 cores, most not past 6 in a meaningful way. You're still better off with a high clock frequency 6 core part than you would be with more cores at a lower frequency.

similar to how Sony approached the PS5 and perhaps MS to a lesser degree. While in that case it's strictly GPU related (graphics being inherently a parallel process), the logic still follows. It's much easier to scale performance in a linear and predictable way than trying to extract opportunities for parallelism (multi core) so clock frequency serves us more than more cores for gaming.
==================================================================
This applies to 9th Gen

6 core, 6 thread CPU @ 5.2GHz > 8/12/16 Cores @ 5GHz
5.2GHz 6 core @ 5.2GHz Prime95 Power load is around 125W max (Just about anything can cool this including mid range air coolers)
compare this with 200W or even 215W~ 8 core CPU with HT @ 5GHz (Only for AIO and better).

We insist on SMT/HT but in reality we lose nothing by disabling HT. In fact, I mostly run all machines I have without SMT and HT even with 7980XE/9980XE/10980XE 4.5GHz 18 cores will beat 4.3GHz with 36 Threads. Even in productivity workloads. Yes it's a but slower but only by 10% or maybe 15% at most. But for that you can run cooler (a good 12'C lower at the top) and draw far less power. That is 250W for 4.5GHz 18 Core vs 380W for 4.3GHz 36 thread.

Disabling HT also allows tuning of the Cacheline/Uncore frequency. Since this also requires an increase in input voltage, running with HT means you run out of thermal headroom much quicker, therefor keeping that clock a low lower.

Disabling HT also relieves the IMC, so you can clock DRAM higher. Overall, the benefits of disabling SMT outweigh whatever you may lose by far.

The exact same applies to 10th gen. 20 threads will do nothing for your gaming, but 10 threads at 5GHz will bring you under the PL2 limit of 250W, lower temps and give you better performance.

 

[Valheru]

Thanks bud, post the full review when you can, really interested in hearing your opinion. Need to see what is out there and decide on possible replacement in the near future, so something like a 10900K is right up my alley, good for gaming, great for workload.

I use virtualization A LOT so will be keen on seeing how far the SMT enabled chip can go.

 

[Pickled_Dick]

Good luck cooling these 14nm chips

 

[Gouhan]

Thanks bud, post the full review when you can, really interested in hearing your opinion. Need to see what is out there and decide on possible replacement in the near future, so something like a 10900K is right up my alley, good for gaming, great for workload.

I use virtualization A LOT so will be keen on seeing how far the SMT enabled chip can go.

Well then you'll appreciate the per core HT.
Because you may find on your particular CPU, best bet is 10C/16T @ 5.1GHz for instance. That is likely to be faster than 5GHz 20T. Losing 4 threads vs gaining 1GHz in total across all cores.

 

[Gouhan]

Good luck cooling these 14nm chips

That's not much of an issue if you configure the power the right way. Intel can't match AMD right now as AMD simply has the node and design advantage. Their silicon is exceptional in power on top of having a much newer node.

Not all that boad though for despite the ancient manufacturing node, I can run an 18 core CPU @ 4.5GHz using as little as 1.115v. Not too tough to cool.

 

[Gouhan]

Looks like Per Core HT disable/enable may be a problem for most monitoring apps.
HWiNFO, CoreTemp can't even load. Prime95 can't see more than the physical number of cores either.
Now one has to wonder how games will deal with this. Oddly enough 3DMark has no problem scaling with an odd number of threads.

 

[Gouhan]

Two of the Finest