only one motherboard because your system
needs only one CPU but with so many options all with different
configurations of power phases PCI Express Lanes and m.2 Slots how do you
choose which one is truly the best is it actually worth it to spend more money on
a higher end motherboard well Micro Center sponsored this video and sent us
10 motherboards from various manufacturers to test and um let me put
it this way if the results surprised us then they're almost definitely going to
surprise you like this was not the Biggest Loser not by a long
shot and neither is Micro Center get the best
prices and best selection on PC hardware and other technology at any of
microcenter's 25 locations across the United States new customers can get a
free 240 Gigabyte SSD at Micro Center offer valid in-store only no purchase
necessary
for every motherboard we tore down and rebuilt the exact same test bench we're
using the same memory CPU Cooler power supply SSD and graphics card we even
made sure to grab the exact same type of thermal paste for the last few boards
when our first tube ran out this is to control our variables as tightly as
possible we even tested every system in the same climate controlled environment
after building each bench we'll have affiliate links down below for
everything we use by the way we immediately found an important reason to
choose one board over the other not every UEFI BIOS is created equally some
of these didn't even allow us to change the pl1 and pl2 power limits that much
if at all and while most of them did we
had to dig through advanced CPU settings to find them in some cases after
powering on we updated the BIOS enabled XMP and maxed out our long duration
power limits whenever possible we could have gone for a more you know
vanilla configuration here but given this is a more Enthusiast oriented
exploration and that we are looking for benefits of more premium motherboards we
felt this was the right approach the reality is modern CPUs have gotten
really good at knowing exactly when it is okay to boost and when it is not
these days it's actually pretty hard to break a CPU and on most boards you'll
get some kind of warning when you toy with the settings that can do so
Enthusiast cooling has also gotten really good with most performance tier
gaming systems being equipped with a 240 millimeter AIO water cooler or a large
Tower heatsink we used a Noctua nhd15 which will run you about 115 bucks at
Microcenter and should give our processor plenty of room to stretch its
legs while providing some incidental cooling to the vrms which could help
performance something to note is that even with a great cooler our cinebench
and blender tests never saw our CPU push past the 250 watt Mark and this is in
spite of setting the power limits to the maximum like 4 thousand watts in some
cases so what gives with that well the
thing is even if we do find some performance differences from board to
board changing the power limits is kind of like removing the governor on a car
yes theoretically the speedometer goes up to 300 miles an hour but your engine
is still going to max out on its own and like occur you can open up some more
Headroom by increasing voltage adjusting load line calibration and manually
changing the frequency of your chip but that's topic for another video like this
one or for you to explore by subbing to an extreme or clocker like your Bauer
this video is all about out of the factory performance and right out of the
gate I'm really surprised our big winner was
MSI's gone like z590 which ended up with the highest cinebench score and the
fastest blender render times to be clear this is a 900 motherboard competing
against boards in the 100 to 200 category but I mean even in the days
when motherboard's affected system performance by a lot it was common to
see expensive boards that were like loaded up with features in this case
Thunderbolt 4 Wi-Fi 6E obviously super Premium Power delivery but it didn't
actually offer a clear performance Advantage unless you were trying to
break Sub-Zero overclocking records of course that performance Advantage was
still pretty small so let's take a look at the board that came in second place
at least in terms of cinebench our ASRock z590 Pro 4 was behind by just 19
points in cinebench and ran only a couple of seconds slower in the renders
yet managed a whopping one percent more FPS in CS go okay that that last bit
doesn't sound that impressive but it costs a fraction as much at 185 US
Dollars and while it only has 14 power
phases with 50 amp chokes 2.5 gigabit Lan and no onboard Wi-Fi the choice is
pretty clear if you care about value buy one of these instead and maybe use the
money you saved at ltstore.com the beanie and the water bottle are a great
combo as for the rest of our results they're mostly what we were expecting
this CPUs are more integrated than ever these days so motherboards don't
contribute like they used to but there are some outliers for instance MSI wins
the crown for the best microatx b560 board as well beating out three other
z590 boards at least in cinebench the b560m mag mortar was slower to render by
eight or seven percent in BMW and classroom respectively but it had the
third highest cinebench score the second highest FPS in CS go and the second
fastest turn time in Civ 6. b550s aren't
supposed to overclock so picking up a supposedly lower tier board for its
performance is a little unintuitive meanwhile MSI z590a Pro lost instead of
inch by just 17 points but how well you
could explain this with some simple run-to-run variants that's such a narrow
Victory that's barely one at all you'd think that but we actually re-ran our
benches on every board and these margins between them while narrow were
surprisingly consistent one of the major benefits we saw with MSI boards was when
you set them up it asks you what kind of cooling solution you have the more
robust solution you pick the higher they push both the long and short duration
power limits since an nhd-15 is basically as good as a solid water
cooling setup we chose water cooled instead of tower cooler and it maxed out
the limits for us at 4 000 Watts you could easily achieve the same on a
different brand but this kind of user friendliness is something the others
could learn from of course performance isn't the entire story MSI's z590 board
managed to stay about 10 degrees cooler on the vrms so while the 90 plus degrees
of our b560m mag mortar isn't out of spec for these kinds of components a hot
day could easily push that to 100 or 110
and remember we have some airflow around the socket if you're using an AIO or
you're in a tight case you might not as for our losers
well as you could have guessed it's mostly the b560s and our solitary h510
board the Gigabyte z590 UD was 20 points behind at cinebench and so it
unfortunately gets to hang out down here despite performing significantly better
in the render times and perform the best when it comes to CS go at nearly 560 FPS
average so if you're purely after gaming performance this one might call to you
from Micro Center shelf or in one of their custom prebills despite being down
here in the losers bracket as for the one that was bad across the
board there are a few reasons for this first off is their inability to set
higher power limits most of them capped out at 125 150 or 200 watts and
increasing the duration limit didn't help all that much either most of them
aren't running too hot and if you chose a matching mid-tier CPU they would most
likely be fine but they're just not able to live up to the 11 900k's full 250
watt potential they typically have fewer power phases and a less robust power
delivery system with just one eight pin EPS connector speaking of phases we're
building out a DIY phase change CPU Cooler with some help from Brian the
electrician so make sure you get subscribed so you don't miss it back to
our b560 boards though these power draw limits aren't surprising but what is
surprising are the bottom two boards you might be shocked to learn the ASRock
h510m wasn't in last place it has no XMP
option and memory can only go as high as 3200 megahertz so it did see the worst
CS go score at 407 22 FPS average however it absolutely crushed our loser
board in cinebench by roughly 4
000 points render times were also won by nearly an extra minute in the BMW render
and two minutes in the classroom as impressive as this is these results are
still significantly lower than the b560m board above it but what the heck is
going on with our Gigabyte b560m ds3h well power phases don't seem to matter
all that much until they do this thing starts out
strong and the initial render in cinebench R23 finishes quickly giving
you hope but with each subsequent render the score goes down and down and down
all the way to about 7688 points
ouch if we check our clock speeds in power
they're all over the place while CPU temperatures are mediocre at 80 to 84
degrees what gives well our vrm temperatures are terrible
quickly hitting 112 degrees Celsius this
board is trying to squeeze all the power it can out for our CPU but the load is
simply too much for the system to bear and it buckles onto the pressure
dropping wattage and clock speeds in an effort to lower the temperatures
bringing them back up to see if it's okay yet and then quickly settling back
down again it's like a person trying to take a bath in boiling water the toe
dips in they recoil and wait a moment and then they they try again and it just
keeps going like that our other CPU heavy tasks saw similarly poor
performance with this board seen the worst turn times in Civ 6 and the second
worst FPS in CS go I have a hunch that
if the memory had been set to 3200 megahertz it would have lost the battle
to the ASRock h510m as well so our winner is obvious but it's not the
Godlike as it stands the best board of the bunch with prices we can actually
recommend is the ASRock z590 Pro 4. it
didn't come out on top in any category but it was always near the head of the
pack at 185 dollars the BIOS was relatively easy to use it
has a lot of options for expansion and storage and it comes with asrock's base
frequency boost technology that supposedly pushes non-k CPUs past their
limit through base clock overclocking so theoretically you should be able to buy
this board put a lower end chip in it and still get pretty good performance so
you can afford something better our honorable mention is MSI's b560m mag
mortar for a smaller machine on a budget it's a great choice just like Micro
Center today's sponsor get the best prices and the best selection on PC
hardware and Technology at any of Micro Center's 25 locations across the United
States new customers can get a free 240 Gigabyte SSD at Micro Center offer valid
in-store only no purchase necessary thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed
this video make sure to check out our how motherboards work turbo nude Edition
for a better explanation of how some of this works I'll have the link down below