every motherboard with a z490 chipset
has one thing in common Intel Intel into wait a minute what in
the heck is this thing it it says z490
but there it is obviously an AMD CPU
socket where did this thing come from Reddit obviously
don't you read the video title but more importantly what is it why did they make
it why ultimately didn't they make more of them and how does this compare to the
AMD motherboards we know and love these three m.2 slots tell us that the story
might have something to do with PCIe Lanes but from what we've been able to
glean this entire chipset was canceled
before it could be released is this the competitor that could have
been did we miss out on something amazing well it turns out that for an
engineering experiment it's surprisingly functional so we're going to be taking
it for a spin with close attention to all the Curious little details
after you pay close attention to these details from our sponsor Mexico whether
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this strange motherboard first appeared on Reddit a year and a half ago but has
otherwise completely flown under the radar that is until now which is kind of
wild because as skeptical as I was this is no hoax this is an AMD CPU socket and
it is on a motherboard with a z490 chipset just not the kind of z490
chipset that you might think now we have seen motherboards in the past with
support for both Intel and AMD CPUs most
recently from ECS using a daughter board but if you look carefully at that
product the chipset is actually on that secondary board that's because both AMD
and Intel use proprietary protocols and
no modern motherboard chipset is capable of communicating with CPUs from both
vendors so no this is not an AMD socket
frankensteined onto an Intel chipset board but rather just another case of
AMD ripping off Intel's naming scheme to make it seem like they're a generation
ahead but that doesn't mean that it's boring let's jump in and see how close
this thing was to being ready one thing we can tell immediately between the
particular shade of orange they use and the lettering for the silk screen not to
mention the fact that it says Gigabyte right on it is that this board was
originally from Gigabyte and while it might be missing some of the Cosmetics
we can also tell that it was based on the x470 aorus gaming 7 because between
the layout and features and from looking at the pixels you can tell they've got a
lot in common for our CPU given that this is in the same family as the rest
of AMD's 400 series motherboards I think it is possible well probable that first
and second gen ryzen chips like this 2700x will work but even though x470
boards like this one's cousin can be updated to support third and up to 5th
gen well there are no BIOS updates available for engineering samples so
third gen and up would be basically impossible as for RAM we'll be going
with these g-skill flarex sticks rated for 3200 Mega transfers per second 2000
series chips could do better and did benefit from faster but this was kind of
the bang for the buck speed at the time that I would expect any motherboard to
support fairly easily
finally it's it's a Time bringing us to the most
obvious advantage of this chipset compared to x470 an extra m.2 slot okay
I'm leaving out some important details here it's not quite as simple as
slapping on an extra slot and calling it a day you actually need the PCI Express
Lanes to support that slot and this board's x470 cousin is clearly already
maxing out this platform's 32 Lanes so
then how does this one have more ah
the secret is under this heatsink with
it removed we'll find a couple of things first is the AMD chipset itself this
looks pretty darn similar to an x470 chipset and honestly probably uses the
exact same silicon it wouldn't be the first time we saw a manufacturer
artificially limit the features on a chipset to address different price
points if you remember from our Intel r d Center tour they actually have special
chipsets for development that they can reconfigure through software to be any
member of the 12th gen chipset family that they wish so the different codes
etched in the top are probably the only things that differentiate this from an
x470 but this a chip from plx yes this seems to
be the secret sauce of the AMD z490
chipset that enables it to have four extra general purpose gen 3 PCIe Lanes
it's also a big part of the reason this board and any like it never made it to
the market more on that later this chip is known as a multiplexer and while plx
is probably the best known they are just one of the many manufacturers who
produce them a multiplexer's purpose is to connect multiple PCIe devices
Downstream to the same Lanes originating
from the CPU or for that matter from the
AMD chipset now obviously a multiplexer
can't magically create extra bandwidth And if every single Downstream device
was running Full Tilt at the same time it would be bottlenecked but that rarely
happens and these devices were very common back in the mid 2000s in the
Heyday of SLI so that motherboard manufacturers could squeeze as many 16x
slots as possible onto a motherboard for three-way and four-way configurations of
course now that multiple gpus aren't really a thing anymore the focus for
this chipset was on increasing support for NVMe ssds now because I really want
to load this thing up and see just how close it was to final we're going to be
going high end here with three of these awesome sabrant rocket 4 plus PCIe Gen 4
drives we're gonna have those and more linked down below oh whoops I've got
these on wrong evidently we need um hook and loop Fastener to hold down
this one doesn't have all the mounting hardware all right it's engineering sample don't
worry though that's an older one not a rocket plus other fun quirks once we've
got the board powered up here we go watch this
all the RGB on the motherboard lights up in white and then that's the last time
you're ever going to see it because any control for it appears to have been
completely removed from the BIOS I mean you don't need no RGB on an engineering
board do you surprisingly all three of these slots do work but not everything
about the board does even though I haven't personally tested it yet we did
test it before getting started and there are absolutely some quirks on this board
the bottom PCIe slot for example is
completely dead and so is the onboard networking what's Curious is that the
network chip is detected in Windows but no driver package from Intel that we
could find would install so it's possible that it's an engineering sample
as well ryzen 2000 chips didn't have onboard gpus so this is the only way for
us to get a video output speaking of video output we've been outputting some
really great exclusive videos over on flowplane.com how about this one
showcasing some of the tick tock hacks we tried that you won't find on YouTube
Big Moment
to be clear I am expecting it to work it's just that this kind of borderline
engineering sample stuff if you look at it wrong or blow on it too hard
sometimes it stops working so nothing's a guarantee hello
yes okay time to see what else works or
doesn't work as it turns out the USB headers do work the back I O all works
except for Ethernet even the USBC Port so here's one of our steam drives which
should allow us to game on this completely unreleased motherboard and
everything about this just feels and looks completely normal 2700x8 core
processor it's turboing as you would expect Gigabyte z490 RS Master chipset AMD
Promontory I don't remember what their coding was for x470 Promontory means it
has a Zen 2 ready BIOS that's it wait
Bixby how does Bixby figure into all this
my arch nemesis returns no these are code names Promontory was used for
everything from A320 to b550 and Bixby
was used for x570 I think the most
notable thing about all of this is how not notable it is though
everything is operating exactly as I would expect the interesting thing about
this run isn't the score but rather how fast the CPU turbos were sitting at
anywhere between around 3.9 to 4 gigahertz which is
about what we'd expect our Wi-Fi card is only 2.4 gigahertz so I guess we're
going to be pushing it a little harder even by throwing a network card in this slot
here and seeing if the whole thing will run together we're off the rails Now
ladies and gentlemen not in a good place I got him
okay uh I need Shields I need Shields no
there's an invisible guy behind me but that's not what's important what's
important is that I'm running at 118 frames per second in Halo infinite
obviously that's not like the most FPS is ever or anything like that but what
it is is working okay it's a normal
motherboard which means you're probably wondering a few things first and
foremost being why AMD chose the Z blank
90 naming convention which is associated exclusively with Intel or well almost
exclusively and the particularly Savvy among you are probably wondering how it
is that this z490 project came about
before Intel's z490 well
this isn't the first time that AMD has pulled this kind of product naming
one-upmanship back when Intel's x299 chipset was the King of the Hill AMD
released their competing threadripper platform x 399 seemingly to paint Intel
into a corner and make it seem like when Intel launched their next gen that they
were copying AMD when actually they were just following their own established
pattern and AMD room the party but unconventional naming isn't what gets
the product canceled what does is price those plx chips were seemingly necessary
for motherboard manufacturers to Market their boards as z490 and they came at a
heavy price you'd have easily been paying 300 to even 350 dollars for what
an extra Drive how many of you even have
more than one m.2 drive today let alone four plus years ago add to that that
teams would have needed to do new BIOS engineering and provide law long-term
support for what would have probably been a low volume product and suddenly
the x470 ARs gaming 7 that this is based
on looks like a much more compelling value at 240 dollars brand new to be
honest then I don't think we really missed out on anything here sure there
are some people out there who would benefit from more PCIe Lanes but 2000
series and 3000 Series ryzen also had
threadripper equivalents that I mean by the time you're spending this kind of
money on a motherboard not only had more PCIe Lanes but also more memory
bandwidth and the possibility for higher core counts if only AMD had kept their
promise for platform longevity which you can tell I'm totally over and besides
AMD already had x570 under development to provide more Lanes than the x470
chipset that it replaced I can see why AMD officially canceled d490 at computex
in 2018. I mean x570 came out less than
a year later so all in all rest in peace confusingly named chipset
you died before you could live and were forgotten not long after just like this
segue to our sponsor thanks to Micro Center for sponsoring today's video new
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out Micro Center today for all of your Tech needs thanks for checking out this
rare motherboard with us I really love it when we get these kinds of engineer examples or prototypes to mess around
with it can be kind of hit or miss this one was a hit but if you want to see a
Miss check out the video that Alex and I did where we looked at a prototype water
cooled laptop um