So 13 years ago, I ditched the AMD processor in my personal gaming rig and
switched to an Intel Core2 Duo E6600.
And since then, I have never looked back. Because quite frankly, while AMD
has had some reasonably compelling
values on offer, typically my personal rig upgrades were dictated more by who
had the top performance versus who had some good bang for the buck stuff in the
low end. Well, today is an interesting day
because while AMD's Ryzen third gen
processor, so I'm holding a 3900X here,
aren't exactly brand spanking new, what
is is a feature that I sorely need for
my setup. For those of you who aren't familiar, this is my gaming desktop, but
the key component that's missing is the
desktop. It's not here. I run a single
Thunderbolt cable through the wall into
this server closet where my personal rig, my wife's rig, and my home server
all reside. This allows me to isolate not just the noise, but also the
thermals so that this room doesn't heat up. I don't have central AC in my house.
Check this out. The ASRock X570
Aqua is one of the first AMD Ryzen third
gen supporting motherboards with not one
but two Thunderbolt 3 ports. And we're
going to take it for a test drive after this message from our sponsor.
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All right,
so why don't we start with taking a look at the board.
Oh crap. Where'd I put the CPU?
Left that in the pocket of my ass. What? Uh, ltstore.com.
First, I should probably acknowledge the elephant in the room. Uh, the keenite
among you probably noticed that this is not in fact the motherboard that I
claimed to have upgraded to a couple of months ago. Uh, this is the new Titan
RTX graphics card, but I had to go back to my old motherboard and Extreme
Edition 5960X 8 core because I didn't
realize when I put the new board in that there were no Thunderbolt 3 cables long
enough to go from my desktop through the
wall and then into my server closet. Fortunately, we have a solution for that
today, and we will get to that later. First, we got to swap out this board.
Now, those of you who are new to the channel might not know this, but we
actually used to do a ton of videos just
about motherboards, but the truth is I
just got kind of bored of them. I just felt like I didn't really have anything
to say. This one I have a fair bit to
say about. The X570 Aqua ticks a lot of
boxes for me. It's limited to just 999
units presumably because they figure not
too many people are going to be able to afford this monstrosity. It is one of
the heaviest boards that I have ever encountered and I don't want to show it
to you guys like this. Let's get this horrible peel off it. Wow. That ASRock
has some work to do on their peel game.
that. But that's fine because everything else about this thing, at least on
paper, is basically flawless. It uses a
reinforced PCB and reinforced PCI Express slots for reduced flexibility.
It features an all copper cooling solution. So, this is one of the few
X570 motherboards that has no cooling fan for the chipset on it because it's
going to be taken care of by your water cooler. They boast support for up to
5,000 MHz DDR4 memory. And the I/IO is
absolutely incredible. So, you've got support for SLI and Crossfire, as though
that mattered in 2019, with six PCI Express slots, including three of them
that are rated for Gen 4 operation. Around back, you've got, wait, what?
Check this out. Yes, my friends, that is a DisplayPort input. So, in ASRock's
own lineup of graphics cards, they actually have cards that have an
internal DisplayPort connection so you that you can plug it right into there,
and that'll inject the DisplayPort signal that Thunderbolt 3 requires.
Pretty freaking cool. I won't be using that feature, but that's okay cuz
they've got me covered, too. Around the back is where things get really
interesting to me. So, we've got AX Wi-Fi. That's Wi-Fi 6. PS2 in case you
like really need something to work on an interrupt basis or whatever, there's a
second DisplayPort in. So, we've got two DPNs built in for the Thunderbolt 3
ports that are right on the motherboard. And aside from USB 3.1 gen, whatever
they call, whatever USB 310 gig, check this out. We've also got 10 gig
networking. So, the irony is that this
board is loaded up for Mondo expansion. Oh yeah, did I even mention the dual M.2
expansion slots, but it already has everything that most people could ever
need built onto it. So, ah, now that gives us a better look at
the board. So, there's our X570 chipset. Here's our dual M.2 slots, both of which
are Gen 4. Very nice. Our front USB 3 Type-C, our
regular front USB 3, our other regular front USB 3, our front USB 2 HD audio.
Uh, what else we got here that's exciting? Oh, yes, that Aqua 10 gig
networking. Oh, and of course, aside from the CPU and the chipset, the VRM
are also cooled by our water block.
Pretty sweet. Oh, now that's interesting. If I was going to install a
single M.2 to in this board, I would probably go with the top one because it
seems to have much better thermal contact with our water block solution
compared to the bottom one, which does have a metal spreader on it, but only
makes contact with the uh the metal of our mono block right here. So, it's
probably not going to do a ton of cooling. I mean, to be clear, even that
is going to be better than nothing, but um I I'd use this one if you can. All
right, let's get this puppy installed. Sorry, I mean kitty. I mean, kitty. So,
I usually find the best way to line up a mono block rather than laying the board
down and then putting the block on top of it is to go the other way around. So,
lay the block down, plug in all your front leads so that you don't forget,
and then line it up from above so you
can kind of guide the holes down onto
their corresponding uh threaded inserts there.
Okay. Whoa. Do you hear that?
This loop is not particularly well sealed at the moment. Okay, so we're
going to open her up right here.
Okay, there we go.
There we go.
Water cooling maintenance is so much fun. All right, let's drain this. Not
too much, though. I don't think it's going to be necessary to completely
drain the loop. Why?
You're literally standing on a Titan. You move.
So, here's the plan. We're going to strip
out the expansion cards and kind of hang them over here.
Then swap in the motherboard and then put them all back in. Should be no
problem. Well, I can't believe it. Assuming that
the Thunderbolt upgrade works,
I am removing my painted motherboard for the final time.
Okay. So, Andy, the key here is that these tubes have to
stay above the water level. Sure.
You got that? No problem. Right. No problem. Easy at all.
Piece of cake. Piece of crumb cake.
No shadow. No.
So, what's really cool is that even on the Intel side of things, generally
speaking, Thunderbolt is added to motherboards with these expansion cards
that have a header that plugs into the board and then require the DisplayPort
signal to be injected from the graphics card outside. So, it takes up one of
your PCI Express slots, in this case, a 4X slot, and you know, ugly and often
quite cludgy because the BIOS support for these things, particularly this one,
does not have a great reputation. Um,
so having it built right into the board this time around, is something that I am
definitely looking forward to.
Okay. and
out it comes again. Now, these are not spectacular
memory modules for the chip that I'm putting in. These are pretty old. Uh
they're 2666 C16 Dominator Platinums,
but um realistically, I don't need the
extra 5 10% performance that badly
anyway. So, I'm going to stick with them because they look really good. Also, I
don't feel like any other memory. It's here already.
So, this is funny. One of the features for this board, apparently, is the
slight leeway in the positioning of this
integrated IO shield because sometimes the tolerances on the cases aren't
perfect. Um, you know, that's actually pretty smart cuz sometimes you do have
trouble with those integrated IO shields and actually getting them into the case.
Cute idea, ASRock. I like it. Look at
that. Perfect fit. Love it. All right.
Well, that's a little awkward. I've only got one USB 2 header um because there's
a whole whack of USB3 ones and this case only has front USB 2, but um I guess two
of those ports are going to be dead now. All right.
Eight pin connector.
24 pin connector. Look at this. Barely even have to move anything. It's great.
The real test is going to be seeing whether it just boots up. That would be
amazing. Okay, so
one challenge here is that our graphics card is going in one slot lower.
Is that going to make it? That looks really tight. Um,
hold on. Let's get this screwed in as high up as possible.
So, you can see this tube doesn't quite make it to the socket, but we've got
about that much room off the fitting. So, maybe it'll be good enough.
What the heck is this leaking?
It is. Why is this leaking? Okay, we will deal
with that in a moment. First, let's find out if we even have a build here.
All right, we're going to make it.
Oh, shoot. I don't think so.
And every time I pull this up, this drips.
Crap. This is bad. For those wondering
what a tech YouTuber's attic looks like, basically the same as anyone else's
attic, but with more YouTube branded magic eightballs and signed Derbower uh
CPUHs. All right, but the most important thing
up here for our purposes today is this.
This is my old personal rig chassis that
was a gift from my wife that I have been
through much with and I just didn't have the heart to get rid of it.
And it's possible that buried within it is actually some
of the same tubing that I'm still using.
this blue UV primo chill stuff.
I wanted to hold on to this thing in case I ever decided to go back to the
tower case. Frankly, they just don't make cases like they used to. And I
doubt I would find something on the market that I would like better than
this one. So,
now I don't see anything up here, which
is actually a pretty bad sign right now.
Were you just going to instruct me? Oh, buddy. Oh, jackpot.
No wonder I didn't take this out. It's 3/8 inch tubing stretched over a 1/2 in
fitting.
That's how stretched that was. Look at the difference in diameter.
We got it though. That should be a long enough piece of tubing. So, I don't know
why. I mean, maybe it was just my block wasn't tight enough from the factory. I
mean, could it be that simple? That had a good quarter turn left in it.
That one had a eighth plus.
So, let's have a look here and see if we're still leaking.
No drops. Now, after journeying to Mount
Doom and back, we can finally put on
this piece of tubing.
Blue cable. This triggered so many people when I put it in, and I don't
even blame you. Okay. Cleanest build you ever saw? Ah,
maybe not.
Good enough. Yes.
Now, rather than load it back into the server
cabinet, I'm just going to test it right here. All right, that's a good sign.
Okay, all 64 gigs of RAM detected. Ryzen 9
3900X 12 core processor.
X570 Alpha.
Excellent. Oh, I guess we should connect the Wi-Fi, so at least have a network
connection. The phone's Bluetooth doesn't say. I wasn't going to bother to
hook up Bluetooth, but whatever. So, this is weird. Um, what I was expecting
was some kind of USB 4 implementation
here, but on ASRock's website, it
straight up has an Intel Thunderbolt driver download. I mean,
maybe this is just something that I haven't encountered yet, where the specs
are so similar that you just literally
use Intel's own software on an AMD board.
Guess we'll find out. All right, speaking of sick, I have updated my
BIOS. I have applied my XMPP profile, so my memory is now at least running at
2666 instead of uh 2133.
And I am ready to install my Intel
Thunderbolt driver. So, I told you guys before I had a solution to the problem
of getting my Thunderbolt signal from the other side of this wall to my
desktop setup here. And I do. The
problem is that I'm not allowed to tell you what it is and I'm not allowed to
show it to you. So,
it's a little awkward. So, we're just going to use uh a PCI slot as a pass
through. Plug that in and then plug this
into the back of the graphics card. Just
like that. Not exactly elegant. But hey, if you
want elegant, buy a Mac.
Hey, G-Sync display connected. Everything is
working just effortlessly. It looks like
uh that one was the right one. Uh,
wow. My doc's even working and everything. So, it's official.
I've gone AMD.
Now, we've just got to run the uh the secret sauce here.
Hey, that was it. We good.
Oh, fantastic. Everything working exactly as intended.
So, thanks for watching, guys. I am personally really looking forward to
this adventure, at least until I get hit with the buyer's remorse that always
comes when something newer and better happens as we know is happening with the
16 core and then the upcoming nextG Threadripper and all that good stuff.
So, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss any of our videos on that stuff. First, it'll be the review, then
like me upgrading my stuff. That'll be good.