The GIGABYTE X570 Aorus Xtreme Motherboard Review: Fanless AM4
by Gavin Bonshor on September 24, 2019 9:00 AM ESTGaming Performance
For X570 we are running using Windows 10 64-bit with the 1903 update as per our Ryzen 3000 CPU review.
World of Tanks enCore
Albeit different to most of the other commonly played MMO or massively multiplayer online games, World of Tanks is set in the mid-20th century and allows players to take control of a range of military based armored vehicles. World of Tanks (WoT) is developed and published by Wargaming who are based in Belarus, with the game’s soundtrack being primarily composed by Belarusian composer Sergey Khmelevsky. The game offers multiple entry points including a free-to-play element as well as allowing players to pay a fee to open up more features. One of the most interesting things about this tank based MMO is that it achieved eSports status when it debuted at the World Cyber Games back in 2012.
World of Tanks enCore is a demo application for a new and unreleased graphics engine penned by the Wargaming development team. Over time the new core engine will implemented into the full game upgrading the games visuals with key elements such as improved water, flora, shadows, lighting as well as other objects such as buildings. The World of Tanks enCore demo app not only offers up insight into the impending game engine changes, but allows users to check system performance to see if the new engine run optimally on their system.
Grand Theft Auto V
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine under DirectX 11. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark. The in-game benchmark consists of five scenarios: four short panning shots with varying lighting and weather effects, and a fifth action sequence that lasts around 90 seconds. We use only the final part of the benchmark, which combines a flight scene in a jet followed by an inner city drive-by through several intersections followed by ramming a tanker that explodes, causing other cars to explode as well. This is a mix of distance rendering followed by a detailed near-rendering action sequence, and the title thankfully spits out frame time data.
F1 2018
Aside from keeping up-to-date on the Formula One world, F1 2017 added HDR support, which F1 2018 has maintained; otherwise, we should see any newer versions of Codemasters' EGO engine find its way into F1. Graphically demanding in its own right, F1 2018 keeps a useful racing-type graphics workload in our benchmarks.
Aside from keeping up-to-date on the Formula One world, F1 2017 added HDR support, which F1 2018 has maintained. We use the in-game benchmark, set to run on the Montreal track in the wet, driving as Lewis Hamilton from last place on the grid. Data is taken over a one-lap race.
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Smell This - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link
Maybe __ but I'm not sure I get your point.A conventional top down plugin has to bend 180-degrees to route under the tray as opposed to a 90-degree 'bend' ??
DanNeely - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link
A 90* plug doesn't get you anything unless you're routing the cable on the same side as the board (which isn't normal these days outside of SFF), or can make a tight 90* bend as the cable comes out of the routing hole. Unless you have a really flexible cable you're not going to be able to do that. Instead you end up having to make a 270* loop (up, then forward into where drive bays used to be, and then down and back to the board), so you still end up with a big loop.With a big loop a 180* can be done without putting any bending stress on the plug. A 270* either needs more cable to match the same bending radius or will have to be tighter and puts more stress on the board as a result. With the one system I had this sort of setup in there wasn't enough slack in the cable to do a loop with enough slack that it wasn't trying to bend/twist the board up. When I plugged the cable in before the board was screwed down it was flexing the board up when I tried screwing it down on the edge with the socket. With the board screwed down first, it was very difficult to get the plug to the socket partly because of the tray meaning I could only grip the cable from one side and partly because the cable didn't want to be bent tightly enough to go in. On the whole it was among the most frustrating build steps I ever did and the stiffness of the cable meant that it completely failed at the notional goal of keeping the wires out of the way that's normally behind 90* edge plugs.
My initial thought was that a rigid 90* adapter that extended out to the cable management hole would avoid the problem by removing the need to tightly bend the cable to fit. Thinking a bit more, that probably wouldn't be enough because making a tight bend behind the board would be just as difficult; you'd either need a 180* piece so the cable could stay flat on the backside of the board, or a short extension with all loose wires to make it work.
Ratman6161 - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link
How about this:https://www.newegg.com/cooler-master-cma-cemb00xxb...
Ratman6161 - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link
https://www.google.com/search?q=ATX+24+Pin+90%C2%B...MamiyaOtaru - Wednesday, October 9, 2019 - link
cool, connect that to the side plug and come at it from behind /seek2121 - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link
IMO we need a better solution for all the connectors that exist on motherboards. For example, those USB3 connectors. How many times have I bent a pin trying to plug one in when it accidentally gets pulled out? More than I'd care to admit. I mean hell, at least put a snap/latch on it similar to what most SATA cables have. Ideally, we've had 1 cable running from the case to the motherboard, and 1 cable running from the PSU to the motherboard. Both connectors would had the little snap or latch or whatever you call it, and both would be right angled so that they can easily be hidden from view for a nice clean look.DanNeely - Wednesday, September 25, 2019 - link
USB-C does use a smaller and more robust connector than USB 3.0 (you can see one on this board near the diagnostic code display) that appears to take its design inspiration from PCIe.A single cable from the PSU to the mobo would run into one size fits all problems and end up huge, ex the difference between the needs of an SFF system using a 4 pin CPU header and a high end work station/gaming board using 2x8pin CPU headers and a PCIe header (to give extra power for multiple GPUs).
What could be done easily enough would be to gut the 24 pin cable by making about half of its wires optional; even if not followed up by a new smaller plug/socket a few years later it would remove a lot of the headaches from the worst connector on the mobo. This could be done safely because the original 20 pin connector dates back to when the CPU ran on 3.3v, everything else ran on 5V, and hardly anything needed 12V; vs today when 5V is used almost exclusively for USB, 3.3V for odds and ends (eg 10 of the 25/75W a PCIe card can draw from the mobo is 3.3v not 12v), while everything else runs 12V to component specific voltage regulators.
The reason nothing's happened is more or less the same as why the mess of jumper style headers for the front panel has never been replaced by a standard block style connection. The PC industry as a whole no longer cares about desktops enough to expend the effort needed for a major new standardization round. Big OEMs can and do address the issues via proprietary components scoring spare part lockin as a bonus; while for everyone else (eg the people who make parts for customer built systems/boutique vendors) the upfront time spent and short term costs from needing to bundle legacy/modern adapters for a few years is too high to try and push something on their own. Residual trauma from the effort spent on the failed BTX standard some years back was probably an issue back when desktops were still important enough of a market segment to get serious engineering effort in standard modernization as well.
Dug - Monday, October 7, 2019 - link
I just have to chime in and agree with changing the entire layout. Look what oem's can do when they aren't tied to the ancient atx power supply and standard pin layout. Look at the power supply used on an imac pro. That's how it should be done. These giant cables and connectors are really unnecessary.4everalone - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link
I wish MB makers would start providing SFP+ ports instead of 10GBASE-T ports. That way we at-least have the option of running fiber/copper.TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, September 24, 2019 - link
I like the look of the board and passive X570 cooling, but am dissapointed at the lack of expansion slots. No USB 3 header? Really? Just a gen 2 that cant be used on the vast majority of cases, and even if it can it will onyl feed a singular port? No PCIe x1 slots for, say, a USB 3 header card to make up for the lack of internal headers?Granted, this is a subjective problem, not many people use more then 1-2 slots, but for the price, I would want way mroe expansion for future upgrades. Think USB 3 headers, replacement NIC or sound cards in case of on board failure, NVMe cards for RAID arrays and better cooling, ece.