The $120 MSI X470 Gaming Plus Review: Only 4-Phase VRM, Not 11-Phase as Advertised
by Gavin Bonshor on October 4, 2018 10:00 AM ESTCPU Performance, Short Form
For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We put the memory settings at the CPU manufacturers suggested frequency, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v1.0.2: link
Handbrake is a media conversion tool that was initially designed to help DVD ISOs and Video CDs into more common video formats. For HandBrake, we take two videos and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container: a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short. We also take the third video and transcode it to HEVC. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Compression – WinRAR 5.4: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2017. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test v2.1: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here. We are using the latest version of 3DPM, which has a significant number of tweaks over the original version to avoid issues with cache management and speeding up some of the algorithms.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7.1b4: link
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
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jeremyshaw - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
Is there any reduction in performance from the (3?) potential configurations of VRMs you mentioned?Ganged together (like this MSI board?)
Doubled up
More Phases
It looks like MSI put a lot of components on the board, surely it was not all for waste?
gavbon - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
Not really figuratively speaking, not in real-world scenarios at stock settings at least. Example - Looking at it from a different perspective, say in the engine of a car. It would be like a car maker putting a 6-cylinder engine in a car, but the 6-cylinders are operating in pairs meaning each cylinder is doubled with the same capacity of a 3-cylinder engine. The manufacturer is advertising it has 6-cylinders because in theory and on the engine, there is 6...and the car might still do 70mph (UK), but if you tried to go 100mph for whatever reason, it might not give you the expected results as a 'true' 6-cylinder might.I hope this makes sense, I've not had much sleep and my brain is in overload :D
casperes1996 - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
In that case, what's the benefit of the doubled setup? In your engine analogy; What's the advantage to have 6 cylinders operate is if they were 3 compared to just having 3 and cutting costs?Scabies - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
Less thermal load on each cylinder, and you can get away with cheaper... spark plugs...That doesn't work. But if need a switching frequency of 600mhz on one chip or 300mhz on two chips staggered by a half cycle to SIMULATE 600mhz, you can get the job done cheaper.
(for VRMs your actual power efficiency/noise performance can be sensitive to heat, and indeed all ICs die sooner when ran hotter)
Spoelie - Friday, October 5, 2018 - link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IjWCOXSuKUThis one explains it thoroughly
Oxford Guy - Friday, October 5, 2018 - link
But useless car analogies are so much better, right?uibo - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
Why are the overclocked POV-Ray scores at 4000MHz lower than for the ASRock X470 Taichi Ultimate in your review?https://www.anandtech.com/show/12666/the-asrock-x4...
gavbon - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
Sometimes the variation can give different results in POV-Ray when overclocked. This has been the case over multiple boards (on the majority of chipsets). I might look further into this when things settle back down in the next couple of weeks and I might add a second overclocked test on top of POV-Ray in future reviews.Oxford Guy - Friday, October 5, 2018 - link
Thermal throttling? Also, although it may not impact POV-Ray, different boards will set RAM settings differently. Also, is the same set of RAM used in both tests (this board and Taichi)?Soybean0 - Thursday, October 4, 2018 - link
I think B450 Gaming ITX/ac is not 6+2 but 3+2 phrases. From the data sheet of ISL95712, it can only handle 4+3 max.