#Intel Doesn’t Want to Talk About Benchmarks Anymore

[componentplanet]

Intel Doesn’t Want to Talk About Benchmarks Anymore

At Computex last week, Intel CEO Bob Swan spoke about the overall state of the computer and technology industry and the impact that the pandemic has had on computing. He also called on the industry to move away from benchmarking and towards different metrics.

We should see this moment [the COVID-19 pandemic] as an opportunity to shift our focus as an industry from benchmarks to the benefits and impacts of the technology we create. The pandemic has underscored the need for technology to be purpose-built so it can meet these evolving business and consumer needs.

And this requires a customer-obsessed mindset to stay close, anticipate those needs, and develop solutions. In this mindset, the goal is to ensure we are optimizing for a stronger impact that will support and accelerate positive business and societal benefits around the globe.

Let’s talk about that.

Evaluating Swan’s Idea on the Merits

Before we talk about why Intel is making this argument now, let’s examine the argument itself, which I’ll word as follows: Technology coverage should focus on positive (or even transformative) use cases rather than emphasizing benchmark results.

The fact is, Swan has a point. I can publish five hundred tests showing relative performance between two laptops, but I can’t benchmark how well you’ll like the keyboard response, whether the edges of the machine will cut into your wrists or arms when you type on it, or if you’ll like the trackpad. I can tell you how light a notebook is, but I can’t tell you if it’s light enough to avoid triggering your carpal tunnel if you carry it around much of the day. The best I can do is to describe my own experiences and hope that the description will help guide your own purchase.

Benchmarks have another weakness: They don’t capture the happiness of having a new system that solves previously annoying problems. I can tell you that Laptop A gets 6 hours of battery life while Laptop B gets 12 hours, but that doesn’t say anything about the surge of satisfaction you might feel if your flight was hit by a four-hour delay and you still didn’t have to go rooting around in your bag for a charger or fight for space at one of the public charging stations.

There’s also a distinct satisfaction that comes from being able to run a game or application that ran poorly before that reviews don’t always capture. Reviewers tend to compare previous top-end hardware against current top-end hardware, effectively missing the user experience of someone who leaps from, say, a GTX 680 or Radeon 7970 to an RTX 2080 or Radeon 5700 XT.

As a hardware reviewer, I agree with Swan and always have. Benchmarks don’t capture the entire experience of using a product.

Of course, that’s why reviews have text in them in the first place, instead of just benchmarks. A review comprised solely of benchmarks would, in fact, have more results in it — I’d have more time to run them. The reason we don’t do that is because text is how we convey contextual information of exactly the sort Swan wants the industry to focus on.

Evaluating Swan’s Claim Against Intel’s Current Competitive Position

As much of a point as Swan has regarding the limitations of benchmarks, there’s no way to disentangle his comments from Intel’s current competitive position vis-à-vis AMD. Currently, it’s not that great. This isn’t a repeat of 2004-2005 when Intel was saddled with Prescott and Smithfield, but AMD has taken the overall lead in the CPU market for any use-case beyond gaming — and the gap in gaming is pretty marginal.

Bob Swan knows this, of course, which is at least part of why there’s a remark about how COVID-19 is a reason to shift away from benchmarking. The idea of emphasizing the benefits and impacts of technology on a work from home situation make good sense, given that WFH is very new to a large group of people — but it’s best deployed alongside test metrics, rather than in lieu of them.

I entered tech journalism just as the first websites were really getting started. At the time, there was a tremendous surge of excitement over leaving the tyranny of column inches behind. No more fighting with copy editors to get graphs made instead of charts. No more fighting for every scrap of space. You want 50 graphs in a story? Put 50 graphs in it.

And we did.

That didn’t happen by accident. There was a tremendous hunger in the market for this kind of coverage because techies and enthusiasts wanted to see more performance information about the products they were considering buying.

Benchmarking is how we catch cheaters. Benchmarking is how we find thermal problems. Benchmarking is how we discover that one laptop will burn your legs if you try to game on it, while another won’t. Benchmarking is how we discover if your laptop’s power-saving mode is working properly, or whether the battery life is actually an improvement over the system you’re using currently. Want to know if your smartphone got slower over time, or if a new Android or iOS version is slower? Benchmark it. Need to figure out which system component, peripheral, or device is causing high latency across your system during audio processing workloads? Benchmark it.

Benchmarking has its limits. Within the scope of those limitations, it is nothing short of a titanic force for good.

The last thing to be aware of is that this kind of concern for performance rankings is really, really common. Every time Intel, AMD, or Nvidia drops behind in performance rankings, we can expect to see a discussion of whether the benchmark practices and tests reviewers currently rely upon are actually capturing what they need to capture. Sometimes, these discussions lead to real and fruitful improvements to benchmarking as a whole, but they’re a common tactic for companies to call for.

Intel undoubtedly would like to de-emphasize benchmarking at the moment. Fortunately, it’s not going anywhere.

Now Read:

Some AI Advances in the Last Decade May Have Been Illusory

Intel Core i9-10900K CPU Review: Comet Lake Paints a Target on AMD’s Matisse

Intel May Have Reserved Its Top-End 28W Ice Lake CPUs Exclusively For Apple

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/computing/311275-intel-doesnt-want-to-talk-about-benchmarks-anymore from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/06/intel-doesnt-want-to-talk-about.html

[lippyawards]

Intel Doesn’t Want to Talk About Benchmarks Anymore At Computex last week, Intel CEO Bob Swan spoke about the overall state of the computer and technology industry and the impact that the pandemic has had on computing.

[ryliweb]

PS4 Central Processing Unit (CPU) | The Information Guide

The PS4 processor (aka PS4 CPU) is the main hardware part of the whole PS4 system. It is the unit which performs most of the processing inside the PS4. In other words, the CPU is the brain of the PS4 where most calculations take place. In terms of computing power, the CPU is the most important element of the PS4 game console. It receives data input, executes instructions, and processes information. It communicates with input/output (I/O) devices, which send and receive data to and from the PS4 CPU. Additionally, the PS4 CPU has an internal bus for communication with the internal cache memory, called the backside bus. The main bus for data transfer to and from the PS4 CPU, memory, chipset, and AGP socket is called the front-side bus.

To control instructions and data flow to and from other parts of the PS4, the CPU relies heavily on a chipset, which is a group of microchips located on the PS4 motherboard.

The PS4 CPU contains internal memory units, which are called registers. These registers contain data, instructions, counters and addresses used in the ALU’s information processing.

Components of PS4 CPU

The PS4 CPU has two components:

Control Unit: extracts instructions from memory and decodes and executes them

Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU): handles arithmetic and logical operations

To function properly, the PS4 CPU relies on the system clock, memory, secondary storage, and data and address buses.

The Four Primary Functions of the PS4 CPU

The PS4 CPU processes instructions it receives in the process of decoding data. In processing this data, the PS4 CPU performs four basic steps:

Fetch: Each instruction is stored in memory and has its own address. The PS4 processor takes this address number from the program counter, which is responsible for tracking which instructions the PS4 CPU should execute next.

Decode: All programs to be executed are translated to into Assembly instructions. Assembly code must be decoded into binary instructions, which are understandable to the PS4 CPU. This step is called decoding.

Execute: While executing instructions the CPU can do one of three things: Do calculations with its ALU, move data from one memory location to another, or jump to a different address.

Store: The PS4 CPU must give feedback after executing an instruction, and the output data is written to the memory.

But how can PS4 CPU manage all data together without any flaw? The number of operations the PS4 CPU can perform depends upon its speed, which is measured in Hertz. One hertz is the speed during which the CPU performs one operation in one second. Typically, you can measure a PS4’s speed in gigahertz. 1 GHz is the speed it takes the PS4 CPU to perform one million simple tasks. Get it as a necessity to handle all these data without a single failure. A “simple task” includes the smallest steps a processor can perform.

What the PS4 CPU Looks Like and Where’s Its Location

The PS4 CPU is small and square, with many short, rounded, metallic connectors on its underside.

The processor attaches directly to a CPU “socket” (or sometimes a “slot”) on the PS4 motherboard. The PS4 CPU is inserted into the socket pin-side-down, and a small lever helps to secure the processor.

After running even a short while, PS4 processor can get very hot. To help dissipate this heat, it’s almost always necessary to attach a heatsink and a fan directly on top of the PS4 CPU. That’s why you see the PS4 processor mounted with a cooler.

PS4 CPU Type

PS4 uses an AMD Jaguar CPU with 8 cores at the speed of 1.6GHz. While some of AMD’s charts are a little misleading out of context, this one is fairly straightforward. AMD claims that its low-power Temash system-on-chip simultaneously manages to have double the performance in 3DMark11. Now, with the release of new PS4 Pro CPU, you can imagine how faster it is. It’s a graphical benchmark, and a sizable bump in PCMark7, an all-purpose benchmark. It comes with only half the power at its disposal. At just 3.9 watts, there should be little trouble putting a dual-core 1GHz A4-1200 into a completely fanless tablet. Therefore, you can probably expect eight-watt, quad-core A6-1450 (which can boost to 1.4GHz) to fit in very thin laptops indeed.

AMD Jaguar 8-Core Processor

To get at why and Sony chose AMD CPU for PS4, you need to start with the content needs. Sony was looking for a way to increase the console “footprint”, increase the amount of apps, and lower the cost of software development. For this reason, PS4 CPU is a very good processor for the job it handles. The company designed PS4 to do a lot more than games. They designed the Ps4 console to be the future hub for all home entertainment and home automation and control. To effectively do this, they will need hundreds of complex apps that are relatively straight-forward to code. You can guess it. the PS4 processor can do the work as it should be. Therefore, you need to start with an application processor architecture that supports this, and it’s not Power architecture.

Digital Foundry finds that the scenes that only tap the PS4 Pro’s 2.1GHz Jaguar CPU only provide a minimal bump in FPS, with one scene hitting just a 6FPS bump, which actually directly corresponds to the 31% boost in the CPU’s overclock. The publication hints that if the PS4 Pro had a more optimized and powerful CPU, these specific scenes would have better frame rates.

AMD Jaguar processor used in PS4 makes the gaming more seamless and smooth. 64-bit was important as it maximized memory addressability, and the next gen console needed to run multiple apps, operating systems and hypervisors. ARM-based architectures will soon get as powerful as AMD’s Jaguar cores, but not when Sony needed them for its new console.

32-bit vs. 64-bit processors

PS4 CPU is a 64-bit processor that conforms to the modern standards of gaming consoles. Most of the newer game consoles have 64-bit compatible processor units. PS4 CPU is just one of these good consoles that adopted 64-bit technologies. The move to the newer 64-bit technology emerges from the need to allow computers to support larger RAM memory chips. The 32-bit architecture would only allow the use of a 4GB RAM. Even if you install a larger RAM in the PS4, it will only be able to use 4GB and the rest will go away wasted.

Users with the PS4 Pro usage, who want to simply browse the internet, write documents or send and receive e-mails can still select a 32-bit chipset. However users who heavily use their PS4 for multitask-heavy applications such as games and video editing will need to purchase a 64-bit chipset to optimize their computer performance.

PS4 CPU Cores

A CPU core is a CPU’s processor. In the old days, every processor had just one core that could focus on one task at a time. Today, CPUs have been two and 18 cores, each of which can work on a different task.

PS4 CPU permitting, some applications can use what we call multithreading. When the PS4 CPU runs hot, you may consider changing its fan. If a thread is understood as a single piece of a computer process, then using multiple threads in a single CPU core means more instructions can be understood and processed at once. The 8 cores of PS4 processor may get really hot if loads of data rush at once at it. Some software can take advantage of this feature on more than one CPU core, which means that even more instructions can be processed simultaneously.

A core can work on one task, while another core works a different task. So, the more cores a CPU has, the more efficient it is. In fact, PS4 CPU with its 8 cores will not make you need additional power, in most cases. Many processors, especially those in laptops, have two cores, but some mobile processors, such as Intel’s 8th generation processors, have four. You should shoot for at least four cores in your machine if you can afford it. Even with PS4 Pro CPU, you shouldn’t worry about the speed it offers.

Clock Speed

The clock speed of PS4 CPU is 1.6 MHz, while it is 2.1 MHz in PS4 Pro. The clock speed for the PS4 CPU used to be enough when comparing performance. Things aren’t so simple anymore. A CPU that offers multiple cores or hyper-threading may perform significantly better than a single-core CPU of the same speed that doesn’t feature hyper-threading.

Since PS4 comes with multiple CPUs, it can have an even bigger advantage. What you may not know about the clock speed of PS4 CPU is that developers code their games to comply with this limit. Manufacturers design all of these features to allow high-end game consoles to more easily run multiple processes at the same time, increasing your performance when multitasking or under the demands of powerful apps like video encoders and modern games. That’s why when dealing with PS4 CPU clock speed, you have to free your mind in this regard. So, let’s take a look at each of these features and what they might mean to you.

Hyper-Threading

When talking about PS4 CPU, this topic is not what we want to discuss. Actually, some Intel microprocessors use Hyper-Threading is a technology that allows a single microprocessor to act like two separate processors to the operating system and the application programs that use it. It is a feature of Intel’s IA-32 processor architecture. So, don’t concern too much when it comes to this point.

The fact that PS4 CPU doesn’t support hyper-threading is not surprising at all. With Hyper-Threading, a microprocessor’s “core” processor can execute two (rather than one) concurrent streams (or threads) of instructions sent by the operating system. Having two streams of execution units to work on allows more work to be done by the processor during each clock cycle. Using the right PS4 CPU can add more power to the gaming experience. To the operating system, the Hyper-Threading microprocessor appears to be two separate processors. Because most of today’s operating systems (such as Windows and Linux) are capable of dividing their work load among multiple processors (aka symmetric multiprocessing or SMP ). When considering the processor of PS4 Pro, the things don’t differ here. The operating system simply acts as though the Hyper-Threading processor is a pool of two processors.

Conclusion

There is a lot of gossip on PS4 CPU and how powerful it is to handle all the data it must process. This is something that shouldn’t concern real players that know the capabilities of their PS4 game console. In fact, PS4 CPU is a part of PS4 architecture that you can’t change/remove. There’s no replacement for it and you have to accept it as it is. So, don’t panic when PS4 CPU doesn’t perform the way you want, because all PS4s do the same. Unless you plan to optimize PS4 speed by doing some tweaks, that’s something else. Just make sure the PS4 CPU is the one that needs your real care.

The post PS4 Central Processing Unit (CPU) | The Information Guide appeared first on RyLi Gaming Solutions.

[techietrends]

Intel Doesn’t Want to Talk About Benchmarks Anymore

[componentplanet]

A Brief History of Intel CPUs, Part 2: Pentium II Through Comet Lake

All the CPU cores, none of the motherboard upgrade requirements? Count a lot of people in -- if it works.

In Part 1 of this guide, we discussed the various Intel CPUs from the beginning of the company through to the Pentium Pro. Before we dive into the other CPUs in Intel’s overall history, in celebrating the 40th anniversary of the 8086, let’s take a moment to further discuss the Pentium Pro. In a very real sense, the PPro is the core that revolutionized the x86 architecture and Intel’s microprocessor design and can be thought of as the “father” from which modern CPUs are descended (the original 8086 itself, in this context, is more of a grandfather).

The Pentium Pro was, in many ways, a true watershed of CPU design. Up until its debut, CPUs executed programs in the order in which program instructions were received. This meant that performance optimizations heavily relied on the expertise of the programmer in question. Instruction caches and the use of pipelines improved performance in-hardware, but neither of these technologies changed the order in which instructions were executed. Not only did the Pentium Pro implement out-of-order execution to improve performance by allowing the CPU to re-order instructions for optimal execution, it also began the now-standard process of decoding x86 instructions into RISC-like micro-ops for more efficient execution. While Intel didn’t invent either capability out of whole cloth, it took a substantial risk when it built the Pentium Pro around them. Needless to say, that risk paid off.

The Pentium Pro’s P6 microarchitecture would be used for the Pentium II and III (all forms) before being replaced by the Pentium 4 “Netburst” — at least for a little while. It resurfaced with the Pentium M (Intel’s mobile CPU family) and Core 2 Duo family. Modern Intel CPUs are still considered to have descended from the Pentium Pro, despite the numerous architectural revisions between then and now. The original Pentium Pro, however, didn’t perform particularly well with 16-bit legacy code and was therefore mostly restricted to Intel’s workstation and server product families. The Pentium II was intended to change that — so let’s pick up our history from there.

To trace the history of Intel CPU cores is to trace the history of various epochs in the evolution of CPU performance. In the 1980s and 1990s, clock speed improvements and architectural enhancements went hand in hand. From 2005 forward, it was the era of multi-core chips and higher efficiency parts. Since 2011, Intel has focused on improving the performance of its low power CPUs more than other capabilities. This focus has paid real dividends — laptops today have far better battery life and overall performance than they did a decade ago.

Compare the Core i7-10810U with the Core i7-2677M to see what we mean. The Sandy Bridge-era CPU had a maximum clock of 2.9GHz, supported just 8GB of RAM (not shown), and offered one-third the cores and L3 cache of the modern Coffee Lake SKU. Overall mobile performance per watt has improved dramatically. At the same time, Intel faces real challenges, both from AMD and ARM. We’ve compared against the Core i7-10810U rather than the Ice Lake-based Core i7-1065G7, because the 10nm ICL CPUs are balanced differently between CPU and GPU, and they make the straight-line CPU improvements harder to see.

But regardless of what the future holds, Intel CPUs have driven consistent performance improvements over the past four decades, revolutionizing the personal computer in the process. We hope you’ve enjoyed the trip down memory lane.

Now Read:

MSI Launches a Water-Cooled Motherboard That Won’t Break the Bank

Killer Move: Intel Acquires Rivet Networks

Intel Doesn’t Want to Talk About Benchmarks Anymore

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/computing/271105-a-brief-history-of-intel-cpus-part-2-pentium-ii-through-coffee-lake from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-brief-history-of-intel-cpus-part-2.html

[componentplanet]

A Brief History of Intel CPUs, Part 1: The 4004 to the Pentium Pro

To celebrate the 42nd anniversary of the 8086 and the debut of the x86 architecture, we’re bumping our previous retrospectives on some of Intel’s most important CPU designs. In this article, we’ve rounded up the first decades of history, from the 4004 in 1971 to the Pentium Pro in 1994. This period covers the first two eras of Moore’s Law (a concept we’ve discussed elsewhere), in which discrete capabilities were rapidly integrated on to a single contiguous wafer, and then as microprocessor transistor counts and clock speeds continued to rise.

Today, x86 chips are the backbone of modern computing. ARM may dominate the smartphone industry, but the cloud-based services and platforms that smartphones rely on are sitting in data centers running on x86-based hardware. What’s surprising, looking back, is that no one at Intel had even an inkling that this was going to take place. Intel had sunk its hopes and dreams into the i432APX, a 32-bit microprocessor with a radically different design than anything the company had tried before. Early sales of the 8086 and 8088 weren’t very strong, since the entire computer market was facing something of a hardware glut. Intel’s Operation Crush, an aggressive marketing and support effort around the 8086, helped change that and caught IBM’s attention in the process.

Enter IBM. When Big Blue decided to build its first PC, it narrowed the field to three choices: Motorola’s 68000, the Intel 8086, and the Intel 8088. Because the 8088 and 8086 were compatible with each other, it ultimately didn’t matter which Intel CPU IBM picked. IBM was more familiar with Intel than Motorola and Microsoft had a BASIC interpreter with x86 support already baked in. If IBM had gone the other way, we might well be sitting here talking about the rise of “Motosoft” instead of “Mintel.” IBM’s decision to back Intel shaped the future of computing, and Intel’s future processors. Over the next few years, OEMs like Compaq brought new systems to market, powered by new, more advanced x86 CPUs.

Below, we’ll discuss the next series of Intel CPUs, starting with the 80286 and running through the Pentium Pro. The 80186, while it technically existed, was actually primarily used as an embedded microcontroller rather than a PC CPU (with a bare handful of exceptions). For most, the line of succession jumped from the 8086/8088 to the 80286.

The 8086 to Pentium can arguably be grouped as a single family of products, albeit a family that evolved enormously in less than 20 years. All of these chips executed native x86 instructions using what we now call in-order execution (prior to the invention of out-of-order execution we just called this “execution.”) Intel rose to dominate the personal computing market on the strength of these cores. In October 1985, the fastest 80386DX was clocked at 12MHz. By June of 1995, the Pentium 133 was on-sale — a greater-than 10x speed improvement, on top of all the architectural improvements, in just a decade.

By this point, Intel had already largely conquered the personal computer market and begun making early inroads into the workstation and data center spaces, but the bulk of the market still belonged to various RISC architectures backed by entrenched players like Sun, MIPS, and HP. Intel wanted to expand into data centers and professional workstations, but to do that it needed a CPU architecture that would allow it to compete against these high-end workstation chips on absolute performance. Intel had added manufacturing capacity through the 1980s and 1990s, and any new chip needed to do more than simply boost performance — it needed to be a CPU that could leverage Intel’s growing economies of scale.

The Pentium Pro and its descendants were that CPU. We’ll discuss how they evolved — and the features they brought to market — in Part 2.

Now Read:

Intel Shares PL1, PL2, and Tau Values on 10th Generation CPUs

Intel Doesn’t Want to Talk About Benchmarks Anymore

Intel May Not Launch a New HEDT CPU This Year

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/computing/270933-a-brief-history-of-intel-cpus-part-1-the-4004-to-the-pentium-pro from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-brief-history-of-intel-cpus-part-1.html

[componentplanet]

Intel May Not Launch a New HEDT CPU This Year

Normally, Intel refreshes both its desktop and its HEDT product lines on a yearly cadence, with HEDT tending to launch after the desktop refresh. Since Skylake-X debuted in 2017 the two platforms have used the same architecture, with desktop chips launching first. Now, it looks as though Intel won’t have an HEDT refresh this year.

This is less unusual than it might seem. Since launching the 3960X in 2011, Intel has skipped years on several occasions. There was a nearly two-year gap between the 3960X and the 4960X (Q4 2011, Q3 2013) and the 5960X and 6950X (Q3 2014, Q2 2016). Since the 6950X, Intel has delivered a regular cadence of updates, with Skylake X debuting in 2017, the 9th Gen HEDT refresh in 2018, and last year’s launch of the Core i9-10980XE.

In most cases, these pauses happen at platform boundaries. The X79 supported the 3960X and the 4960X, the X99 anchored the 5960X and 6950X, and the X299 has anchored the Skylake X, Skylake X Refresh, and Cascade Lake families. If Intel is holding off for a new chipset, it would explain why the company doesn’t have an HEDT chip ready for this segment.

Frankly, it makes sense for Intel to hold off at this point. Rocket Lake, Intel’s next-gen 14nm architecture (at least according to rumor) isn’t ready yet, and won’t ship until the end of the year. Theoretically, Intel’s next HEDT part could be based on Ice Lake or Tiger Lake (Sunny Cove and Willow Cove architectures, respectively). Rumor has it that Rocket Lake is the 14nm implementation of Sunny Cove while Tiger Lake is the 10nm variant.

We don’t even know if the next HEDT platform will be built on 14nm or 10nm. If Intel decides to follow standard procedure, it’ll be a 10nm CPU with a few strategic changes to differentiate it from Xeon. If it sticks with the bifurcated approach we’ve seen to the enthusiast market, we could expect a 14nm core with higher base clocks compared to 10nm. Then again, we don’t know what the clock delta will be between Tiger and Rocket. In theory, Intel’s 10nm+ should reduce the clock differential between the two nodes, which has grown rather large.

As for Intel’s competition, we haven’t heard a peep out of AMD regarding Threadripper. After last years’ sprint to 64 cores, we’d expect AMD to keep core counts steady this time around and likely focus on improvements to IPC and clock instead. With Windows already unable to use 128 threads in a single process under the default Windows thread scheduler, there’s not much benefit to pushing past the 64C/128T point.

There’s also no info yet on how many cores future HEDT chips may offer. Current solutions top out at 18 for Intel and 64 for AMD, and that’s obviously a gap that it’s in Intel’s best interest to reduce. Thanks to THG for spotting the slide.

Now Read:

MSI Launches a Water-Cooled Motherboard That Won’t Break the Bank

Killer Move: Intel Acquires Rivet Networks

Intel Doesn’t Want to Talk About Benchmarks Anymore

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/computing/311373-intel-may-not-launch-a-new-hedt-cpu-this-year from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/06/intel-may-not-launch-new-hedt-cpu-this.html

[componentplanet]

MSI Launches a Water-Cooled Motherboard That Won’t Break the Bank

Back in early May, we discussed Asrock’s $1,100 motherboard and the fact that it didn’t seem to be designed for any actual group of users. Now, MSI has announced its own water-cooling product line, and it looks to be considerably more practical than what Asrock showed in May.

The MSI MPG Z490 Carbon EK X (MPG? Carbon?) features a custom water block built in partnership with the premium water block manufacturer EKWB. The cooler block is designed to cool both the CPUs and VRMs, which means it’ll fit this motherboard specifically but won’t work with others unless MSI goes to the trouble of guaranteeing backwards-and-forwards water block compatibility.

Feature-wise, the board supports what you’d expect from a product of its caliber, with USB 3.2 Gen 2×2, Wi-Fi 6, and 2.5G Ethernet support. The motherboard includes a leak-testing kit and RGB support done in MSI’s colors with support for 16.8 million colors and 29 effects. With this kind of color and effect support, you can keep it looking like a unicorn horked a rainbow into your office all year round.

Price: Reasonable!

The biggest reason I didn’t like Asrock’s shot at the water-cooled market is that it wasn’t clear who was actually supposed to buy an $1100 motherboard as a serious product. When fully custom kits from EKWB cost less than half that much, asking consumers to shuck out that kind of cash for a motherboard takes some guts, whether the product in question is “limited edition” or not.

Thankfully, MSI doesn’t follow Asrock’s lead in the pricing department. The MSI MPG Z490 Carbon EK X is expected to retail for just $399, and while that’s still quite high, it’s much closer to something enthusiasts might consider reasonable than $1,100 was.

Will This Trend Hold?

The most interesting thing about the fact that we’re seeing multiple companies pushing custom loop solutions as default on a motherboard is the implication that this could become more common in years ahead. AMD and Intel’s power consumption isn’t going down, and power demands are only increasing.

To put it another way: If Intel or AMD kicks a 500W CPU out the door and declares it’s for top-tier water-cooling enthusiasts, you’d see a spike in custom loop sales.

Nothing within realistic reach of a conventional PC enthusiast can trump custom loop water cooling with an internal or external reservoir. Single-stage freon cooling is much colder, of course, but not many people have the expertise to build one. EKWB, in contrast, sells prebuilt water cooling kits to take all the guesswork out of the equation.

I think the chances of this happening are still quite small, the PC industry has never collectively embraced water cooling, preferring to instead find ways to further extend air cooling performance. If absolute PC power consumption keeps increasing, they won’t have a choice. With that said, water delivers excellent results on the whole. When I reviewed the VisionTek CryoVenom back in 2014, I was astonished to see how well the GCN GPU responded to high clocks — from 949MHz to 1225MHz, at a maximum temperature of just 46 degrees Celsius. Water definitely has cooling potential that air can’t match, but whether we’ll see it catch on in the mainstream market? That’s a different story.

Now Read:

Asrock Announces $1,100 Water-Cooled Z490 Motherboard

Intel Doesn’t Want to Talk About Benchmarks Anymore

Intel Core i9-10900K CPU Review: Comet Lake Paints a Target on AMD’s Matisse

from ExtremeTechExtremeTech https://www.extremetech.com/computing/311333-msi-launches-a-water-cooled-motherboard-that-wont-break-the-bank from Blogger http://componentplanet.blogspot.com/2020/06/msi-launches-water-cooled-motherboard.html