HW News - Intel 14th Gen Threat, GN ITX Reviews, ASUS Responds to Ally SD Card Thermals
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I personally can't wait to see your ITX case reviews. Right now rocking a Skyreach S4Mini and I'm quite happy with my setup, so it would be nice to see what other alternatives one could get considering S4Minis aren't being produced anymore...
Date: 2023-07-20
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Comments and reviews: 19
R&D
I'm all for the reduction of PCI-E connections as it enables a better product engineering path and a significantly higher utility path for current and future CPU+board combos. My Athlon 64 and Phenom II X4 systems have 16 PCI-E lanes each. My FX rack somehow gets 22 lanes while my Ryzen 3600 box gets 20. My favorite enterprise hardware starts at gen 2 with a x8 connection. My best GPU is gen 3 x16. I've plugged this into an x4 slot running at gen 2 or gen 3 speeds and it runs fine. The spooky part is running enterprise equipment in an x4 slot when it isn't exactly clear how the device was engineered. Maybe it's fine with half its bandwidth, maybe it needs all 8 PCI-E lanes...It's hard to diagnose issues with this stuff when running other equipment that doesn't even properly utilize the full length of a x16 slot.
If you ignore full fat height and length cards and the current round of slot durability issues for a moment and consider the low profile stuff going into cool boards loaded with tons of x16 and x8 slots...Consider the ratios:
Gen 2.0 x16 bandwidth is gen 3.0 x8 is gen 4.0 x4.
Gen 2.0 x8 bandwidth is gen 3.0 x4 is gen 4.0 x2.
Gen 3.0 x16 bandwidth is gen 4.0 x8 and possibly gen 5.0 x4.
Those older x8 and x16 cards are NOT being brought back for manufacturing on newer generation links as that's the point of getting a newer mid/low spec card. There is however a very big incentive to evolve past that point and start tuning the connection part now that we're entering an era of ultra high bandwidth computing where we run high speed GPUs pushing pixels to multiple 4K60, 2K144 panels, high FOV VR HMDs, 1080p60 USB displays, etc. A GPU consuming 16 lanes of any generation is common enough in a general purpose computer that there's the issue of splitting up remaining bandwidth to 4K video capture cards, USB3 extenders, SATA/NVME storage controllers, SAS/RAID enterprise storage devices, 10GbE SFP/Ethernet or Fiber cards, next generation data (co)processors, card readers, PCI-E x1 device extenders, or anything else that you need in this era of high bandwidth gaming and streaming.
The bad part of juggling this goes back to my enterprise hardware. Lets say we put a finely tuned g4x8 GPU into a g4x4 slot. It runs on less bandwidth but is there no difference in performance or does it become catastrophic? We don't know and probably won't know until we get there and try it.
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I'm all for the reduction of PCI-E connections as it enables a better product engineering path and a significantly higher utility path for current and future CPU+board combos. My Athlon 64 and Phenom II X4 systems have 16 PCI-E lanes each. My FX rack somehow gets 22 lanes while my Ryzen 3600 box gets 20. My favorite enterprise hardware starts at gen 2 with a x8 connection. My best GPU is gen 3 x16. I've plugged this into an x4 slot running at gen 2 or gen 3 speeds and it runs fine. The spooky part is running enterprise equipment in an x4 slot when it isn't exactly clear how the device was engineered. Maybe it's fine with half its bandwidth, maybe it needs all 8 PCI-E lanes...It's hard to diagnose issues with this stuff when running other equipment that doesn't even properly utilize the full length of a x16 slot.
If you ignore full fat height and length cards and the current round of slot durability issues for a moment and consider the low profile stuff going into cool boards loaded with tons of x16 and x8 slots...Consider the ratios:
Gen 2.0 x16 bandwidth is gen 3.0 x8 is gen 4.0 x4.
Gen 2.0 x8 bandwidth is gen 3.0 x4 is gen 4.0 x2.
Gen 3.0 x16 bandwidth is gen 4.0 x8 and possibly gen 5.0 x4.
Those older x8 and x16 cards are NOT being brought back for manufacturing on newer generation links as that's the point of getting a newer mid/low spec card. There is however a very big incentive to evolve past that point and start tuning the connection part now that we're entering an era of ultra high bandwidth computing where we run high speed GPUs pushing pixels to multiple 4K60, 2K144 panels, high FOV VR HMDs, 1080p60 USB displays, etc. A GPU consuming 16 lanes of any generation is common enough in a general purpose computer that there's the issue of splitting up remaining bandwidth to 4K video capture cards, USB3 extenders, SATA/NVME storage controllers, SAS/RAID enterprise storage devices, 10GbE SFP/Ethernet or Fiber cards, next generation data (co)processors, card readers, PCI-E x1 device extenders, or anything else that you need in this era of high bandwidth gaming and streaming.
The bad part of juggling this goes back to my enterprise hardware. Lets say we put a finely tuned g4x8 GPU into a g4x4 slot. It runs on less bandwidth but is there no difference in performance or does it become catastrophic? We don't know and probably won't know until we get there and try it.
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Erelyes
Hey Steve, great to see you're getting into ITX case reviews. However I think there's always been this problem with case reviews - by doing ATX case reviews, and ITX case reviews, you're sort of ignoring micro-ATX cases - and a growing part of the market uses mATX cases for full-horsepower builds in what's called 'medium form factor' cases. In my view, and given board VRM overkill these days, I think there's an easy solution - have an ITX testing setup with an SFX PSU, midrange CPU, low height cooler, and (optionally) a midrange short GPU like a 4070; and then, have a full-fat testing setup with an mATX board, high end CPU, 4090, and an ATX PSU. This would cover almost all cases, and better capture in testing what people use them for. The only exception would be tiny ITX-only cases that house 4090's, but they are so unbelievably optimised for space (and sacrifice so much elsewhere) they're unrealistic to compare to each other, really, anyway.
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Hey Steve, great to see you're getting into ITX case reviews. However I think there's always been this problem with case reviews - by doing ATX case reviews, and ITX case reviews, you're sort of ignoring micro-ATX cases - and a growing part of the market uses mATX cases for full-horsepower builds in what's called 'medium form factor' cases. In my view, and given board VRM overkill these days, I think there's an easy solution - have an ITX testing setup with an SFX PSU, midrange CPU, low height cooler, and (optionally) a midrange short GPU like a 4070; and then, have a full-fat testing setup with an mATX board, high end CPU, 4090, and an ATX PSU. This would cover almost all cases, and better capture in testing what people use them for. The only exception would be tiny ITX-only cases that house 4090's, but they are so unbelievably optimised for space (and sacrifice so much elsewhere) they're unrealistic to compare to each other, really, anyway.
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Hydrargyrum
GamersNexus Regarding cutting down the PCI-E lanes: it's been pointed out in r/hardware in decent detail IO and related parts of the GPU design are actually surprisingly large, and in case of process nodes like TSMC's 5nm they can actually be absurdly expensive, this certainly includes DRAM controllers, and probably (not sure) PCI-E IO blocks as well. Of course, the fact that IO doesn't really scale anymore with subsequent process nodes have been pointed out multiple times before, but that wasn't enough to state that this sort of IO (DRAM controllers & PCI-E lanes) actually take a lot of area in absolute terms (as opposed to merely taking relatively more with every new process node).
Thus all chances are, savings here aren't as much in the PCB layers or in-PCB wiring, but in the die area of a very expensive TSMC 5nm (about 3x more expensive per wafer - and unit of area - than the Ampere's Samsung 8nm).
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GamersNexus Regarding cutting down the PCI-E lanes: it's been pointed out in r/hardware in decent detail IO and related parts of the GPU design are actually surprisingly large, and in case of process nodes like TSMC's 5nm they can actually be absurdly expensive, this certainly includes DRAM controllers, and probably (not sure) PCI-E IO blocks as well. Of course, the fact that IO doesn't really scale anymore with subsequent process nodes have been pointed out multiple times before, but that wasn't enough to state that this sort of IO (DRAM controllers & PCI-E lanes) actually take a lot of area in absolute terms (as opposed to merely taking relatively more with every new process node).
Thus all chances are, savings here aren't as much in the PCB layers or in-PCB wiring, but in the die area of a very expensive TSMC 5nm (about 3x more expensive per wafer - and unit of area - than the Ampere's Samsung 8nm).
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Jeremy
GPU manufactures need to either do what Palit did by only make a 8X card (to free up the 16 lane,) or make use of the other half of those lanes by allowing additional features like M.2 ports (with 2 ports.) For example those that want to build a ITX build that has limitations on storage/PCI-E ports now would have a additional ports to add up to 8TB of storage (which helps for both gamers & content creators). Right now with games, and multi media files getting larger storage is needed more & more. There are those that would talk about heat, but you don't have to put it ultra fast SSDs. Third gen SSDs don't run as hot so they'd be best to use on them. Yes I know ASUS has a prototype, but it still needs two not one slot. M.2 SSDs (non industrial) no matter what gen can only use four lanes max so just put two ports to get all the lanes working. Oh this goes for AMD GPU makers as well.
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GPU manufactures need to either do what Palit did by only make a 8X card (to free up the 16 lane,) or make use of the other half of those lanes by allowing additional features like M.2 ports (with 2 ports.) For example those that want to build a ITX build that has limitations on storage/PCI-E ports now would have a additional ports to add up to 8TB of storage (which helps for both gamers & content creators). Right now with games, and multi media files getting larger storage is needed more & more. There are those that would talk about heat, but you don't have to put it ultra fast SSDs. Third gen SSDs don't run as hot so they'd be best to use on them. Yes I know ASUS has a prototype, but it still needs two not one slot. M.2 SSDs (non industrial) no matter what gen can only use four lanes max so just put two ports to get all the lanes working. Oh this goes for AMD GPU makers as well.
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Holy
Asus is lying about SD cards melting because of overheating. People on readdit ran the ally on 10W, had extra coolers fit at the vents and still had the SD cards malfunction. Others have pointed out the a related card reader hardware from same company had the same issue on Apple devices before a driver update fixed it. The issue there was due to high voltage from the reader with the same pins getting fried and sometimes triggering the lock shortcircuit switch that bigger SD cards have on the side rendering some of the microsd cards as permanently readonly.
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Asus is lying about SD cards melting because of overheating. People on readdit ran the ally on 10W, had extra coolers fit at the vents and still had the SD cards malfunction. Others have pointed out the a related card reader hardware from same company had the same issue on Apple devices before a driver update fixed it. The issue there was due to high voltage from the reader with the same pins getting fried and sometimes triggering the lock shortcircuit switch that bigger SD cards have on the side rendering some of the microsd cards as permanently readonly.
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Adam
As an owner of a 4090 I'm happy about the raw performance. But the GPU segment has been boring as hell the last several years. What I really find exciting is the CPU segment. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the progress ARM CPUs have made lately. But the competition between Intel and AMD is nice to see. I love Intel's use of performance and efficiency cores. I love AMD's use of 3d cache. For the longest time we have been stuck in the 2-3.5ghz range for base clocks. The jump to over 4ghz base and over 5ghz boost is something I didn't expect to see.
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As an owner of a 4090 I'm happy about the raw performance. But the GPU segment has been boring as hell the last several years. What I really find exciting is the CPU segment. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the progress ARM CPUs have made lately. But the competition between Intel and AMD is nice to see. I love Intel's use of performance and efficiency cores. I love AMD's use of 3d cache. For the longest time we have been stuck in the 2-3.5ghz range for base clocks. The jump to over 4ghz base and over 5ghz boost is something I didn't expect to see.
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SheddyBear
I noticed my ROG Ally that it sometimes goes to 43W on APU, and I am not even sure why, it usually happens while plugged in (wont go over 25W otherwise) and for the first few minutes of opening a game. The temp was going up to 93 degrees on the APU. Since the bios update, it tends to stay below 90, usually 85-86. If the APU was reading 90, and there is a hotspot on the SD card, I feel like this could cause even higher temps on the SD card. The fan is slightly louder after the update but not super loud, so I am OK with it SO FAR.
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I noticed my ROG Ally that it sometimes goes to 43W on APU, and I am not even sure why, it usually happens while plugged in (wont go over 25W otherwise) and for the first few minutes of opening a game. The temp was going up to 93 degrees on the APU. Since the bios update, it tends to stay below 90, usually 85-86. If the APU was reading 90, and there is a hotspot on the SD card, I feel like this could cause even higher temps on the SD card. The fan is slightly louder after the update but not super loud, so I am OK with it SO FAR.
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Alex
What frustrates me with ITX is so often they almost make a perfect case, then just make it slightly too small. Example, the SilverStone SUGO 14 is the only case that will fit height wise in the space I have, but a few cm more width would have made it a whole lot better as half the radiator is grossly restricted by the PSU. You also have to blow the GPU exhaust right into the PSU which is less than ideal. But I've not found a single other case I can fit in the space with a three slot GPU.
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What frustrates me with ITX is so often they almost make a perfect case, then just make it slightly too small. Example, the SilverStone SUGO 14 is the only case that will fit height wise in the space I have, but a few cm more width would have made it a whole lot better as half the radiator is grossly restricted by the PSU. You also have to blow the GPU exhaust right into the PSU which is less than ideal. But I've not found a single other case I can fit in the space with a three slot GPU.
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Digital_Jedi
I would like to point out at 9:37 that we have actually seen 8+12 for Raptor Lake already, just not on the desktop. The i7 13850HX is a mobile part and the little brother to the i9 13980HX. It's probably the best bet for estimating 14700K performance as it's the same core architecture in the same counts, and is unlocked, so in theory at least somebody could try to overclock one in a beefy gaming laptop to leaked 14700K clocks and get a decent estimate of the performance.
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I would like to point out at 9:37 that we have actually seen 8+12 for Raptor Lake already, just not on the desktop. The i7 13850HX is a mobile part and the little brother to the i9 13980HX. It's probably the best bet for estimating 14700K performance as it's the same core architecture in the same counts, and is unlocked, so in theory at least somebody could try to overclock one in a beefy gaming laptop to leaked 14700K clocks and get a decent estimate of the performance.
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Mark
I've no idea how Intel justified the engineering cost of those enthusiast NUCs, Beast Canyon etc. Impressive as they were I didn't understand how they're making their money back on those. The regular small brick NUC's IMO are what the NUC was always for. Glad they'll continue on via 3rd party OEM's though.
The 8x physical PCIe graphics cards. I wonder if that'll affect cards with large heatsinks more with sag? The longer 16x slot gives more physical support to the card.
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I've no idea how Intel justified the engineering cost of those enthusiast NUCs, Beast Canyon etc. Impressive as they were I didn't understand how they're making their money back on those. The regular small brick NUC's IMO are what the NUC was always for. Glad they'll continue on via 3rd party OEM's though.
The 8x physical PCIe graphics cards. I wonder if that'll affect cards with large heatsinks more with sag? The longer 16x slot gives more physical support to the card.
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Michael
Steve, it might have escaped your notice, or you have just never worked in Disaster-Recovery Tech-Support, but fireproof safes might be effective against fire damage with regard to papers.
They are NOT however HEATPROOF!
So why don't you just take an HD or especially tape backup media, shove it in an oven at full whack for a couple of hours and although no flames have ever touched the media, what's the over-under of you being able to read said media afterwards?
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Steve, it might have escaped your notice, or you have just never worked in Disaster-Recovery Tech-Support, but fireproof safes might be effective against fire damage with regard to papers.
They are NOT however HEATPROOF!
So why don't you just take an HD or especially tape backup media, shove it in an oven at full whack for a couple of hours and although no flames have ever touched the media, what's the over-under of you being able to read said media afterwards?
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Notorious544d
I'm interested to hear a critical review of the Fractal Terra because although it's a good first effort, there are various design flaws that should be highlighted.
For example, it is quite large and space inefficient when compared to similar cases such as the FormD T1 and Ghost S1. The lack of top exhaust fan support is a missed opportunity and aesthetically, I wish the edges of the wood piece was flat, not chamfered and colour customisable.
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I'm interested to hear a critical review of the Fractal Terra because although it's a good first effort, there are various design flaws that should be highlighted.
For example, it is quite large and space inefficient when compared to similar cases such as the FormD T1 and Ghost S1. The lack of top exhaust fan support is a missed opportunity and aesthetically, I wish the edges of the wood piece was flat, not chamfered and colour customisable.
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Ryan
can't wait to see your rog all review. there have been many reports of sd cards and readers malfunctioning even after the latest updates. which ever the cause may be i think it was a terrible idea for Asus to put that sd card right next the top vents where it gets extremely hot. i uninstalled all my games on it to be safe and took it out. i just ended up upgrading the internal ssd to a 2tb to compensate for added memory.
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can't wait to see your rog all review. there have been many reports of sd cards and readers malfunctioning even after the latest updates. which ever the cause may be i think it was a terrible idea for Asus to put that sd card right next the top vents where it gets extremely hot. i uninstalled all my games on it to be safe and took it out. i just ended up upgrading the internal ssd to a 2tb to compensate for added memory.
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Joe
ITX sounds awesome. With storage being tiny cards, it's tempting to have a 2nd desktop PC down the road in a small form factor with one of the latest CPU/GPU combo (but efficient chips over the monsters we have now), but keep the older PC for mass storage. I want more of small cases over large cases with small motherboards. The next upgrade will be the mass storage PC, then the one after that will be the mini
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ITX sounds awesome. With storage being tiny cards, it's tempting to have a 2nd desktop PC down the road in a small form factor with one of the latest CPU/GPU combo (but efficient chips over the monsters we have now), but keep the older PC for mass storage. I want more of small cases over large cases with small motherboards. The next upgrade will be the mass storage PC, then the one after that will be the mini
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Zzzz
INTEL 8 P CORES + 32 E CORES DID INTEL GONE RETARDED? I am not buying INTEL CORE i9 13900K and i9 13900KS the HEAT GENRATED IS TOOOO MUCH to deal with there is NO CPU AIR COOLER in the world is going to KEEP that BEAST BURING UP the choie is to keep my i9 9900K or AMD RYZEN 7 5800X there is one more problem with with i9 13900K and i9 13900KS is the amount of power from the WALL SOCKET is going to BURN UP
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INTEL 8 P CORES + 32 E CORES DID INTEL GONE RETARDED? I am not buying INTEL CORE i9 13900K and i9 13900KS the HEAT GENRATED IS TOOOO MUCH to deal with there is NO CPU AIR COOLER in the world is going to KEEP that BEAST BURING UP the choie is to keep my i9 9900K or AMD RYZEN 7 5800X there is one more problem with with i9 13900K and i9 13900KS is the amount of power from the WALL SOCKET is going to BURN UP
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Rob
While I like that there's a company making a x8 option, it's not just Nvidia with some evil scheme causing other cards to use x16 physical connectors with x8 electrical. The x16 connector is physically stronger, both in just it's ability to distribute load over a larger area, and the retention mechanism at the end of the slot. Don't let yourself fall down the conspiracy hole.
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While I like that there's a company making a x8 option, it's not just Nvidia with some evil scheme causing other cards to use x16 physical connectors with x8 electrical. The x16 connector is physically stronger, both in just it's ability to distribute load over a larger area, and the retention mechanism at the end of the slot. Don't let yourself fall down the conspiracy hole.
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Jon
Would I buy an Acer card? It depends on the warranty. Over here in the UK we are ed by warranty some of these companies offer. The straight up persona non grata list is XFX, Gainward, Palit, Inno3D, Gigabyte, Powercolor, Saphire, MSI, ASUS. If Acer provide a top notch warranty service such as EVGA did then they would pretty much mop up the UK market.
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Would I buy an Acer card? It depends on the warranty. Over here in the UK we are ed by warranty some of these companies offer. The straight up persona non grata list is XFX, Gainward, Palit, Inno3D, Gigabyte, Powercolor, Saphire, MSI, ASUS. If Acer provide a top notch warranty service such as EVGA did then they would pretty much mop up the UK market.
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holobolo
Would be interested to see what could come about if you collaborated with a statistical mathematician and if you could create standardized numerical scores for cases or other hardware. Of course having the details is important also, but having a single number to compare would be cool. Might not be feasible just a bit of a random thought.
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Would be interested to see what could come about if you collaborated with a statistical mathematician and if you could create standardized numerical scores for cases or other hardware. Of course having the details is important also, but having a single number to compare would be cool. Might not be feasible just a bit of a random thought.
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James
I'm considering waiting for the 14th gen to release. Then buying a 13900K, z790 mobo, 32gb ddr5 6000. Hopefully the prices drop a bit to save some money.
I cant see the 14900K being a massive improvement over the 13900K(judging by the only difference being a slightly higher boost freq.)?
I'm currently running an i7 8700K setup.
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I'm considering waiting for the 14th gen to release. Then buying a 13900K, z790 mobo, 32gb ddr5 6000. Hopefully the prices drop a bit to save some money.
I cant see the 14900K being a massive improvement over the 13900K(judging by the only difference being a slightly higher boost freq.)?
I'm currently running an i7 8700K setup.
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