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 ESTGaming Performance
Ashes of the Singularity
Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of DirectX12s features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.
Rise Of The Tomb Raider
Rise of the Tomb Raider is a third-person action-adventure game that features similar gameplay found in 2013's Tomb Raider. Players control Lara Croft through various environments, battling enemies, and completing puzzle platforming sections, while using improvised weapons and gadgets in order to progress through the story.
One of the unique aspects of this benchmark is that it’s actually the average of 3 sub-benchmarks that fly through different environments, which keeps the benchmark from being too weighted towards a GPU’s performance characteristics under any one scene.
Thief
Thief has been a long-standing title in PC gamers hearts since the introduction of the very first iteration which was released back in 1998 (Thief: The Dark Project). Thief as it is simply known rebooted the long-standing series and renowned publisher Square Enix took over the task from where Eidos Interactive left off back in 2004. The game itself utilises the fluid Unreal Engine 3 engine and is known for optimised and improved destructible environments, large crowd simulation and soft body dynamics.
Total War: WARHAMMER
Not only is the Total War franchise one of the most popular real-time tactical strategy titles of all time, but Sega delve into multiple worlds such as the Roman Empire, Napoleonic era and even Attila the Hun, but more recently they nosedived into the world of Games Workshop via the WARHAMMER series. Developers Creative Assembly have used their latest RTS battle title with the much talked about DirectX 12 API so that this title can benefit from all the associated features that comes with it. The game itself is very CPU intensive and is capable of pushing any top end system to their limits.
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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.