GIGABYTE Z590 Aorus Tachyon Review: Built for SPEED
by Gavin Bonshor on May 10, 2021 9:30 AM ESTGaming Performance
For Z590 we are running using Windows 10 64-bit with the 20H2 update.
Civilization 6
Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civilization series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer underflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but I have played every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, and it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Shadow of the Tomb Raider (DX12)
The latest installment of the Tomb Raider franchise does less rising and lurks more in the shadows with Shadow of the Tomb Raider. As expected this action-adventure follows Lara Croft which is the main protagonist of the franchise as she muscles through the Mesoamerican and South American regions looking to stop a Mayan apocalyptic she herself unleashed. Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the direct sequel to the previous Rise of the Tomb Raider and was developed by Eidos Montreal and Crystal Dynamics and was published by Square Enix which hit shelves across multiple platforms in September 2018. This title effectively closes the Lara Croft Origins story and has received critical acclaims upon its release.
The integrated Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark is similar to that of the previous game Rise of the Tomb Raider, which we have used in our previous benchmarking suite. The newer Shadow of the Tomb Raider uses DirectX 11 and 12, with this particular title being touted as having one of the best implementations of DirectX 12 of any game released so far.
Strange Brigade (DX12)
Strange Brigade is based in 1903’s Egypt and follows a story which is very similar to that of the Mummy film franchise. This particular third-person shooter is developed by Rebellion Developments which is more widely known for games such as the Sniper Elite and Alien vs Predator series. The game follows the hunt for Seteki the Witch Queen who has arisen once again and the only ‘troop’ who can ultimately stop her. Gameplay is cooperative-centric with a wide variety of different levels and many puzzles which need solving by the British colonial Secret Service agents sent to put an end to her reign of barbaric and brutality.
The game supports both the DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs and houses its own built-in benchmark which offers various options up for customization including textures, anti-aliasing, reflections, draw distance and even allows users to enable or disable motion blur, ambient occlusion and tessellation among others. AMD has boasted previously that Strange Brigade is part of its Vulkan API implementation offering scalability for AMD multi-graphics card configurations. For our testing, we use the DirectX 12 benchmark.
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Linustechtips12#6900xt - Monday, May 10, 2021 - link
I do hope in the pursuit of faster memory, the consumer boards still have 4 ram slots, I had 16GB and I just upgraded to 32Gb with the 2 slots I had free, it creates less e-waste too imo.MenhirMike - Monday, May 10, 2021 - link
I don't see a reason for regular consumer boards to move away from 2 DIMMs per Channel/4 DIMMs on a Desktop board. This board is for extreme overclocking, where only having 2 DIMMs makes a lot of sense (shorter trace lengths mean that the likelyhood for a successful overclock increase).Silver5urfer - Tuesday, May 11, 2021 - link
e-waste ? lol. That is over at the BGA garbage use and throw laptops where the battery cannot be purchased and the Heatsink will deteriorate due to poor cooling and ultimately the laptop will be rendered useless garbage.Or the li-ion phones that are announced every year, Apple says they sell double digit millions every quarter so what happened to the millions for the past year or such, same for Android li-ion sealed phones.
Or those new wireless earbuds which do not have any option to replace the battery in them and every year people purchase new esp Anker and the low end market is literally flooded by these use and throw garbage products.
Desktop DRAM DIMM slots do not have any relationship with e-waste in contrast with the other consumer products which are made for planned obsolescence plus a Desktop will live as long as the components are in working state, people even run Core 2Quad machines today, and Xeon market still exists since Nehalem uarch machines.
Linustechtips12#6900xt - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link
I meant that it creates e wast of dimms not much but it does when you have to throw away a 2*4gb kit because you dont have enough dimm slots and want to upgrade to 16gbmeacupla - Tuesday, May 11, 2021 - link
???consumer boards are unlikely to move away from 4 slots
You do realize that this mobo is specifically designed with very short traces between cpu and ram, right?
Linustechtips12#6900xt - Wednesday, May 19, 2021 - link
i do understand that yes. but its. cost saving thing aswell and it might catch on into consumerdotes12 - Monday, May 10, 2021 - link
I've always wondered why every picture of direct LN2 cooling I've seen is done in wide open air as towels and conformal coatings are used in an attempt to prevent electrical shorts. Why don't we see them putting their board in a glass or plexiglass box (like a fish tank) with a loosely fitting easily removable lid on it? Most compressed (or liquid) gasses are incredibly dry and have extremely low moisture content, so once it turns to gas and displaces the room air from the box it'll naturally be such a low humidity that you shouldn't have to worry about condensation. Furthermore, they could purge the box with another cheap heavy dry gas like CO2 first, or continually pump it in there to keep the moist room air out.gavbon - Monday, May 10, 2021 - link
One of the reasons why an enclosed space would be a negative is that even small amounts of air that would be present can still have moisture. This would condensate on the board and create shorts. Unless you were able to remove ALL traces of the air, it just would cause problems. Also as an ex-extreme overclocker myself, having direct and unrestricted access to the board/pots for heating up the LN2 pot with a blowtorch when hitting a cold bug would be hard to do otherwise.dotes12 - Tuesday, May 11, 2021 - link
That makes sense, thank you for taking the time to write me a reply!just_passin_by_2 - Tuesday, May 24, 2022 - link
A large ventilation to the outside would also be beneficial to prevent a lack of breathable oxygen in the room if using CO2 or liquid nitrogen. Glass could also break especially if under stress from temperature differences. With that said, safety could be dependent on different factors and too much safety could be bad as well. Wearing gloves around liquid nitrogen could potentially allow the liquid nitrogen to become trapped inside the glove to going gloveless may be better but I do not really know. Anyway, this does sound fun and I wish you all the best if anyone here overclocks.