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It's build therapy time, isn't it? I mean, I've seen the analytics number. I know none of you are building. But I have the Vulcan iGame X870E. Colorful sent it to me. I'm going to give it away for Devvember. That's how we roll. It's one of the Devvember prizes. But I'm going to do a build with it temporarily to, you know, kick the tires and see how it runs. Come with me on that journey and live vicariously cuz no one's buying RAM right now or CPUs. It's a bit of a problem.
So, Colorful has put this together with the idea in mind that this is a an enthusiast build, you know, 18 + 2 + 2 110 amps of power delivery, but it's AM5, so you don't really overclock on AM5. It has a built-in Vulcan LCD display. It has 5 gigabit Ethernet at the back plus USB 4 plus Wi-Fi 7. It has a quick-release VGA button. It's only two DIMM slots, but that makes it easier to run higher clock memory. See, these designs were in the pipeline for a while. There is right now in the server market DDR5 that's running at over 10,000. It's over 9,000. It's 10,000, 12,000, 12,600. And the JEDEC standards have outrun EXPO and XMP. Think about that. EXPO and XMP usually is like the pipe cleaner for getting the freely absurdly fast memory going. And
right now the most absurd memory that you can get in DDR5 is actually for the server socket with the standard, you know, 12,600 or whatever. JEDEC standard. Anyhow, continuing the trend, we're down to one expansion slot. Well, there's two. There's one hidden under a cover. So, one PCIe 5 by 16 and one PCIe 3.0 by 16 physical, that's PCIe 3.0 by 4 electrical. We've got five m.2 slots. One 2280 that's PCIe Gen 5. Another 2280 that's Gen 5 but only two lanes cuz it shares with the USB 4. Unless you turn that off and then you get your lights back. Then you've got three more m.2 that are PCIe Gen 4. Fancy unboxing experience
cuz you know you open it. When you do that the box sounds asthmatic. Oh. It's asthmatic and foaming at the mouth cuz of the packing foam. Yeah, it's another 10 lb motherboard. Have a combination PS/2 port. This is going to work great for my modeling keyboards. Two USB 2 ports, four 5 gigabit type A ports, three 10 gigabit type A ports, another 10 gigabit type A port underneath your 5 gigabit Realtek network and then your two 40 gig USB-C ports. It's USB 4, Thunderbolt compatible. Then we've got our Wi-Fi 7 antenna connections, two analog connections, one for mic in and one for line out, and an optical SPDIF button.
We have a turbo button, like old school turbo, a BIOS update button, and a clear CMOS button. The motherboard does have a rear back plate. And the back plate does have a thermal pad. Mostly right here to just heat dissipate from the VRM area. It does have a sheet of plastic on it so if you find this aesthetic appealing don't forget to do that. Now colorful instead of struggling with oh do we design a motherboard for front to back or you know traditional power connections front to back being the connections are mounted back here and you get a special case so the wires can be hidden. They've gone for right angle everything. You got the two 20-pin so you got four type A optional for your
front panel connections. A single type C right angle four-pin fan header. You got two SATA connections at the bottom and your standard 24-pin plus eight PCIe power for your motherboard plus your dual eight-pin here at the top. Also at the top you've got two RGB headers that are addressable RGB, a post code readout which is nice for diagnostics, and four-pin fan headers. The M.2 on this motherboard does support a 22110. You just have to unscrew a little peg there. It is a toolless setup, which is nice. If you are constantly changing your M.2, that is.
There's always one naysayer that's like, "You don't need toolless for an M.2. You can screw it in because how often are you changing your M.2?" That is a fair point. Most people will never change their M.2, but uh I was doing toolless M.2 with 3D printable accessories before they were actually toolless because I am a crazy person. The secondary bank of M.2s is also removable. Note that I really don't recommend on AM5 platform running any kind of M.2 raid. Like a lot of you are tempted to, "Oh, let's let's do some kind of raid." It might make sense if you're looking at this motherboard in the future and using it as the you know, the basis for some kind of an NAS build and you're just using your M.2 for
storage, but the connectivity for these M.2s are asymmetric enough that I don't know. I don't think raid makes sense. Even if you're going to run a raid one, you'd be hard-pressed to talk me into that with this kind of a setup. And also, the platform itself really doesn't do a super good job supporting raid, especially under Windows. But if Linux, you're going to be using Linux MD, and so like maybe you could disable your USB 4 and then run two Gen 5 M.2. Maybe that would be okay. That's like the one exception, but mostly you don't need it. And then this is just a plastic thing that goes into the bottom expansion slot, which again is just it's just four lanes of PCIe Gen 3. It's for like a
capture card or something like that. It does cover up a bunch of buttons and switches, which are for like your overclocking features. There is also a clear CMOS header here, speaker header, another header for an addressable RGB, two more four-pin fan headers, two USB 2.0 headers, your front panel header, and then in the corner there's another 5-volt addressable RGB header. And this is your VGA quick release. So, you can if it's down at the end of the GPU is not locked in here on the end. If you mess up the little thing that the little retention mechanism like the little thing that sticks out on the uh your graphics card and it gets a crack in it, chances are the company will not honor the warranty. So,
be gentle with your graphics cards. Whenever you transport your machine, I'd be worth taking your graphics card out. So, if you do LAN parties or travel to visit your friends in post-apocalyptic scenarios, uh being able to remove your GPU for travel probably not a bad idea, especially if your case doesn't let you mechanically, you know, screw your GPU in there. It's not enough to have the uh mechanical anti-sag bracket. You really want that thing to be bolted into the case at the front and the rear so there's no physical stress on this connector. At least if you transport your machine around fair bit. I also like that the M.2s have labeling on the silk screen to tell you, oh, this M.2 is compatible with SATA M.2. This M.2 is not
compatible with SATA. This M.2 uses some of your Gen 5 lanes. This M.2 uses PCIe Gen 4 lanes. In addition to your overclocking physical switches at the bottom, there's also LED modes. You can turn the LEDs off completely if that's your thing. The LCD gets a peel as well, but we'll have to look at that again when we actually get a build. There's power, reset, and a retry button here. Retry is useful, especially in our DDR5 age cuz like DDR5 acts different when it's cold like the machine's been off for a while and when it's warm. And so, if you've got a stable overclock or you've got something crazy going on with
your memory, let the machine warm up, you can hit retry. It might boot fine, whereas it didn't boot correctly the first time around because well, it was cold. Cold boot. Other accessories you get in the box, a hanging air freshener. Is that some sort of implied statement that the gamers that are buying this have uh personal hygiene problems? It's fair. It comes with a ton of extra thermal pads. This is great. This is I mean, I like this trend. It's like the overclocker motherboards, the enthusiast motherboards. It's like, "Oh yeah, we know what you're going to do with this.
Here, have some extra thermal pads. There you go." Uh these are extra and spares in some respects, but also there's a secondary reason to include these. And that is sometimes your M.2 has chips on both sides and sometimes there are chips only on one side. And with these thermal pads, you can ensure that no matter which kind of M.2 that you have, your M.2 is making connections on both the top and the bottom. A lot of motherboards only have the single connection for the M.2. Like you get a connection on the M.2 and it may or may not have a thermal pad that connects to the bottom of the M.2, the underside of the M.2 to the rest of the chassis. With these extra thermal pads, no matter what kind of M.2 you have, you can ensure
that you make connection. Most of the time the temperature the thing on the M.2 where the temperature matters is the RAM, which is optional. Most M.2s that you have now don't have RAM because RAM costs too much. Cooling that is important and then cooling the controller is important. It's less important to provide extra cooling for the NAND chips because those are designed to operate kind of warm. And you don't want um like the M.2 will use more power than it otherwise would to try to keep the NAND warm because the NAND does better when it is warm versus when it is cold in terms of endurance and reliability. So you don't want it too hot, you don't want it too cold. It's got to be just
right. Get your colorful motherboard quick start guide and then an actual printed manual, an operation guide, which is also multi-language. That explains the connections and the headers and stuff. You can get the PDF version of this on the website if you're thinking about buying this motherboard so you can check out what you're getting. Over here we've got a couple white SATA cables, some white Velcro straps. Ooh, this is a gray something. What the heck even is this? Hey, look at that. Get your free included iGame toolkit. It's a multi-toolkit. It's got Phillips, security bit, star.
This would help you installing your machine, especially if it wasn't toolless. Got a colorful M.2, some extra M.2 mounting hardware if you prefer not to go toolless, they include the accessories for that. Front panel and USB breakout headers. Sometimes it's easier to wire the header and then plug the header into the motherboard than to wire it into the motherboard. And you've also got a cool magnet that's like a little model of your motherboard. Man, that air freshener is overpowering. So, you're nervous, you're on your first date, and you accidentally put on too much cologne. All right, that's enough horsing around.
Let's actually do a build with this thing. So, I'm going to say build. Yeah. It's a nice build. It turned out really well. And I ended going with the ASRock 9070 for the GPU, G.Skill for the memory, and uh yeah, it's a pretty good setup, I think. You can see at the rear there's a plastic cover that covers the expansion slots here. This is the solid side panel version of the Define 1, which is a little more expensive than the glass side panel, but the solid side panel is just all metal. case is just it's all metal. And I ended up using a Fractal AIO for the cooler. And uh the top is set up as intake, which is unusual for me. The little built-in LCD screen is pretty cool, I have to admit.
It can be tough to find parts in this environment. Don't go into debt. This is Jake's mug. It's It kills me every time I hear debt cuz uh well, I mean, when you're working on stuff like this, it's like, "Oh, this memory kit." Uh G.Skill memory kit is the ultra low latency. Like, there've been all these breakthroughs with memory and everything else that is just not available in the wider market. You can get AM5 DDR5 memory latencies down to like 68, 72 nanoseconds these days, which is absurd, but it's not widely available. It is available, just not widely available and at extreme cost. It's like war rations. The BIOS is full-featured. Nothing is locked down. You got the AMD overclocking menu, AMD CBS menu, PBS IOMMU, SR-IOV, basically all the settings. It is
themed. They put some work into the look and feel, but all the knobs and tunables you could want are in there. If you want eco mode down to 45 W, you can do it with this motherboard, but all the peripherals on this motherboard consume kind of a lot of power. If you really want an ultra low power build, you're you're probably looking at an ITX or maybe a microATX motherboard, but you can run the CPU with a TDP down to 45 W. Yeah. Overall, I like how this build turned out. I think I would actually probably use this build with Linux, which means that the uh the iGame software from Colorful not really a thing. Maybe I could sit down and Vibe code something
to control the LCD screen. Found the English language version of the software to control the LCD screen a little fiddly, but you can customize the LCD screen, you can upload images, and um customize what's displayed and the information. It's just the date and time out of the box, which isn't super useful. But, the English version of the software seemed not to detect the LCD screen for whatever reason. Updating the BIOS was easy. Overall, not bad. It's really just going to come down to like price, value, and features. If you're building with this motherboard, you're building to an aesthetic. It's not for functional reasons, in other words.
There is pretty good overclockability on this board, but there's not pretty good overclockability for AM5 CPUs in general. I've got a 9900X 3D in here, which is 12 cores, which is one of the better overclockable CPUs that I happen to have. I think cuz it's six cores per CCD instead of eight. And our AIO certainly helps with that, but I couldn't get any I mean, I can deliver like 270 W to our AM5 CPU, and the motherboard can keep up with that, no problem. Doesn't really give us a ton of extra performance, maybe like 3 or 4%. The build out on this motherboard is also interesting. 5 gigabit, I would have liked to have seen 10 gigabit, especially at the price point that we're at. But, the USB 4 implementation on
this motherboard is pretty solid. I guess that's that's kind of expected because USB 4 in the markets where this motherboard is intended for, I think has a little bit more penetration. And so, like if you wanted to use this with an external USB 4 dock or something like that, you should have a pretty good experience. I tested that on Linux and Windows. The drivers that Colorful offers on their website for the USB 4 interface with the latest BIOS update, you need that. Uh worked pretty well. Uh generally one of the better implementations of USB 4 on Windows that I've seen. That's Thunderbolt compatible, if you're just joining us for the whole USB 4 debacle \{slash\} saga on Thunderbolt on an AMD platform, but you can't call it
Thunderbolt, but it's Thunderbolt. I mean, Thunderbolt compatible. Also, I will always have a soft spot for a motherboard that has a PS/2 port because it lets me use positively ancient keyboards like the original IBM Model M PS/2 with no modifications. Or old beam spring keyboards or what have you. The USB 4 implementation is so good, a USB keyboard works over the USB 4 port. That's not always a guarantee. So, there you go. Colorful X870E and a Fractal Define 1 build solved the existential dread and unavailability of parts that we have. We can enjoy this together. And remember, we're going to try to give this motherboard away for Dev Ember. So, check out the details of that on the Level 1 Techs forum. And we're all signing out, and
I'll see you there.
