Comet Lake Discussion Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/asrock...2vo-10-pin

A giant wave of Z490 motherboards flooded headlines yesterday, accompanying Intel's 10th Generation Comet Lake-S CPU launch. It's no wonder that motherboards, such as the Z490 Phantom Gaming 4SR, went unnoticed. But as spotted by hardware detective @KOMACHI_ENSAKA, ASRock's Z490 Phantom Gaming 4SR comes with Intel's ATX12VO power connector.

The ATX12VO specification is Intel's invention to deviate from the standard 24-pin ATX power connector that has been with us for ages. Basically, Intel's connector removes the 3.3V and 5V rails and only retains the 12V rail. The new standard reduces the bulky 24-pin connector to just a 10-pin connector.

ASRock didn't touch the 8-pin EPS power connector. Although the motherboard manufacturer has sacrificed the 24-pin power connector, there are still a bunch of components that still depend on the 5V rail, and a handful need 3.3V. As such, ASRock placed two 4-pin power connectors on the top right corner of the motherboard that should be used to power SATA drives.

There's also a 6-pin PCIe power connector, which we suspect is there to feed graphics cards in a multi-GPU setup.

https://www.techpowerup.com/266489/asroc...-lake-cpus

Historically, Intel has separated its processors and chipsets that accompany them to overclockable and non-overclockable ones. That means that only the "K" CPUs can be overclocked. With the latest generation, only some parts of the lineup are K CPUs, like the Core i9-10900K, i7-10700K, i5-10600K, etc. Those processors could only be overclocked one put in motherboards based on "Z" chipset, like Z390 and Z490. However, it seems like ASRock has developed a new technology that will overclock non-K CPUs on non-Z motherboards, which is quite impressive.

Called the Base Frequency Boost (BFB) technology, it will allow for overclocking the non-K processors on chipsets like B460 and H470. How will that work you might wonder? Well, ASRock will take the TDP of the CPUs and make it run in the PL1 mode, which increases the processor TDP form 65 W and turns it into a 125 W TDP beast. This will, of course, be user selective and case dependent, meaning that if your cooling system can not handle that much heat coming out from the overclocked processors, it is unlikely that they will reach the peak clocks ASRock can target. You can check out the slide below: