jake_westmorley

I can confirm that after some poking, I got BIOS P2.90 to work with a 10th gen CPU (10980XE) and get 4.7-4.8GHz turbo boost on single threaded loads. This reduces the disparity with the 9900K machine and you get up to 128GB in quad channel.

Anyone else wondering about this, I have successfully gotten a 10980XE installed with BIOS P2.90. So it can be done.

My guess with the tech support is that the first level might be outsourced to an external 3rd party company. What I've experienced, the first reply is one or more of: incorrect, brief, not helpful, giving an impression of not caring. If you persist and ask them to escalate, you might eventually break through to a 2nd level of support (indirectly of course), which do seem to be genuine Corsair employees that have knowledge of the product and seem to care. I suppose luck and time are factors into whether you can get access to this 2nd level of support, however. The first level of support don't have any C1s available to reproduce/test issues on their side. Shame, really.

To clarify just in case someone is misled by the above information: those slots work perfectly fine with any M.2 NVME SSD as long as they are not in RAID mode. Enabling RAID mode will require a VROC license if they are not intel SSDs.

StormShadow, Actually I'm wondering if it already does support it. The latest BIOS already installed is P2.10, and Asrock site says this version added support for new Core-X cpus: 2.10 2019/9/16 12.73MB Windows®How to Update Supports New Intel Core™ X-Series Processors Do the version numbers between Asrock stock and Corsair custom match up?

I wasn't able to find good detailed teardowns of the i180/i182. I attached a low-res photo showing the front M.2 slot already populated (it seems on that particular review unit, the original drive was installed on the front of the motherboard). In my i182 units, the original drive was put on the back of the motherboard, leaving the easily accessible front slot available for upgrade. I don't know what your system will look like. Maybe the i180s all have the drives installed on the front? If your i180 has the front M.2 daughterboard on the left side of the CPU unpopulated, that would be the easiest one to access. The risk to screw things up on this slot is very low. Just pop it off like if it were a RAM stick, slot the new drive into it, screw the SSD down, and push the daughterboard back into the slot. The SATA HDD -> SSD conversion on the i180 is the same as for the i16x series and so the online photos should be just as good for that. This is also a very low risk operation. If you're not experienced in tinkering with tight SFF PCs, I wouldn't attempt removing the graphics card to access the 3rd slot. It's pretty tight and therefore the risk is a little higher.

There are a total of 3 M.2 slots on the i180/i182. The original SSD is on the top back side of the motherboard. There is an easily accessible M.2 slot on the front side of the motherboard next to the CPU. The third slot is harder to access and is on the back lower side of the motherboard. You will need to remove the graphics card to access it. Also nothing stopping you from replacing the internal HDD with a high capacity SATA SSD. I have done all of the above operations on my machine without issue. Only thing to be aware is to consider thermals for M.2 drives since the airflow on back side M.2 slots is not ideal I would try to opt for drives that are relatively efficient.

Bump. I'd also like to be able to purchase the cooling system as one of my i164 systems has the dreaded pump cavitation noise and I figure the easiest is just to replace the AIO cooler myself.

An i182 with a 9900K is a bit of a paradox. Literally the only thing different between the i182 and the i165 is the motherboard and the CPU. A 9900K is a socket 1151 processor, and thus requires a different motherboard. The i182 motherboard is X299/socket 2066, which means you can't fit a 9900K. A motherboard with socket 1151 and 4 memory slots does not currently exist, so you really have to choose the platform and you cannot have your cake and eat it. Another alternative is to poke Corsair to allow a BIOS update on the i182 to upgrade the CPU to 10th generation Cascade Lake-X processors. (Asrock released this BIOS last September already). The 10th gen processors have higher boost speeds, and also more flexible TB3 boosts (4-core boosts). In that case I would expect a 10920X to reach at least 4.7GHz under lightly threaded applications. Still lower than a 9900K, but quite a step up from the 4.2GHz we're getting on the 9920X.

From my experience with both systems, you might be better off with the 9900K. Reasons: 1) The 9920X, from a stock installation, rarely boosts above 4.2GHz and basically never reaches 4.5GHz. On single-threaded workloads. 2) The X299 motherboard used has fewer options to control the MCE feature that works very well on the i16x series, making it relatively unusable. Therefore you're kind of stuck with the inability to reach full boost on the 9920X. The i16x board with a flip of the switch to enable MCE and a TDP adjustment to allow 125W-160W TDP will work at 5.0GHz on all cores all the time. 3) Corsair have been pretty open that they aren't catering to the enthusiast community with the Corsair One series, so don't rely/expect BIOS updates to help you tinker like for their other product series. Reference: https://forum.corsair.com/v3/showpost.php?p=1000777&postcount=48 Only exception: total RAM usage for your application. You only get 2 slots on the 9900K platform, whereas you get 4 on the X299. I needed 128GB for my workloads, which is not possible with 2 slots. Check your needs on that since it may be the overriding requirement. Other possibly related factor: my 9900K system has the dreaded extremely annoying pump cavitation noise on the CPU cooling (left) side that many users are complaining about on the forums and in the reviews. My two 9920X systems have no pump noise issues at all, either CPU or GPU (although one of the systems does have some coil whine on the GPU in some workloads). When I rotate the systems around, I can clearly hear a lot of bubbling/gurgling in the 9900K system, indicating the AIO system was not well bled before sealing. I do not hear gurgling in both 9920X systems. Since the cooling systems are identical in both platforms, one might hypothesize that the 9920X series has better quality control...

So it seems at least the latest BIOS on the i180/i182 now allows to set the CPU multipliers, which is a great step up. However, it seems we still don't have access to the TDP limit settings from the regular X299E-ITX/ac. Also, if one enables MCE multi-core-enhancement, it seems this option also removes all TDP limits. This causes the CPU to predictably shoot up in temperature and quickly overwhelm the cooling system. A more balanced approach would be to allow the MCE yet keep the TDP limits to 165/170W as per the original configuration. A completely custom approach would allow the user to define their own TDP limits. In the i16x series, the MCE option by default doesn't remove the TDP limits, which I think is a lot safer/easier. Can we get the same for the i18x?

When can we expect a BIOS update for Cascade Lake-X CPUs? I tried to update the standard Asrock X299E-ITX BIOS but it wouldn't take it. Thanks.