Gadgetory

my coverage of Computex 2017 is brought to you by be quiet cable mod verda gear and EVGA go ahead and check out the links below for more info all right guys about the gigabyte booth or the suite Taipei 101 check it out wait thought of you're recording yeah we're good I just roll it we're going alright look at this xqn motherboards is all I care about pretty sweet right so we've got the Auris lineup here this is the gaming three sort of your more basic entry-level model let's say you don't want all the bells and whistles then you might want off for this especially if you're just looking for a straight-up X 299 and you know maybe court sky like X or KB like X support right out of the box is what you want you want to spend a ton on the motherboard I've surveyed you guys in the past you're like we don't want to spend more than $200 on the motherboard which I completely agree and while I cannot confirm or deny price guarantee you this is going to be one of the cheaper boards in the x-29 lineup from good old gigabytes so does being said you still get some really nice base features here obviously you get quad channel memory support support for the latest ascetics give like if you're like X processors 1 2 3 4 5 PCIe gen3 slots right there especially these two kind of nice will reinforce ones with the LEDs have a nice touch nice tool LED on the chips that he think as well and if we look at the middle of the motherboard we get a pair of m dot two nvme SSD slots right there which we're going to talk more about in a little bit and down here I don't know if you can see but there's a digital LED header so if you wanted to connect an addressable LED strip you could easily do so that seems to be the latest craze these days addressable LEDs kind of like what we've seen with the NZXT 2 plus just being able to really have a lot more customization features and signals being sent to the LEDs so that they're not all having to conform to each other so you have a lot more fun effects to play with going down the line here we have the gaming 7 you can see that this one's a little bit more lit AF breath there's a bunch more lighting zones you actually get this nice little chipset heatsink upgrade for this little plate here you can remove that you can sort of customize the logo that you want here you're a modder for example I'm sure some system integrators will have their own version of this you get one two three four five PCIe gen 3 slots all the same as the the gaming three however all of these feature RGB LEDs get RGB LEDs between the the DIMM slots on the motherboard of course you get one two three m dot two you can see that these two are pretty much the same as we saw in the gaming three but the third one actually has a heatsink which got it's got this metallic plate here with some thermal pads underneath for additional cooling I was talking to Matt from gigabyte and he was saying that they distant testing on the 960 Pro for Samsung nvme SSD within four minutes without that he think it was throttling and then they actually put the hissing back on and it went for 24 hours straight with no throttling whatsoever so that's a--that's a good version performance right there but of course we're going to see some more reviewers perhaps myself even do some more in-depth thermal testing but there you have the horas gaming seven let's mosey on over to the gaming 9 really quick and this is sort of via the flagship motherboard X 299 on the gigabyte side of things you get all the same lighting zones and all the same basic features I didn't want to mention that on the gaming 7 it does also have a USB 3.1 type C header which the gaming 3 does not have so bear that in mind additionally you also get all the same features that we saw before but look now you get these em dots you heatsinks on all three of your mq slot as far as audio is concerned you actually get the highest sound fidelity with the gaming 9 it's a small step down with the gaming 7 and the bass version of that audio chip with the gaming 3 now the fourth motherboard here is the XQ 99 Oris altra gaming which is actually sort of an interesting position right in between the gaming 3 and the gaming 7 so you'll see it's just as lit literally as the gaming 7 is so pretty much all the same led zones except for the audio solution this is actually still rocking the same audio solution as the gaming 3 so not quite the same fidelity as the 7 or 9 and it's also lacking the the led feature cover the LED plate over the audio chip as well we also get 3m 2 slots with one heatsink included whereas on the gaming 3 you only get 2 as I mentioned earlier and you also are getting that same sort of customisable chipset if you're perhaps a moderate or feeling like just making this more of your own this is the last board that I want to talk about this would be x2 99u d4 and this board is super special because it's basically a gaming 3 board with none of the I think this is going to appeal to a lot of us who don't really care about the gaming centric features we don't care about RGB LEDs we just want a board that doesn't look like like terrible that isn't going to cost us an arm and a leg because at the end of the day what this is really about here folks and where I feel like most of us are excited including myself is just being able to support a skylit connect or a cable ache X processor so for those of us who are just looking to get on the new Intel HED keen platform this might be a really great option for not too much money we see none of the RGB LEDs the the rear i/o cover is just completely gone you're just trying to build a system for performance this is really for the the purist in all of us so you can bet your bottom dollar that this is going to be the chiefest X $2.99 board in gigabytes line up of course I can't confirm pricing at this moment but I've been informed by the gigabyte staff that June 19th is when we're going to be able to preorder these boards and that's also when we're going to find out exactly how much they cost so keep your eyes out for that