Gadgetory

hey everyone I am Steve from gamers Nexus Donette and today we're talking about chipset differences looking at the new Intel lineup so that would be the 100 series chipsets and we're primarily looking at z170a CH 170 and H 110 there are three other main chipsets that are out and that would be Q 170 q 150 MB 150 these are all classified as business chipsets but as seen here by this MSI be 150 motherboard they can be outfitted for gaming so it is a possibility we're not going to talk about those as much in this video but they have been discussed in the article linked in the description below if you want to read more about the business series chipsets now that we've got things like the z170 EVGA board over here so two representations of what the motherboard market looks like in the immediate future and before we dive into the individual differences of each chipset out there we need to talk about what a chipset is an established sort of a base knowledge pool of how it all works so a chipset can effectively be thought of as the brain stem of your computer this is something we've written about in the past couple years ago actually and the chipset handles all the i/o all of the transfer and exchange of information in your computer your PCIe devices can communicate through the chipset and will the storage devices can go through the chips at USB Gigabit Ethernet all that stuff at some point can feed through the chipset in order to access and communicate with other devices that need to be met in the chain of command so the CPU of course can sort of overseen everything the CPU has its own lanes and integrations now with modern devices as well so modern CPUs have their own PCIe lanes on the die itself that means the CPU can and does allocate some of its own PCIe lanes to your attached devices like video cards so the chipset doesn't do as much as it used to when the days of Northbridge and Southbridge it still existed but it is an important part in that you can't have a computer without one so that's the baseline the next thing is to establish what Intel's branding means so these chipsets use two different prefixes and there are many other chipsets out there as well the ones we're talking about and the only ones that exists really in the consumer market and business market our X chipsets Z there used to be P H Q and B and we're going to talk about each of those means very briefly X is the extreme series chipset this is the one associated with the LGA 2011 socket type which means that there are 2011 contacts on the CPU 2011 pins on the motherboard more or less you can activate some pins or deactivate them as needed by the motherboard manufacturer but that's the X series and then there's the Z series which is performance Z used to be called the P series you may remember things like the P 50 X whatever was P 57 maybe motherboards and that was superseded by the Z series it means performance that is going to be sort of the mainstay for gaming enthusiasts for people who are interested in overclocking and things like that the H series is more mainstream so it's still an important chipset but it disables some things like overclocking which generally makes it more affordable than its a Z series counterpart the B and Q series are both business class chipsets and as such they enable some features that are totally uninteresting to a lot of gamers out there but very useful for business applications as an example one of those would be protection against lower level attacks on the system where an attacker a hacker might be attempting to gain access or inject something at a low level before the operating system is loaded so there are protections against that in some of the business class chipsets and then things like B 150 which is what this board is right here clearly you can outfit be 150 to be a gaming motherboard as MSI has done but it is still equipped with business class features it has Intel small business advantage and items like that and you can check the full charts on that if the video is too quick for you in the article below let's get into the 100 series differences for the 100 series we have things like HS i/o high speed i/o lines we have PCIe lanes and all sorts of other items that go into the differentiation of chips has the main item for the 100 series is the inclusion of HS io lanes a high-speed eye Elaine is allocatable by the motherboard manufacturer to some extent for different devices in the system so this means that companies that make them other words actually have some control and customization over the board which allows for further differentiation in the motherboard market and that helps in a time when a lot of the controllers have been moved to the CPU itself like the memory controller several years ago and things of that nature HS i/o lanes are consistent of the gigabit ethernet options the SATA options PCI Express and other i/o devices m2 would be included in there as it is a PCIe interface device and with z170 you get 26 of those lanes the HSI o lanes with the H 170 board you get 22 or fewer the H 110 you get 14 so that's the difference at a top level what that translates into is a difference of how many ports are available on the devices now just because there are 26 H s io lanes available doesn't mean that the motherboard manufacturer has to fill their board with PCIe or SATA or USB devices this is a good example this is a mini ITX motherboards about six and a half by six and a half inches it physically cannot fit any more than it's already on that board more or less so to that extent just being z170 doesn't mean you're going to use all of those HS io lanes for some crazy config the next big difference is PCIe devices with z170 you get 20 PCIe lanes available on the chipset but those are offered in chunks of four so you can't take eight of them and give them to a video card for example it sits in chunks of four so it's very important with H 170 there are 16 PCIe lanes on the chipset with h1 10 there are six and do keep in mind as I said the CPU itself has some lanes as well and those will generally be given to your video card so these lanes can be used for things like m dot 2 devices and m dot 2 SSD will generally want by 4 or X 4 that means it wants about 4 lanes for peak efficiency and that includes the new Samsung 950 and these are part of the HS IO system so they're allocatable 2 different interfaces on the board as the manufacturer deems necessary other than this it's generally going to be for capture cards things like that so if you want more PCIe devices on your board including more video cards you should be going z17 you kind of have to actually with video cards because the maximum PCIe configuration for video devices is 1 by 16 device on this is e1 71 by 16 device 2 by 8 devices or 1 by 8 and 2 by 4 devices for a total of 3 with h1 70 you get 1 by 16 or x16 device and the same is true with h1 10 you get 1 x16 device and that's generally going to be your video card if you are any kind of gamer with a higher-end card so one thing to note here is that with SLI it is actually required by Nvidia to have a buy eight minimum Lane allocation to video cards in the in SLI setup so if you want to do SLI you're basically stuck with two cards right now and that may change as manufacturers Institute things like multiplexing and PEX chips plx chips things like that you will see things change a bit in terms of these specs offering on websites the lane allocation will look different but in reality it's just being multiplexed and then on h1 70 you're basically given 1 by 16 device and you might get a couple other devices through the chipset not through the CPU where you are able to do things like m dot 2 or whatever two more major differences here and one of them is pretty critical the memory support and the overclocking support z170 is the only of chipsets that is capable of overclocking through UEFI BIOS so if you buy a case cue CPU and you have intent to overclock that CPU z170 is the only board that is in consideration for skylake processors right now the other option here or the other item of note is the memory configuration z 172 h 170 are the same they have two dimms per channel and they have two channels h 110 which is much more affordable has one dimple channel and it has two channels that means your capacity is going to be limited your memory configuration is going to be limited so do keep that in mind with the H 110 chipset in terms of overclocking and multi-gpu configurations and other devices and generally the question of which chipset is right for me the way we determine this for our own builds is to start with a couple simple questions the first one you need to ask yourself am i interested in overclocking if the answer to that is no you can still buy a z series chipset for other reasons but you don't need it for the overclocking function it's not going to serve you any good so at that point you can start looking at h 170 the next question am i interested in multiple GPUs and am i interested in multiple PCIe devices which means GPUs PCIe SSD s and M 2 SSDs in this specific case if the answer to that is no meaning you want a CPU you don't necessarily care about overclocking and you want a GPU you don't necessarily care about having more of them then h 170 is pretty much where it's at h 110 is still an option but we'll talk about that momentarily and where it becomes limited in some areas so those are the main questions other things to ask yourself are about raid h 110 does not support raid but Z 172 H 170 do and the Q and B chipsets have their own raid support as well listed in the specs table but for the mainstream chipsets that's what we're looking at and then other items multi-monitor support using the IGP for the IDP multi-monitor support is limited two three monitors on Z and H 170 and two monitors on H 110 so that is another limitation that should be noted for those who are building more of an office suited PC where you're not going to have a video card there was a user recently who commented on the article asking a pretty good question they asked is there a reason I would want a Z series chipset if I'm not overclocking and I am NOT doing multiple video cards the answer is yes but kind of so the reasons for yes are a few one of them is fairly specific it's that you want high-end components that are associated with the Z series chipset but you don't necessarily need the actual features provided by the chipset so what I mean by this is higher quality capacitors chokes vrm things like that now if you're not overclocking you're not using the features you don't necessarily need those higher quality components but this is a use case that I've heard from some people who have who have had me build systems for them excuse me and another reason for buying z3 is without wanting to use multiple video cards or overclocking would simply be because you need more HS i/o devices so you're doing some crazy internal Nass or capture card setup or anything we're using a lot of i/o or you want a lot of us be available or anything like that then yes z170 is still on the table for consideration for most users if you're not overclock you're not doing multi-gpu you're basically looking at H 170 immediately then H 110 as an alternative the reason I am NOT a massive fan of suggesting the H 110 to at least us builders is because generally the price of the H 110 motherboard is going to hit a ceiling so this this is true of the previous HDS as well so with the HT vs motherboards and the lower and chipsets there is sort of a an associative price where the motherboard eventually hits a ceiling and it stops increasing the quality of components even though the chipset doesn't necessarily dictate the quality of those components and in the US market you'll see H 170 boards that are very good and comparable to some of the h1 ten boards in price but you get the extra feature support a braid and some expansion if you want to grow or generally just potentially higher quality components and if you're in Asia markets if you're in non-us markets h1 10 starts making a lot more sense for pricing reasons I'm not super familiar with those but that is one of the reasons that the ultra low end ships that exists for users who are on a very tight and restrictive budget h1 10 is where you want to start looking for a cheap motherboard if you're doing something like a low-end maybe Pentium set up and you have no plans to overclock or do anything like that so that's sort of the roundup of the existing Intel chipsets that came out with the skylake processors the architecture and the 100 series q and B are definitely worth looking at hit the link in the description below for more information on those but if you have any questions if I've skipped over something - please leave a comment below I'll try to help you out otherwise hit our forums on the website gamers Nexus Donette and we'll help you there that's all for this time if you like this type of reporting as always check out the patreon link in the post roll video we picked up a couple of backers now super excited about that because it helps us remain pretty independent and keep the journalistic approach things that we do so that's all for this time I'll see you all next time