Gadgetory

everyone we were at the msi booth at CES 2018 looking at two primary products one is a prototype the other one is in front of me that's the Z 370 god-like motherboard for Intel's of course coffee-like platform it's got some interesting power design we'll be talking about we've got most of the information on this one and it's definitely a flagship probably in the 500 ish dollar range so we'll be getting to that after this before that this coverage is brought to you by Thermaltake and the flow liquid cooler the flow is a 360 millimeter radiator with three ring RGB LED fans you can program the fans our custom lighting through software and then of course benefit from the larger radiator size and cooling performance learn more at the link in the description below so for these III 70 godlike board this is a brand that has existed in the past or MSI they're bringing it back for coffee lake they've got a couple of key features here obviously this has a lot of the gamer embellishments on it with for example caution ultimate power and things like that the most interesting feature on the MSI motherboard is probably the network switch that's built in the network switch basically it's three Ethernet ports on the back of the board and you can plug a console or some other device into the board and then out of it will come the signal that goes back to the router so you can actually use the board as a switch itself or another device at the base of it it's an 18 phase so it has it's a doubled eight phase VRM plus two for the memory and they're using IR or international rectifier 3555 MOSFETs for it with a 35 201 controller which we've seen actually pretty frequently in the last couple months for the that's also IR by the way for the voltage controller other than that memory support is 40 133 megahertz at its max for this board officially and that is powered by the two phase vr m v mm v RM other information those are 60 amp hour stages so the 35 55 or 60 amp stages can handle plenty of power it's spread out over 16 of them for V Corps and the the heatsink on this one is getting closer to what we're looking for it's so it is it's kind of diced in a way that it's not just a big block this time it does actually have some surface area to it and then it's got the usual covers for IO cover and for the kind of metal top cover with all the branding on it so it's getting there it's looking better than previously for power configuration this one is an 8 + 4 for EPS 12-volt there's also a 6 pin PCI power for the PCIe slots of which there are 4 16 length slots so those would be by 16 and then 3 by eights by 1688 all the way down the board which is definitely on the high end for PCIe electrical wiring so a lot of the boards do by fours in there as well so that's kind of cool if you like doing a 4-way set up for GPUs other than that most the board's kind of covered at this point there's kind of the expected USB 3.1 gen2 and support for all that stuff that you've seen basically every board at this point it has the built-in overclocking switch it uses a lookup table so you turn it to different numbers it checks a lookup table it applies that overclock your cpu and whatever else and then you're pretty much good to go obviously we would recommend you manually overclock these boards it's decently powerful but it is an expensive board so might be something we look at in the future with build Zoid to analyze the BRM for its actual high-end overclocking capabilities the I mentioned the m2 heat shield since we've done that in the past or these this time are they're aluminum instead of the previous which was a stainless steel so aluminum significantly better thermal conductor than stainless steel for the gen one and they're also using slightly thicker their old pads which is just good for ensuring that there's flush contact with all the components and of course I've talked about the difference of cooling and vs. controllers in the past so we won't go through that again but those are all of the main changes on this one and for the other item the prototype that I mentioned that is a new edition of the Titan laptop which is the sort of Halo product that we've seen in the past the mechanical keyboard all that stuff just ignoring all of those features for a moment this is a product where MSI is trying to introduce HDR displays to laptops we one we can't film it with HDR display and two it's relevant because we don't have an HDR camera and probably 99% of you don't have an HR display either but the idea is they're putting HDR displays and laptops right now it's extremely limited there are five of them in existence there are two here and there are prototypes so it's a little while out sort of long-term view and besides trying to go for HDR 100 Hertz displays which would be crazy if they can pull it off and eventually roll it out into smaller consumer laptops that are more affordable and not just halo products but they're starting there because they've limited quantity so MSI has told us that they are ready to go they're just waiting for their suppliers to produce enough of the panels to use in laptops at the laptop sizes and major challenges for HDR displays have included primarily thermals so you have obviously a higher power higher quality display sitting in your laptop which is pretty enclosed they have to deal with thermals so that's been the main thing they've been dealing with and they're trying to work towards obviously making sure that the display can sit in there without burning out so it'll be a little while waiting on supply and working on the thermal challenges but it's something to keep an eye out for if you're interested in that kind of thing ultimately means HDR is coming to consumer in a much greater way for the next few years so that's it for Emma sighs sweet as always you can check links in the description below for other articles from CES you can subscribe to us for additional coverage at the show and help us out directly on patreon.com slash gamer xanaxs thank you for watching I'll see you all next time