Gadgetory

hi and welcome back to our brown box i'm your host Matt and today we're taking a look at the brand new Zeb 170 motherboard from ads Rock the extreme 7 plus earlier this month Intel releases first batch of skylake processors with the core i7 6700 k and the core i5 6600 k unfortunately they only offered a very minor performance bump over existing house or processes which was pretty disappointing however skylights updated platform does bring high-speed ddr4 memory to the mainstream and a cutting-edge chipset known as the Z 170 there's already a huge number of dev 170 motherboards to choose from ranging in price from just a hundred dollars all the way up to five hundred dollars for most people though the best value boards we found somewhere in the middle with motherboard such as the ads Rob Zeb 170 extreme 7 plus which can be had for just two hundred and forty dollars rather than running a heap of benchmarks the kind of inconsequential as all Zedd 170 motherboards will deliver the same performance we're instead going to focus on the many new features that adds rocks crammed onto this board other than the board itself we also find included in the package a quick installation guide and support CD there's also fourth side of data cables an i/o shield 2-way SLI bridge three screws for the m2 sockets and one screw for the mini PCIe slot we've also got a special USB 3.1 front panel designed to fit into a five and a quarter bay the front panel uses the motherboards internal SATA Express header to provide USB 3.1 type A and type CD ports in the front of your case asrock uses a third-party controller in the device itself to go from the pc i expressed USB 3.1 interface so it looks like finally after a year or so someone's come up with a useful application for those unused SATA Express sports the front panel comes the power cable SATA Express cable and a USB 2.0 cable power cable enables faster charging thanks for 3m rating while the USB 3 type-c port features a reversible design and will support modern devices the asrock said 170 extreme 7 plus is a stunning-looking motherboard that's heavy on features included to the 12 power failures design of the CPU and as rocks matte black PCB which has been garnished in their new black and copper heat sinks and shields the i/o panel impurity sound 3 has been dressed when a drug call that I 0 armour they say this newly designed cover protect crucial parts near the motherboards rear I oh so they won't easily be damaged by static electricity truth be told it's more of an aesthetic design choice and it makes the board look pretty badass networking support comes from a pair of Intel controllers the I to 19 v and an i 2 1 180 which supports teaming wake-on-lan energy-efficient Ethernet and as rocks full spark protection there are plenty of USB options and now Rob has even included in asme dr ASM 1142 controller on board which provides USB 3.1 a and USB 3.1 see on the i/o panel elsewhere on the board you get a total of eight USB 3 ports two headers and four we are and eight usb2 ports three headers and two rear as our expiry sound three is included which is powered by the realtek alc 1150 codec supporting 7.1 channel high definition audio the purity sound 3 package includes nichicon fine gold series audio caps 115 jezebel snr DAC with differential amplifier and a TI NE 5532 premium headset amplifier that supports up to 600 ohm headsets there are four full-length pcie x 16 slots on offer although they are not created equally the first or primary pcie x 16 slot is connected to the LGA 1151 processor and can achieve full pcie 3.0 x 16 bandwidth with a single graphics card while the secondary slot is limited to a pci three times for bandwidth as it's connected to the chipset the third slot is connected to the cpu for pci e 3 times 8 and then the fourth is also connected to the cpu though it's limited to pci e 3 times for bandwidth so technically a three-way GPU setup would be configured as a times 8 times 4 times 4 arrangement from the cpu the Zep 170 extreme 7 plus also supports three ultram two slots so you should note that the share with the sadder and sadder express sports for example if the first M 2 slot is in use and the first and second SATA ports will be disabled if you would use all three M two slots then at least six of the ten SATA port to be disabled so while on paper the Zeb 170 extreme 7 plus looks to offer a huge amount of storage options with three SATA Express ports 3m two slots and ten SATA ports in reality the amount of storage that can be supported is fairly standard for example if you used all tense I deportes then it'd be impossible to use the m2 and SATA Express options therefore I wouldn't say it is there 170 extreme seven plusses storage rich but rather very flexible when it comes to storage options which is a good thing at this price around at the i/o panel there's legacy ps2 keyboard and mouse connector along with two usb2 ports there are four USB 3 ports two USB 3.1 ports dual Gigabit LAN ports five audio jacks and an optical s/pdif Airport the display outputs include a DVI port HDMI port and a displayport 1.2 connector as rockers certainly managed to pack a lot into the Zeb 170 extreme 7 plus and we particularly enjoyed the flexible storage options and of course that USB 3.1 front panel module of course the extreme 7 plus also looks amazing and is definitely one of the better looking Zeb 170 motherboards that we've come across as we've come to expect from asrock the board competitively priced for around the same price the lesser equipped ROG Maximus eight ranger can be had or the MS is dead 179 a gaming m7 so we feel as rockers delivered a solid offering with Zeb 117 extreme 7 plus thanks for watching this motherboard review this has been Matt file brown box let me know what you think in the comments hit like hit subscribe i'll see you next time yeah