Gadgetory

what is going on all your PC enthusiasts James $0.02 here and if I sound a little raspy er than normal well that's because J's got bronchitis again it's like CES all over again but dammit I wasn't gonna let that stop me from bringing you these videos because I'm just that dedicated now obviously all the buzz in the PC realm right now is the fact that haswell-e and intel's first eight core 16 thread processor has been launched and I actually have it right here drove all the way down to Micro Center to pick this bad boy up we did a vlog on that hopefully you guys watched it because uh you know coconut monkey and I we we like to get into little shenanigans but anyway I get a lot of questions now people saying what are you gonna be putting in for a motherboard well guys I was actually so impressed with the z97 classified from EVGA we are going to stick with the classified series and we're going with the classified x99 in skunkworks now I know some of you are already like really really J you're upgrading to X 99 from z97 what the hell man you just built that I know I know I just built it but you got to look at it from my perspective I play very little games and I do an awful lot of content creation to an awful lot of rendering my computer spends more time rendering than doing anything else so any time that I can save by throwing more horsepower at it is a benefit to me all right so we're not going to really do a full review of this motherboard in this video we're going to more or less do an unboxing and see what the x99 classified looks like what it has instead of in terms of features and we'll do a full overclocking review of both the eight core and then the feature set of the x99 classified from EVGA in a later video once the system is it's finished being put together and whatnot so I actually don't have a knife and this thing is sealed up I'm very unprepared look at that a knife out of nowhere that's so cool anyway well go ahead and cut this this beast open I just cut the box instead of the tape uh anything you guys might get some good lulz and fails out of this because well I guess that I'm sick actually before we open that up let's just it's pretty much like very similar to the feature set of what's on the z97 classified you got your onboard CPU temperature monitoring which means the trouble code readout turns into a stem temperature gauge while the system is actually booted to have ebj Ely ex tuning utility this is like they're overclocking utility now I'm not really a fan of those and I did like the AI tuning from Asus so we will give this thing a shot and see how it does just to you know I'm curious to see how well it does if you guys hear a barking dog my dog is actually an AMD fan so he might be sabotaging this video a little bit I'm sorry all the chip sets feature passive cooling on there no fans or anything like that would you know they kind of ditch that a long time ago EVGA easy voltage easy reading voltage levels of dedicated Reed points that's the little the little harness that plugs in has all the pigtails on there you can stick your voltage meters in get real voltage readings and not trust software you can't trust software voltage in most cases triple BIOS support once again there's three BIOS on this so it's very very difficult to actually brick this thing PCIe disable switch which is kind of nice if you have multiple graphics cards which we're going to be doing in this system three GTX 780 s actually if you wanted to individually test cards maybe to see if a card is failing or do individual overclocking per card you can actually move the switches on the PCI lanes or PCIe lanes and only activate the card that you want active and then when you're done you can activate them all so that's kind of nice it's also nice for a test bench if you want to put three different graphics cards in there maybe do bench testing between the three you can switch between them you know between Reap between reboots and then you can much quick more quickly actually get through those graphics cards 100% solid state capacitors that's nice that's kind of the norm now so it's not really a huge selling point anymore one hundred and fifty percent more gold content in the CPU socket itself and a 10 phase PWM for clean power delivery now what this thing does kind of lack unfortunately is any real like fan control software the z97 is the same way EVGA doesn't hasn't really invested much in terms of the software for fan control or fan suite I think that's a big deal I'd really like to see EVGA start incorporating some sort of fan control into their motherboards because I think that's where there's going to start being a bigger gap between ebj and other menu board motherboard manufacturers is they're the only brand that really doesn't offer you a a fan tuning suite and that's a big deal in my opinion and the only header that actually gives you full tuning control in terms of temperature is the CPU - header where the CPU one and and whatnot or PWM control only so I'd like to see full DC and PWM control on all headers which I think would then make this compete with a lot of the other brands that are already on the market that's just my opinion that's what I look for in motherboards unfortunately this doesn't have it but I run very slow speed fans anyway so it's not the system's not too noisy now it does support up to 128 gigabytes of gddr5 x99 does use G ddr4 and it's a 2667 megahertz + OC on the RAM of the 2667 megahertz plus I don't I guess that means this thing may not be supporting 3000 out of the box I know there's an updated BIOS for this thing already which supports you know 2800 and up I don't know where the up stops at like Kingston HyperX already has 3000 megahertz DIMM modules out 4g ddr4 I don't know if those are compatible with this but EVGA over time will continue to do memory validation obviously when you're an early adopter on a brand new platform you may run into some compatibility issues which already anticipating may happen in this build now moving on to more of the key features we do have you know onboard power reset and all that stuff EVGA Ely Dex tuning Lombardi said triple BIOS the box on here actually says 300% increased gold content it's actually a hundred fifty percent that was a misprint on there it does have two times eight pin CPU power so if you were doing extreme like ln2 overclocking or whatever you have very clean power delivery on there and then it does also have 2m - both type 2 and type 3 sockets on here one is located right here actually we'll look at it on the board but one is on the right above the sound sound card portion of the board and then the other one is actually in between the graphics cards it's 8 layer PCB very durable etc etc now this is a 2011 but it's a 2011 b3 socket sorry that's very annoying sound and what that means is all of your old 2011 CPUs are not going to fit on this board the notches in the pin layout is actually slightly different now one of the things I really do like about the EVGA boards is the amount of accessories they actually give you with this I don't really understand though why they split out there they're manual into two books part 1 and part 2 I maybe I should just do one book I don't know they're both English so I don't I don't get that but whatever so here is your four-way SLI bridge because this does natively support four-way SLI on the chipset or excuse me on the socket PCIe lanes if you are going with the 8 core and I believe the 59 30k also natively supports 4 way I could be wrong it's still really new and I'm not entirely sure so if I'm wrong go ahead and feel free to correct me down in the comments we have a 3-way PCI bridge and of course you have your normal or SLI bridge of course you have a normal SLI all the normal accessories like it came with the z97 the cover for the IO IO shield your readouts black SATA cables and you know lots and lots of accessories I mean look at all these accessories to give you accessory 43.0 iOS you SLI temperature probes I mean you've got they give you so much stuff that's what's so cool and lots and lots of SATA cables alright now let's go ahead and talk about the motherboard itself because after all this is the beauty and the whole reason we're here today now this is the EVGA classified x99 in it pretty much comes with all the classified features you'd come to expect from EVGA 2011 socket like I mentioned v3 it's got eight DIMM slots on here so for a quad channel up to 128 gigabytes of gddr5 one two three four five PCI Express now that also gives you a true 2 x 16 X or as well a 4 x you know 8 X through PCI 3.0 depending on your configuration on here and you do get one PCIe 4x right there auxiliary 6 pin power slot on the bottom for your PCI Express Lanes if you're going with like 4 Way SLI high draw cards you want to be able to keep the power current on their here's your MDOT to slot right there here's another MDOT two right here got really attractive heat sinks on here I really like the way that these look like the gunmetal look right here it's got x99 it looks fantastic got the same 90-degree 24 pin our 25 plus 4 pin right here you've got 2 4 6 8 10 SATA what I like on here is that the SATA is actually marked you can see which SATA is actually what on here makes it much easier to actually figure out you know where things should be getting plugged in fan headers all around the motherboard here's all your PCI Express dip switches I mentioned right there turbo button I'm not sure exactly what turbo button does we'll figure that one out clear CMOS on the front also a clear CMOS on the back you get 2 4 6 PCI Express 2.0 2 for PCI Express 3.0 on the back a dual Intel Ethernet NIC card right here and a 7.1 surround audio on the back all the solid caps have already talked about I wish the caps were black and they weren't this kind of a blaring silver color but anyway I digress now let's go ahead and talk about the elephant in the room and how many of you guys can actually point out the elephant in the room and please don't say Jay I mean that's a given that to me would be this guy right here now the z97 classified was the most beautiful motherboard EVGA has ever made and do you know what made it the most beautiful motherboard ooh they ever made the crowd said give us an option that doesn't include red and they did and it was glorious and it's in skunk works and then the x99 they said screw you were putting red back on everything so they put the red e right here so what does that mean for me well it actually adds more work for me to either make this a gunmetal color or black or yellow or whatever I'm going to do with it and these are like aluminum or aluminium or wherever you are inserts on here that are sub matte they're sub terrain dunno what you would call it they're actually below the surface of the top of the heatsink so I came and get like a needle down in there to try and pry them up and even if I did I'm afraid they might Bend because one they're aluminum and two they are adhesive down and they're adhesive with something that's going to be anti heat it's gonna be anti heat resistant because they would come to laminate it as the heatsink heats up so I have no idea how I'm going to get them out to paint them or what I'm going to do but what really upsets me is the fact that they put on the for the win edition motherboard a gray II the gray II would have gone perfect on this motherboard and I'm unfortunately going to dock EVGA a ton of style points for this because this I think is going to create a little bit of a public outcry that's my opinion on that when it comes to the PCI Express 3.0 I find it kind of interesting that the 3.0 on the bottom here points straight down but the 2.0 next to it points up so you have kind of a funky arrangement of cables there this kind of looks like an afterthought to me like maybe they should have made the 2.0 also point down or make the 3.0 point up at least make a match because that would make it difficult to actually get clean wiring well guys this has been just kind of an unboxing and overview here of the brand new EBG a x99 classified and when I'm done with this video I'm actually going to move right on in to doing my swap in my system and adding my third my third 780 that's actually right here in all of its beautiful glory the third guy right here with ek waterblock three of those bad boys on there is just going to look awesome alright well I'm going to get off this camera now we're going to start this build first things first I figure out what the heck I'm gonna do with that after I bench test this thing to make sure that it's not dead on a rival because it is dead on arrival well then my entire project at the moment will be dead on arrival alright guys meghanadha out here it's jays two cents follow on twitter if you guys would like to interact with me and i'm very active on twitter it's kind of where I'm at I like 140 character limit short messages are good but with that said guys I'm gonna go ahead and get the heck on out of here as always hope to see you in the next one we got smoked sausage if you like this folks okay know me I like how all the same look like stretching a tray just like a second