Gadgetory

so unless you've been living under a rock you've probably heard by now that the intel 9900 K and ninth gen family of processors has been announced they'll be available for purchase later on in October and we can't really show you anything performance wise until then but we can at least start talking about it a little bit and show you some components so we are gonna go ahead and kick things off here by taking a first look here at the MSI z3 90 godlike Meg yeah Intel's launching a new platform for this but that's a point in discussion on its own but yeah we're gonna see what MSI is bringing to the table with the very first motherboard that we are looking at for this new line of processors a strafe RGB mark 2 from Corsair features genuine Cherry MX switches perky RGB backlighting USB pass-through for convenient access and dedicated multimedia keys with integrated volume knob making it a great value for gamers in keyboard enthusiasts alike learn more about the strafe RGB mark 2 by visiting the link down below so this video it's not gonna be about Intel 9th gen specifically there's a lot of information out there I didn't go to the event I liked it to stay home and spend some time with family so please go and check out some of my colleagues out there like gamers Nexus Paul from Paul's Hardware Kyle from bit wet hardware conducts those guys were all there I believe and you can find information on their channels that go a little bit more into depth what I will say though is it is a of course a pricing point of contention as always because the 8700 K when it launched it was obviously coffee lake 6 cores 12 threads with hyper-threading on an i7 and it was more expensive than the 7700 K which was roughly ish the same price as a 6700 K and they are calling this an i-9 and 9900 K don't confuse that with the typical 900 series that you would see like the 79 80 XE which was on X 299 this is a Z 370 main stream platform processor so don't make the mistake of pairing it with the wrong motherboard just putting that out there also to those rumors said it does work perfectly fine on a z3 70 motherboards so we will be testing that when we do our full performance review but obviously to get all the features you're gonna want these the 390 chipset which was kind of the same thing they did with the 8700 k now in terms of pricing this processor is to be over $500 which puts it significantly more expensive than the 2700 X which is obviously I think where a lot of us are going to be doing our testing because you can actually get a 2700 X 4 under 400 leaving you enough money to buy the processor and a motherboard on AMD for the same price of just the processor that's currently launched on Intel obviously there is a pricing model that everyone's following in 2018 which is Jack the price as high as you possibly can which really sucks because this is now the time to build a computer if you're going to everyone's kind of shown all their cards you know it's coming you know when it's coming you know the pricing so you're gonna be able to now make informed decisions without being worried something new is gonna come out down the line so here it is right here the EMA side meg z3 90 god-like it is the god-like series from MSI has always been there fully like their full built Titanic when it comes to a motherboard it has all the features and it's basically holding nothing back it's overclocking friendly this has a 16 phase power delivery system on it and it is definitely a behemoth did I say right this time behemoth there's a lot of features on here this is a very crowded motherboard this this is a very top of the line product what I'd like is back in the day MSI used to color code their motherboards based on the tier that it was yellow was for overclocking remember the empower X power then you had the blue which was mainstream so you have a blue motherboard meant to mainstream it had some overclocking features some gaming features but kind of just sort of a no-frills and then we had red which was all their gaming stuff well they've kind of done away with that now and as you can see we have a nice monochromatic gunmetal sort of a titanium look which is a lot more premium looking and it's also gonna not clash with color scheme so they're not forcing a color down your throat and as I thank you for that because nothing is more annoying than having a great motherboard that's the wrong color and then you don't use it because of a superficial decision like that I digress so that was a tangent so here we go here is the motherboard layout right here if you look at all these chokes right here you can tell there is a massive power delivery on this 16 phases to give extremely clean power so that this can be used for extreme overclocking you can also tell us to use for extreme over clocking because of the dual eight pin EPS power right up here close to the CPU giving plenty of current to the CPU if you really want to push this and go for world records and stuff which obviously is going to take place once this launches up here at the top you also have three fan headers for while technically five one two oh six one two three four five six fan headers right here which is kind of nice because that gives them close proximity to things like your AIO coolers your fans that are up at the top of the case or the back of the case and it really kind of sucks when motherboards will only put or manufacture to only put one or two CPU headers at the top and the rest are on the side or at the bottom when most of the fans are at the top of the case or the front of the case speaking of fan hitters you have another 1 2 3 right here at the bottom unless I'm missing one and you've got two more that are right here in this shield what's right next to it though is the supplemental power for the PCI Express Lanes and I don't like this being in the middle right here because this is an awkward place to put it this is something that should have been down at the bottom if you ask me because you're gonna be running this from your PCI Express power cable from your power supply Renia up here right on top of your graphics card is a very strange location so here's the memory slots right here you can see they are shielded this is supposed to help with more stable memory overclocking and just a better socket design so you're not you don't have EMF bleeding over into the sockets near it this right here is a cue code readout or basically a trouble code readout so this will show a number depending on the post code and you can see where your system freezes if it doesn't boot and then right below this here will show this in a second this is actually an OLED display that is customizable now this over here is actually an infinity window this is just a design aesthetic that looks like it goes down well for infinity because there's mirrors under there of course you've got the Meg logo which is going to light up right there you've got the MSI dragon which is a part of every single product but what I'm really happy about and I'm so glad they did this dual USB 3.0 front header connections that are next to each other nothing is more annoying than having USB 3.0 header over here and another one down here because these are very thick cables with at least 3 C's that are pain-in-the-ass to route and then having to have them split and go off different directions just make the aesthetics look terrible so the fact that they did that is a huge plus I think them for that the second I saw them that I saw that I practically wanted to give my rep a hug because I was like thank you for doing this most manufacturers aren't doing that now let's say that you are and not really an overclocker but you you hear me preaching about how overclocking can give you more performance for free msi knows that not everyone's comfortable with that so they've actually got this overclocking dial right here at the bottom now this is this actually will load up different settings in the BIOS to give you a boost in performance without having to go in there and manually overclock it and it does it within safe parameters so you don't have to worry about damaging your hardware because you didn't understand the settings and you pushed something too far and then something ends up in magic blue smoke this knob right here will allow you to do different overclocks even while the system is powered on so you could just turn this knob and it will self adjust to give you more performance as long as the cooling Headroom is there so I would definitely recommend at least an AI o or a big Noctua air cooler if you're gonna be doing something like that right next to it you've got a surface mounted reset and power button which is nice because we're gonna use this on a test bench and then down here we also have a BIOS switch because this is a dual BIOS motherboards you could run some crazy BIOS settings for testing and then just flip back to standard if you want to use it as your regular desktop we've got three onboard m2 with what they're calling their shield frozer now this is this is not the first time we have seen something like this from MSI where we have what's considered to be passive cooling for m2 now if you're not aware m2 or nvme SSDs are extremely fast but as such they also can get extremely hot under constant read/write conditions so MSI had actually come out with this this cover on their previous motherboard for the Z 370 that Steve from gamers Nexus found to be a little bit lacking in design and only touched one side of the end dot - not the other it created a bit of a heat pocket only half the chips are being cooled if you had dual sided and nvme chips or PCB which many of them are now because capacities are increasing but as you can see we now have an awful lot of thermal pads on here creating a situation where it's actually touching both sides of the m2 now say they put a lot of R&D into this a lot of testing because they really are afraid of stiva gamers Nexus no they don't actually say that but they they want to make the community happy they agreed that there was improvement to be had there if you look at the expansion card here you can see it's actually only on one side and I think the reason for that is the problem with the motherboard as you can see this is down on the surface and then you have graphics cards on top of it and it's impossible for air to get down there but with this being like this air can actually come in through the back and through the bottom and the top wherever airflow is because as you can see there is a big gap under there so it's actually touching the side of the chips that would be blocked but the bottom side is not being you know it's not actually touching any thermal pads or anything like that so I guess one could say that they technically didn't have to put this on there at all they could have just mounted the nvm ease and let them be air cooled but without the top plate touching it I guess maybe there should be some testing done with that I have find out Steve he will test this so let's go ahead and power this on and see what it looks like with it all lit up alright so let's take a look at some of the lighting here so as you can see the OLED that true gaming and you can program that down there to actually be anything that you want so I can make it say J's two cents the best YouTube channel in the history of YouTube I mean it would be alive but hey as you can see because we have no CPU in there it's telling us CPU error so this is extremely user friendly and identifying what is wrong with your system and why it's not posting can also see that infinity window check that out you see that window how it just kind of goes on for freedom I was gonna say something else after that and I don't know what side whatever and beyond there we go you can see the mag is lit up and then look at the dragon see how the dragon just sort of glows through there it's not like RGB in your face this is our GB you can make it RGB but they have it just sort of glowing red out of the box so I think that this is a very very good implementation of features to make Z 390 at least something exciting to talk about when it comes to motherboards because I feel like motherboards are the unsung hero they are responsible for so much of your computer they responsible for everything but they don't get any of the glory the glory always goes to the graphics card because you get so many FPS but the motherboard is responsible for everything it's your mom you respect your mom or she whoops your ass when you're out of line at least she used to now you get in trouble if you do that but my mom she was German she did not spare the rod okay so we're gonna go ahead and end it there obviously we're gonna do a build with this we're gonna do all kinds of stuff with Zee 390 and testing and probably another overclocking session with Steve and Paul I think that's become a bit of a tradition now as something new comes out we overclock it until it breaks or someone gives up or whatever and then when they give up then you swoop in and take the score they see try and make them think that you gave up well they moved on to other things but we didn't really cuz I care about my ego and I want to be good so I digress but anyway you know in fact Phil even made a good point he's like this is the first MSI motherboard he's seen that doesn't look ridiculous because some of the some of the ways motherboard manufacturers in the past have gotten your attention by the motherboard being on a wall at Fry's Electronics or Micro Center or whatever is to make it basically jump up and down and scream and wave its arms going hey look at me but the problems and you look at it you go hey look how ridiculous that my motherboard looks but not this one it's all black and gunmetal and RGB goodness but not RGB when you turn it on which is really nice so anyway you guys Tim what you think in the comments down below like I said we will be doing full builds with Z 390 tests we're gonna be doing all the hyper threading testing on the i7 or at I 9 to not hyper threading and i7 seeing how things have progressed but until then we're gonna go guys let us know what other products who wants to take a look at with the Z 390 launch and we will of course check it out thanks for watching and as always we will see you in the next one really glad instruct myself on the back of that I was all worried oh wow those are lit up I didn't okay alright well okay there's that too