Gadgetory

so a few days before CES we were actually visited by our friends NZXT and they dropped off the n7 motherboard which I'm kind of glad I didn't do a review right away because there's been a lot of now let's see development but there's a lot of discussion about this motherboard it was obviously very very ambitious for a company that's known for making cases and all in one water cooling units to jump into the hardware space this has actually been a somewhat controversial piece of product I'm kind of I as I'm kind of glad I waited to do a review on this because some things have changed and we're gonna kind of talk about this we're gonna see whether or not this was really a good idea do you want to be cooler do you want to be more desirable well you're in luck because right now you can own your very own J's to send swag and immediately be the cool kid on the block max out your sex appeal by following the link down below I'll be honest I kind of hate doing motherboard reviews they're boring they are the unsung hero of your computer the GPU gets all the gaming glory and the CPU gets all of the hype and other than that your motherboard doesn't really get that much attention I mean if you're overclocking obviously it's an important part of your system and the only time it even gets noticed is when it fails and then everyone loves to curse the motherboard manufacturers but we'll kind of circle back to that here's your motherboard obviously this is a white version set that aside for now SLI bridge some long screws we've got some LED strips right here because unfortunately the lighting control on this specifically requires NZXT cam which let's kind of love hey I did a video on cam many of you didn't like it there has been some improvements to it for sure that's kind of want to see the layout here they look like just standard RGB strips though but this is where you learn that it is proprietary because it has got not just your standard see most of the time RGB plugs terminate like this that way you can just plug this directly into your motherboard these on the other hand terminate to a keyed plug which is pretty much NZXT cam only which like I said it's unfortunate I don't like when companies force you to use their software like you have to use cam to use functions on this motherboard SS so right on the box though so I guess you know whatever so here's the motherboard itself I do believe that a black and a white version white is obviously the one that we got here and in terms of just build quality I mean it feels sturdy it's not the thickest PCB I've ever taken a look at you can see this is a white motherboard right here it's almost got a bit of an eggshell color too it's not like a like a pure white it's more of an eggshell even has a texture to it we've got a kind of a ghost at NZXT logo right here we've got a heatsink so you're pretty beefy heatsink now in terms of the OEM for this this is an ECS motherboard which has kind of been conversation point number two on this is the fact that ECS is not known for being the most high-end motherboard manufacturer but they they did say in a press release that the the motherboard manufacturer built this to spec with NZXT is not a rebrand of another motherboard it was built from the ground up in collaboration with NZXT so there is that this is of course an 8th gen socket so we are gonna be running our 8700 k in here to test now a couple of things I'm not a fan of one we've handled this already so it's starting to look a little dirty right here trying to have dirty hands but hey left here to release this is where your m dot 2 drives go so if you're not using M 2 then that stays on top but what I don't like is you see how I just uncovered that and now you can see the little Q the little Q code readout what I don't understand why they would cover that why would you cover that if it's something that you could still use when you don't have an MDOT to drive in there put that visible somewhere down here again dirty I need to clean this thing man you handle this a little bit and it starts to get it's dirty but anyway there's also another cover right here I'd open it from this side these are not necessarily the easiest covers to get off yeah there we go there's nothing under that one so I think that's just more for symmetry but as you can see there's there's literally nothing under that one so I thought that was an M about 200 ere no I was wrong now the log screws that are in the bag right here these are specifically for you to be able to mount down your motherboard because you've got this bit of an armor on here you can't actually get the screws down in there too easily so these are designed to go in there like that and then you just use your Phillips head screwdriver to tighten them down you got some short ones for it's a little shorter over here got the longer ones for its higher over there so it's nice if they include that you just really got to hope that whatever case you're using actually use that thread because there are a couple of different there's two different thread sizes that standoffs tend to use so fingers crossed on that one in terms of the cover there's one other thing I want to kind of point up and amount a fan up it's this cover right here for the chipset that's the heatsink which we've now covered up with this very lightly perforated piece of metal and why we would want to suddenly just create a situation where we could be overheating our chipset is beyond me so yeah I guess if you're gonna care about your system you're gonna want that off we got a USB 3.0 for SATA ports our 24 pin we have one band no it's not a fan header that's the RGB header we've got another RGB header right here again they have to use if you use their cable and then we've got a i/o pump CPU fan system fan system fan system fan ATX power and on the bottom here we've got our front audio connector and then we've got one two three USBs another USB 3.0 and tons of fan headers though lots of fan headers so cool on that but we got a water pump header to another system fan it's advanced this the fan alright so we've got another lift to release right here and this is where our other MDOT two is right there which goes above the top GPU right next to our 4x PCIe so before we plug this into the test bench a couple things worth noting I'm not sure exactly what the power delivery system on this we've got one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen chokes on there one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve capacitors right here next to the vrm so it seems beefy but again it's one of those things where it's time is gonna tell in terms of how well it holds up but a couple of things worth pointing out on the motherboard surface itself we do have surface mounted power and reset buttons these this is nice especially since we're gonna use it on our test bench that way I'm not gonna jumper pins together on the back of the motherboard we've got one two three four USB 3.0 I'm counting to four USB 2.0 is a BIOS resource CMOS clear switch this is nice this is it I love seeing this because when you're doing a lot of overclocking you need to reset that CMOS quickly there's no reason this shouldn't be on every motherboard as far as I'm concerned but then again I'm bit uh I'm bit of an elitist so whatever we've also got our our Ethernet port on here HDMI and a display port which is nice for Intel's internal you know iris graphics it's good for troubleshooting bad graphics cards and things we've got our spit of yeah it's such a funny acronym right but if that's that is our optical output right there and then we've got our seven point surround built-in so anyway looks like I missed the USB port we got one right there as well so we've got plenty of USB connectivity on this we'd like to see more USB 3.0 but before we can draw our final conclusions we have to get this set up on the test bench to see how well the BIOS is constructed BIOS can make or break a motherboard especially if the UEFI BIOS is terrible let's go ahead and set it up and see how well it is so this is what the motherboard looks like we actually removed the shell it just has these little pressure clips that push in there just be careful when you go to take it off though because yeah I stabbed the out of myself on one of the solder points I was talking about earlier when I grabbed it from the bottom of the board split my finger and then I proceeded to bleed all over everything so we've cleaned that up fortunately we get any on the white part of the motherboard but there is a piece of me on this motherboard forever now I do you think that's blood right there can't get to come off oh well that's fine we don't need to do one on my blood yeah let's just say blood sacrifice has been overpaid and anyway this just tops loss so it doesn't make it kind of neat though that she could mod this right you could paint it do something custom with it saying this one's unscrews but underneath it's just a basic looking motherboard there's really nothing all that special about it I mean just looks like any regular old black motherboard the real reason why I took this off though is I couldn't actually mount it down on this test bench because it's got studs a stick up with these aluminum nuts and because this has that long screw like I showed you like it would go in a standard case with standoffs I couldn't actually mount this down but since I popped that off now we can actually do that and we can just snap it back down unfortunately Nick that means now I have to pop this off again to actually take it off the motherboard or the test bench potentially though see this blood right there there was blood hurt the blood see it's bleeding through the band-aid I cut myself pretty good other blood out there too you know these guys know when they go through for these videos nick has remedied the problem so actually looks pretty good on here because it's a white and black test bench with a white and black motherboard it looks pretty awesome but we're gonna head and do its first boot to power it on it's always a good time alright so here's the BIOS whoa it's interesting looking it definitely looks a lot like like sort of like cam okay so we got our water pump rpm set up right there that is correct I do have my pump wire set up to the pump down here it's some rpm wire for the pump so it is seeing the pump which is good CPU temperature is at 23 system temperature at 20 so we've got these one-click settings here for different performance values and stuff so if we go over here to our main CPU hyper-threading so all the settings we expect here hyper-threading active cores virtualization technology we'll turn that off because we're gonna try and overclock this see States enhanced c1 where is our overclock settings turbo boost oh here we go so we had to go to CPU and RAM not advanced CPU and RAM is where we can do our over clocks and you can see these are the individual core ratios right there so let's just set this to like 48 you're gonna do it all individually huh so instead of just be able to lock all the course together it looks like we have to do this individually voltage settings ok so that's easily identifiable so we'll make that like oh geez so this like provides me the old legacy BIOS we had to actually select from like a drop-down why you can only adjust these by 50 millivolts at a time so we'll do it 1.3 let's see if what even boots up these are settings that I know worked on my asus board so I guess we'll see if that works still booting there we go now we got video CMOS settings wrong what do you see my settings wrong it's this mean CMOS settings wrong doesn't look like it save any of our overclocked settings either so a couple things I'm noticing here with the BIOS is the very same settings I run on my Strix board right here this is the Z 370 - East Rick's from Asus we've been running this on the test bench ever since we got our 8700 K and we were running 3200 actually on the Strix board 29:33 won't boot 2667 I know I guess we'll find out right now it's it's frustrating because I mean this is a very easy it's a very easy CPU to overclock and the memory is pretty simple things I'm setting here are just are not staying which is frustrating there's a 1.3 and AD core we don't know where but on Cori now so I'm just gonna try saving that let's see because what happens is it turns off like it's supposed to it's readjusting its voltages and it turns on tries to boot and it turns off and reboots again so well it doesn't seem to be having luck overclocking the memory like I wanted to remember 3000 megahertz or the XMP profile is indeed an overclock 21 33 is the base clock on this memory and that's how we went to Windows so it's it's a little bit more picky I think we're going to need to see some BIOS maturity on this again I don't have a lot of experience with ECS a lot of people seem to think that ECS is a terrible brand again I don't know I've not dealt with ECS enough but in terms of value though I really have a hard time swallowing 249 for this board $2.99 was absolutely outrageous 249 I think a lot of people still feel is outrageous but it says something that the company listened to the crowd and reduced its price I just don't think they reduced it enough I don't think they can reduce it more cuz they probably are not getting any profit in this as it is at 2:49 motherboard manufacturers have had a long lasting relationship with the OEM have been able to get the price down to get the value up for their motherboards get the prices where they need to be for the public they can still make money new companies against txt getting into the scene aren't getting that kind of we'll call it discount to that manufacturing rate which is why the price has to stay up so that's why something like the Strix board makes a whole lot more sense because you can get this one for $1.99 and it has built-in wireless sure it has less USBs I would like to see more USB 3.0 S on this board but it has built in Wireless which we have to use a dongle right here this is $80 dongle for our 5g to get our full fiber network going wirelessly but you know what though honestly at the end of the day this is just sort of a quick overview of the motherboard showing that hey it works but you guys as buyers you guys are the ones that the company needs to listen to not me and sound off in the comments below what you guys feel about this I know I'm not the first youtuber to do this I mean like fourth or fifth in the list actually do reviews of this but you guys tell us what you think I'm curious I I don't think I would personally spend $250 on this motherboard as it sits right now but anyway time to go guys thanks for watching and I'll see you the next one you