Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing and first look at the soos ROG series Maximus 5 formula this is the thunder FX version and there will be more on what makes it Thunder effects but there is a plain formula version as well it includes the Diablo 3 mousepad that's kind of cool support for Intel Core i3 i5 and i7 processors from their third generation line of CPUs Intel z77 chips that means you get all those usual features including SRT 4 SSD caching as well as virtue MVP for accelerating your GPU experience and allowing you to use your integrated graphics for video transcoding in your dedicated graphics for gaming supports 2-way SLI or Quad SLI with two dual GPU cards and up to 3-way crossfire X or quad crossfire X with two dual GPU cards here are some highlight features including Fusion thermal completely redesigned thermal design thermal dissipation design for the vrm supreme FX 4 which has some really cool new innovations we'll talk more about those later thunder FX is included on this version and we'll definitely talk about that more later in diablo 3 mousepad also included let's go ahead and get this bad boy opened up so some more features we'll talk about those as we get it opened up comes with a Diablo 3 mousepad which is here and you can get it you know how to get that out oh here at the top there's an envelope take you thing all right this is the Thunder FX so the thunder FX this yeah this is the kind of thing that is a tremendous value add for a board like this so yes you're spending a bunch of money on a board but if you're a frequent upgrader sometimes you can get well I hate to say burned a little bit but you can get burned a little bit on spending a ton of money on these premium boards only to find out that there's nothing you can really carry forward with you in the future well the Thunder FX is something that you will be able to so this is okay what do they have to say for themselves versatile gaming audio for PC and consoles right is compatible with any device tablet phone PC console doesn't matter it is capable of driving up to 300 ohm resistance headphones and uses premium capacitors for pure powerful audio supreme sound accessory that your console and or entertainment enjoyment requires so let's have a look at what they've got in terms of spec they're using a C media 66 31 audio processor they're using as I recall I have notes on this so why don't we get more into it rated actually let's just put this aside for now so let's check out the board first we've got under FX audio solution so we'll take a closer look at that there's the USB interface and then you can also just use a standard stereo input which will allow it to amplify the signal and I'll switch to wherever you need it to go so there's your headphones as well as your microphone in xbox360 voice in is also included that's pretty cool this is awesome check this out so this microphone port right here is actually for active noise-cancelling so if you paired this with say for example a Seuss's uh they go vulcan noise cancelling headphones you would have multiple rounds of noise cancelling going on so you would have the closeness of the headphones you would have the noise canceling built into the headphones and then you'd have a microphone actively listening to what is the ambient noise around you and then canceling that out at the sound card level which is very very cool so I also got here you can switch between PC Xbox 360 and ps3 mode you can also switch the oh yeah you just got a volume knob and then that's pretty much it for the physical attributes of the unit so this probably reminds you guys a little bit of the essence one that we took a look at a while ago so it's more like it's a it's well it's not quite an essence one which is like a $600 USB DAC and amplifier itself I mean this one's bundled with a motherboard but it's along the same lines in terms of trying to deliver the best possible quality audio so there are advantages actually this is in line with their with their redline concept so you see the red line that actually separates all of the audio components on the PCB from the rest of the PCB this is to reduce interference there's also shields here to again reduce stray interference and there is an advantage to keeping it separated from the PCB that way you then get a further advantage going with something like a high-end zone our sound card and putting that in a PCI slot or PCI Express slot because then you're further removing yourself from all the hoo-ha that's going on inside your PC case by removing it even further and plugging in via USB you can almost completely eliminate it so that's one of the reasons and people do like using these external USB sound cards so let's start with just an overall look at the layout of the board so one thing that you guys are probably going to be wondering about right right off the bat is the Republic of gamers logo in the middle they have brought back the breathing I so it is no longer just illuminated it is not not illuminated it has a breathing pulsating effect going on right under your CPU socket so that should look really really cool once we've got it powered on um I jump straight to the border into accessories just say alright coming back to the board will do accessories later I guess so couple things I want to mention is it comes with a full one-year copy of Kaspersky and comes with a full copy of daemon tools which is kind of neat one thing to note though guys about formula boards versus extreme boards because in theory like you know an extreme level board should have everything a formula level board so why is it that you can get this under FX one with a formula board and not with an extreme board and why does the formula board have this super high-end onboard audio which we'll get more into later and not an extreme board the reason for that is that Asus is trying to appease the different market segments so an extreme Buy or user is not necessarily even going to want to use on board audio no matter how good it is they're probably going to want to buy like a dedicated couple hundred dollars on our sound card to throw on it so there's no point providing them with that high-end onboard audio anyway although it'll still be pretty decent so networking there we go so they're using Intel networking again however they have completely redesigned the Intel game first technologies that allows you to prioritize gaming or prioritize other applications depending on what you need and you can not only use it on the Intel Gigabit Ethernet but you can also use it on the included Wi-Fi network module and even if you add a third party NIC like say even a multi-port NIC you can still use the soft that's built into AI suite - in order to prioritize different applications in and get the best possible experience so if you even if you load something in here you can still use game first - which has been completely rewritten from game first one in order to provide better compatibility and a more seamless overall experience the reason Isis went with Intel versus killer for this particular application because I if you guys have seen some high-end motherboards are using killer networking is that they wanted that flexibility to allow you to use it not only on this one network connection here but also on everything else as well so I want to talk about the PCI Express slot layout it's going to run in 16 X 8 X 8 X or it will run in 8 X 4 X 4 X now these are all running directly off of the CPU and they are all pcie 3.0 enabled slots which means that even if you're running 8 for 4 that's equivalent to PCIe to 16 8 8 which is plenty of bandwidth assuming you're using newer generation video cards that use PCIe 3/4 3-way crossfire configuration however Nvidia doesn't allow for X lots for SLI so you'll be limited to two-way SLI but one cool thing that you should notice guys is that as you may have seen a soos is doing a lot of triple slot graphics cards with their direct cu2 cooler and there's a lot of boards that aren't really compatible with multi-gpu configurations with these cards well they thought of that and they went okay well let's leave huge spacing in between the slots so that you can even use to triple slot PCI Express cards and still you're left with a PCIe 4x slot for expansion whether you want to throw a raid card in there a network card in there or whatever else you have a desire for so moving on to the vrm you can't really see it very well but something to note is that asus haven't gone overboard in terms of how many phases that they have built into the voltage regulation modules are in to dwell in to the power delivery system on this board instead of going with huge like multi a huge multi phase design they've gone with a lower phase design that uses higher-end components in order to make sure that the taller says are as low as possible and speaking of low tolerances they've also gone with a slightly different overall take on the component sourcing than some of their competitors have as well so while okay while it's interesting to see what a capacitor is rated for in terms of current delivery at 105 degrees because that seems to a normal user you'd go okay yeah that's a highly stressful environment so that probably represents a worst case scenario there are power delivery designs that will perform extremely well at 105 degrees Celsius but then will actually suffer in terms of their efficiency at a more realistic temperature like maybe 70 degrees which is what you might encounter in a typical gamer system so a sous Wanted whether you're using extreme cooling all over your system you're going to be water cooling you're vrm and you know you're going to be going all out on that or whether you're going to be going for like a silent system and it's going to be running completely passive with very little air flow around it they want it to perform well no matter what scenario that you're going to use it in so they're using Niki con GT caps and this is the same design they were using on their x79 boards and if it can handle x79 then d77 shouldn't be a problem also something that ASA specifically asked me to point this out is that they adhere fully to Intel spec in terms of the build quality of the socket itself the components that go around the socket itself and it's not just the marketing spec of what they've built over here but they can actually deliver the quality of power that they're generating to the CPU itself and not all solutions are built equal in this manner it's also worth remembering that it comes with all the usual Asus features so there's actually 8 4 pin PWM fan connectors scattered all over the board love seeing stuff like that there's two in here and you can use fan expert 2 in order to control them some boards have fan control options but not all the ports are supported that's not the way that it works with the Asus one and you can even use external temperature probes in order to control those fans so it has up to three and I can't remember where all the slots are there's one so you just hook up these probes and you can run them wherever you want them to go I think there's one sort over here somewhere anyway there's three run them wherever you want them to go whether it's a hard drive and then you have your chassis fan plugged in in the front you make sure your hard drive stays cool if it's getting too warm or wherever you want to put them you can adjust your fan curves in order to make sure that everything stays appropriately cool you've also got y'all your usual staff including USB boost which gives you better performance out of your USB 3 ports you've also got a I charger which supports not only Apple devices but also Android devices for accelerated charging over your USB ports there's the Thunderbolt header which is present on almost all of these c77 boards which where is it it's right here somewhere so time to pull header right there so there's the Thunderbolt header which is allows you to add Thunderbolt retro actively to this board even though it doesn't include it it supports usb BIOS flash back which basically doesn't really need anything actually hold on let us let's let me find that no button required folks you just renamed the BIOS file to this file name right here you put it in the ROG connect port and then you restart the system and there's some flashing lights that indicate when the BIOS is flashed remember you can use USB bio flash back without even a CPU or memory installed in the board all right moving right along then fusion thermo this is cool so there's a heat pipe in here right there and then there is also a water channel so you can either use air cooling or liquid cooling and while it'll perform perfectly well with air cooling and they've designed it if they're actually using these the special coating that enables better heat conduction all that good stuff the heat pipe in there blah blah all this it's a greater cooler however you can get phenomenal performance with it by using a water cooling setup so these are 3/8 Barb's and there's a little there a little bit narrower on the board than I would have liked to see however the restriction shouldn't be too bad because I saw a cutaway diagram of how the how the routing of the tube is done inside and they're using very smooth curves rather than using sharp 90 degrees like you often see you know non water cooling oriented companies do so I would expect this to not really slow down your flow rate that much I'm very excited to see that a Seuss has made some significant improvements to the quality of their water cooling versus what they were doing back in 2007 so it uses all nickel and copper which means you're not going to run into any corrosion issues if anyone had a Foxconn blackops board and actually tried to water cool at you know what I'm talking about those things corroded like crazy and just fell apart so a soos has figured all that out and they want you to be running this board two three four or five years down the line without without wealth yes falling apart so moving on to the subpoena FX for audio this is discrete class audio and you look at how big the actual PCB that is laid aside for your onboard audio is and it's almost a sound card worth of space so it shouldn't be that surprising that they're able to build in a fair amount of quality there so the redline shielding actually is a physical separation of the PCB which is very very cool and then they're using Elna premium audio caps so those are all here and then this guy right here is kind of special this is a 1500 micro farad massive cap so what a soos is calling it a massive cap so what does this allow you to do it allows you to store power in reserve for when you need it so let's say you know you're creeping down the hallway things really quiet and the boom there's an explosion that requires additional power draw that can't necessarily be delivered on the fly by the normal power delivery system that would go to something like an onboard sound card so this capacitor right here is holding power in reserve so it can deliver that responsiveness in that punchiness as soon as you need the additional power to go to your sound card so that's a really neat design choice that they've made they also went with audio grade caps which are different so there are higher okay higher quality capacitors than what they're using on here in terms of the current they can deliver however audio caps use completely different electrolytic content and completely different foil to give a certain tonality to the noise versus just managing power which is what regular caps are more about so there's some differences in how they respond to the requests and soos believes that the experience that they have in does in audio products now I mean they've been doing zonar for a while including some very high-end stuff has given them some big advantages over what their competitors are doing in terms of discreet grade onboard audio and I'm really excited to try this one out because between the 300 ohm headphone amp just here and the the shielded chip as well as the audio grade caps and the super cap super get massive caps sorry my bad and the massive cap I'm expecting this to deliver a very good audio experience with started thanks a question why would they include this with it and I guess it's that you have like like the best and then like the even like best wrists included with the same with the same board and you have the flexibility of using that on something else even when you no longer using this motherboard which is kind of neat now let's go back to my regular programming so there's your LGA 1155 socket lots of space around it for aftermarket coolers you've got your vrm cooling here which I think we've talked about plenty already your 8 pin + 4 pin power connectors are in their ideal location at the top left of the board and then moving along the top of the board you got some more CPU headers you've got some ah there's a debug LED so if you don't want to use this though remember guys you always have the option of using ROG connect so there's the button to turn it on there's the pork for it and that's where you plug in a separate computer in order to you can monitor things like temperatures you can change overclocking settings you can see ah yes if you're booting up and for whatever reason you don't want to look inside your case lean over and look at the debug LED it'll give you a plain text version of any kind of error so if you accidentally turn the computer without rad in it plug this in it'll just save it all this is like there's no RAM so you better put Cerreta which is kind of neat ok slow mode don't worry about that unless you're going below 10 degrees Celsius so our below negative 10 degrees Celsius so leave it off for for now you've got onboard switches start and reset you've got your Go button which works as a memo pay button as well so for whatever reason you're not posting that'll set it to very very safe settings and get you going you've got all your onboard here you want to get a close look at that all your onboard voltage readouts so you don't have to trust the BIOS you can actually get ones with you can get readouts with a multimeter you've also got not either neat so these are little Buddha LEDs that tell you the status of things as you're booting up you've also got your ln2 mode jumper so don't worry about that unless usually using liquid nitrogen 24 pin connectors in its ideal location along the right-hand edge your front USB 3 connector is in its ideal location along the right-hand edge and they've also changed the configuration of the SATA ports a little bit here too so there's only four SATA ports here that are running off the Intel chipset 2 SATA 2 ports running at 3 gigabit per second to say 2 3 6 gigabit per second ports and all four of these are running off of as media chipsets so while you don't have the caching feature that you get on the third-party Marvelle controllers you do have better performance with these as media ones so that's why SUSE opted for that so you have a total of 6 C 2 3 6 gigabit per second ports and 2 SATA 2 3 gigabit per second ports remember you can still run caching off of the Intel ports should you so desire all your front panel connectors are here TPM your thunderbolt headers down here talked about that already to front USB 2.0 connectors auxiliary power in case you are running multiple GPUs although if you're running only 2 should be fine your front panel audio connector on the other side of the thin red line and aa slot layout so we've talked about this a little bit already but three PCIe 1x slots three PCIe 16x slots and a PCIe 4x slot make up all of that so the pulsating and I just you guys know you can if you for whatever reason don't like it you can unplug it and tuck it in there without damaging the board in the slightest up here this is cool so this is an N PCIe combo and what we're going to do is we're actually going to show you guys what goes on on this guy so this is just a little check this up so you can use there's n PCIe and then there's also a and n SATA slot and it supports both of them and then you plug the whole thing into this module right here that sits up at the top of the board like this so you can see there's already a dual band Wi-Fi module plugged in here wherever the where are the antenna ports give me a sec so these two little nubbins have little adapters that plug into them and then you plug the full sized antennas into them and run them out of the back of the case so that's the mini PCIe card that they include did ice already say it was dual and Wi-Fi as well as Bluetooth 4.0 okay cool and then there's your M SATA slot so you can plug in an additional SSD should you so desire and put pull thing on here like this aha okay so I'm not going to put loops we're not going to put that on for now but let's have a look at some more accessories so there's your antennas that go with that you got some included SATA cables for say two three six gigabit per second cables to say two to three gigabit per second cables you've got an included ro D flexi black SLI connector the very best kind these are all related to thunder FX so we're gonna hold off on those for now io shield helpfully labeled these are great so you can label all your hard drive cables so you make sure you're not boot disks make sure you don't accidentally unplug the wrong thing at any given time there's your user guide which is extremely thick and extremely thorough I think this is the thickest user manual I've seen from an asus motherboard yet and we've used it a couple times throughout this unboxing to clarify things and it's very helpful driver disk don't use that though download the latest I'm gaming Do Not Disturb door hanger very cool ROG sticker with instructions for application ROG connect cable as well as few connectors for the front making it easier to plug in your front USB and front power in one fell swoop so let's finish up with the rear i/o clear CMOS ROG connect three USB 2.0 ports four USB 3.0 ports eSATA DisplayPort and HDMI out optical audio in and out Gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio with like the beastliest onboard audio powering it very good stuff so now let's move along to the flood gah FX so this should not be confused with Thunderbolt which is totally different although the board does support a fun durable add-on card this is thunder FX this is all about sound so we've looked at it physically now let's talk about what makes it special so accessory wise it comes with a USB cable which has two USBs on one end and one on the other end that that it can get enough power okay we've got an Xbox adapter as well as out a more different Xbox adapter for your microphone in good stuff and that's pretty much it in terms of included accessory cables so just wanted to clarify something that I numbed out on before so this is noise canceling for your microphone not for your headphones themselves so you will need noise cancelling headphones which do their own noise canceling for what you hear but what this guy does is it listens to the ambient noise and the microphone for this go oh I must have left it at home okay well if the microphone was plugged in I'd be talking into my microphone and this would be isolating the random ambient noise from the sound coming in through my microphone in order to make sure that whoever I'm talking to here's me clearly even if I'm at a crowded land center so I think that pretty much wraps this up thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Maximus 5 formula from Asus don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos