Gadgetory

welcome to my unboxing of the Asus p8z 77v premium now of note is the fact actually doesn't even always release a premium-grade motherboard they always have a pro they always have a vanilla you know sometimes they'll have you know Ellie's or LX or whatever else mixed in by they always have a deluxe but they don't always have a premium because they Sousa only releases a premium board when they feel that there is some kind of a feature set mix that they can bring to the table that justifies the premium moniker so in this case before we get any further into it what makes this one super special super premium above all else is full native support for Thunderbolts the Thunderbolt is built right into the boards Thunderbolt gives you up to ten gigabit per second which is fully capable of running external storage as well as displays even daisy chained together at the same time moving along we've got an M SATA 32 gig SSD built in so that's as a caching solution for whatever hard drive you might actually connect to it we've also got full support for their Wi-Fi go technology including bluetooth as well as the ability to use your board as a Wi-Fi access point fan expert to is included this is actually a fantastic little piece of software within the AI suite that lets you manage your fan speeds and temperatures along custom curves should you see fit to give you guys some idea how important of a feature I think that is I bought an over a hundred dollar piece of hardware called an Ncube key balancer to use in my system just to give me that functionality it comes built-in to your board here smart DIGI+ so for better overclocking yes this is definitely an overclocking optimized board they've also got their EP you and TPU so apu is a one button way to undervolt and save power with your system whereas TPU has a couple of different options you can either do it with the one button option or you can have it tune itself to overclock your system and get better performance we have full support for nvidia sli AMD crossfire x virtue MVP which improves your performance as well as offers GPU virtualization which allows you to use Intel Quick Sync which is a quick way of transcoding video even though you have a dedicated graphics card installed me DTS DTS connect Intel z77 chipset supports Intel Core processors it better 22 and 32 nanometer CPU support so that second and third generation Intel Core Series processors and here we go we find a whole lot of pretty much the same basic stuff inside here it does talk a little bit more about fan expert - including your abilities to take advanced control of detailed information about each fan you can listen and locate the fans you can get blah blah okay this is all good stuff this is what I'm all about oh no not this one not the RPM fix mode that's cool so you can take all of your fans and fix them at a given rpm which is kind of neat this is the one that I'm all about the one where you can create whatever curves you want and according to temperatures of various parts you lock in each fan to whatever you want it to adjust based on you can get your system to keep itself at exactly the cooling and noise level that you're comfortable with ah SSD caching - so this is cool so SSD caching - now has a multiple caching option so you have four for SSD cache incapable ports which means you can do all kinds of cool stuff including having two separate cache volumes so - SSDs and two hard drives and you can tune exactly the way you want to do it you can have one SSD that's caching like a volume of the other three Drive so that gives you more flexibility because in the past we've only really seen casting solutions that work are third-party caching solutions that work with only two ports ok very - MVP we've talked about USB 3 boost this is important so you asp as well as their turbo mood turbo mood turbo mood that's like when you're like depressed but like really really really fast anyway turbo mode sorry guys turbo mode and you asp give you options to accelerate your USB 3 performance we have a full NCIX tech tips coming out about this soon network eye control uses the Intel NICs built into this board it actually has dual built in Intel network cards to manage things like POS for more optimized network performance Thunderbolt ok up to daisy-chain up to 6 Thunderbolt devices a suits also put a lot of engineering into making sure that it would be hot pluggable because by nature PCI Express is not a hot pluggable interface so they had to do some spec still tuning to the BIOS as well as the driver in order to make this possible on the PC do ok yes we've covered that already we've covered that already so easy installation for Intel Smart Response and rapid start technology very very cool Wi-Fi go is another really neat feature that we've sort of already talked about ok oh yeah I've known to do with Wi-Fi go is I did a DLNA compatible so you can use the only devices to access stuff that you have on your computer from your compatible media player such as one from you know pin vows or Patriot or another or Asus with their own Oh play players as well so that'll so that'll be over the network so inside the accessory package we find a whole lot of really good stuff I'm just gonna take all these out and then we'll have a look at some outside of the box so it has a really big box you can tell that it's a higher-end board because the box is substantially larger than their Pro Series board here I'm gonna go get the pro series board box so that you guys can see the physical comparison you're getting like worn were like different and more better stuff so you check this out premium box compared to pro box see look at that thickness yeah that's a premium boy so why did they need all of that space well because there's tons of cool stuff in here here's the Wi-Fi go module with Wi-Fi N and Bluetooth here are the antennas these are magnetic antennas which are super handy means you can stick them to the outside of your case so those are for the Wi-Fi go module here are the exclusive features user guide walkthroughs ok we also have the Wi-Fi go kart specific user guide for that guy right there we've got the PhD 770 premium user guide including the installation DVD which you should ignore and download latest off the ESA's website check this out this is all English so this is a thick thick user manual for your motherboard which is great because detail is better than not having detail yeah two-way three-way and four-way republic of gamers checked i don't you even get like a republic of gamers a sli bridge to go with your Republic of gamers board but I mean with these kinds of features it almost is pretty close to that level we've also got 4 SATA 3 6 gigabit per second cables to SATA 2 3 gigabit per second cables a IO shield with a few interesting color codes so they've got the USB BIOS flash back port color-coded and then the button color-coded for you as well as your USB 3 ports that are compatible with the UA SP so they've gone ahead and labeled that for you can configure them in the AI suite whether you want to use you ASP or whether you want to use bots or standard mode but the fact that they color code them free means you can more easily figure out which ones are going where because these ones that aren't you ASP ready you can also use turbo mode on those so I also like the positioning of these up at the top because if you do have to reach around the back or if you do have a case that has a pass through having it at the top is usually the closest and most convenient place if Q connectors are right here for more convenient plugging in a front panel of what nots and who has and last but not least we've got an a suit USB 3 front panel three and a half inch Bay since nobody has a floppy drive anymore this is a far more useful thing to put in your three and a half inch Bay then whatever else you were planning to put in your three and a half inch base so thanks to a soos for including that and it used as an internal header not an external pass-through which is definitely ideal alright moving along to the board itself this is yeah I mean I was gonna say it's a premium board but if you haven't figured that out based on the name of the board already then you're probably pretty new so we're just gonna leave it at that I mean even the fact that I thought we need to say it's a premium board is pretty noob right there by the way a lot of people complain about how I touch PCBs let me show you how I'm actually removing the motherboard so this is the grip I have on it which might look pretty bad on the surface but let me show you what I'm doing one thumb is on plastic components here my fingers on the back are actually on the metal spikes coming out of the RAM slots on the other side of the board I'm not touching the PCB touching the edge of a PCB once again is fine so if you watch when I hold a board like this I'm positioning my like this so once again I have my fingers on those metal spikes I'm not touching the piece to be the oil from your fingers can damage PCBs and is not very good for them so yes I'm aware of that no I don't have my greasy fingers all over the PCB I'd like to maneuver boards by slots heat sinks and parts where I don't actually have to touch it I also avoid touching things like this because your fingerprints will get on them and they'll look ugly and greasy because they're made of aluminum and aluminum tends to stain when you get fingerprint pile on aluminum yes not good I hate fingerprints so that is what I am doing I'm not just willy-nilly touching the board all over the place so let's have a look at the general layout of the board right up here in the top left corner I'm gonna start there for a change because it's a bit of an exceptional feature this board that is where the Wi-Fi go module plugs in you put that in there there's a space for it in the back of the i/o shield right there that's where you plug in your antennas so that's pretty straightforward there's a screw that is a pre plugged into the Wi-Fi goecart so it doesn't get lost just go ahead and screw that in no big deal the socket so this has an LGA 1155 socket which means you can't use 1156 processors it's fully compatible with Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge so you can use whatever CPU you want and overclock the snot out of it with the huge multi-phase digital vrm that this premium level board has going on over here it also has fairly beefy cooling with your chipset cooled by just a little guy here we got a heat pipe connecting it to a much larger heatsink that is responsible for cooling part of the DDR M with another large heatsink cooling the rest of it honestly these Ivy Bridge CPUs with their 77 watt TDP s-- don't really start to suck back power and produce a lot of heat until you overclock them so that's how you can tell when a board is designed with overclocking in mine because it'll have all that space and all that cooling going on for overclocking so we've got a lot of logos on the board oh you know what let's here I'll do my usual routine and then we'll go into some of the other more detailed stuff so right here is our 8 pin power connector and it's ideal location at the top left of the board here are our dual channel ddr3 slots so all Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge CPUs support only four slots that's why you don't see any 1155 boards that support more than four slots of memory although technically all Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge CPUs only support up to 2 by 8 X configurations for the PCIe slots but asus has clearly cheated on that a little bit so we'll talk more about that later moving along here's your TPM plug here's your 24 pin power connector in its ideal location along the right-hand edge one front USB 3 connector is located here this is going to be running off of the Intel chipset so that is according to Intel spec you must have at least two available front panel Intel USB 3 headers or USB 3 connectors ok here is a SATA 3 ok say 2 3G port for whatever reason I'm guessing that's probably the same one that's the same controller that's wired into something on the back panel or something I don't know why that oh I know why that's fair ok give me a sec guys alright not so complicated as all of that guys this is a SATA this is just a regular run-of-the-mill Intel C 2 to 3 gigabit per second port these are your Intel SATA 3 6 gigabit per second ports this is another couple Intel SATA 2 3 gigabit per second ports and this one is running off your fourth say 2 to 3 gigabit per second port on the intel controller so that's an N SATA configuration right there so it is power and data to an M SATA drive which by the way you can swap for something bigger should you so desire however SRT technology only supports up to 64 gigs on a single drive anyway or is it 60 gigs or something in that neighborhood so 32 gigs is plenty for some storage drive that you plug in in order to make sure that whatever games you play most frequently or whatever else is going to be cached and ready to rock whenever you want so these guys are special too so I okay I was a little bit I was a little bit unclear before but I've done I've read my notes on this board so it's mostly optimized for using - caching SSDs and - storage drives now while the controller itself may be capable in the future of something like a raid 5 with an SSD cache or something like that raid 5 on a consumer level integrated chipsets is not really the most ideal thing in the world because it doesn't give you the option to recover it in the event of a hardware failure anything like that unless you happen to have an identical board or identical chipset handy so it's not really ideal but using them as a cache it's definitely like recommended thumbs up kind of configuration so these are Marvel controllers these are Intel controllers alright moving right along front panel connectors USB 2.0 front panel headers there's your clear seamless button is there another one on the back of the board no no clear CMOS on the back of the board that's kind of interesting but there's one here so it's not the end oh I forgot the memo k button so if you're using high-speed memory which is far more of a factor now on Ivy Bridge platforms where we're seeing up to three gigahertz memory kits being released you want to make sure if you plug those in you can use that if it doesn't post you can use the memo K button to run it out to force the board in the memory at a super safe setting so that you can post configure all your voltages and settings correctly and then reboot okay here's your post Diagnostics LED readout which by the way not all boards have this but a soos has taken the liberty of including a comprehensive list oh yeah this is another thing they do on their higher-end boards you see a much more comprehensive validated memory section ok comprehensive list of AHA all of the error codes that you might see off that so how many times have you guys had a board that has one of these error readouts and then actually doesn't sorry guys the battery died but what I was I don't wanna harp on it for too long but how many times have you guys had a board that has one of these but you google around and to no avail can you even find out what the stupid post code on it even means so there you go they tell you what it means thank you a soos it's basic stuff like that that really sets apart the products that are good from the ones that sort of are trying to be good GPU and EPU buttons are right here Hardware built in power and reset switches are here there's your front panel audio as well your spit it out and that pretty much covers it for the layout of the board however we got to talk a little bit about these PCIe slots first though let's have a look at the fan header so what good is a bunch of really cool software features to do with your fan configuration if you don't have lots of PWM fan headers one two three four five and I believe I saw six six PWM fan headers built into this board and they're all 100% configure a table this is cool stuff this is the bee's knees because this is compatibility with up to and these are PCIe gen3 those LEDs show you which ones are active in Gen 3 mode and that is a very expensive chip right there so this board supports up to 8 X 8 X 8 X 8 X PCIe 3 now even in the event of because remember these cheat these TPU is only technically support 8 X 8 X but that plx switching chip allows it to achieve better balance basically it's a it's a switch so it manages where the data needs to go to to give you effectively more bandwidth for running more graphics cards not only that but unlike the last generation less expensive pcie 2.0 PL x chip this will run even in a worst case scenario like if you were gonna go oh well you know blah blah blah the naysayer of PL x chips and i think that if you've only got 16 X PCIe 3 effective bandwidth here then you can only have 4 X 4 X 4 X ports even if you only had PCIe 3 4 X 4 X 4 X 4 X that would still be equivalent to pcie 2.0 8 X 8 X 8 X 8 X which is more than enough for 4 of any high-end graphics card today so even worst case scenario this thing is going to be fully unleashed fully functional for four-way SLI and 4-way crossfire with four high-end graphics cards which is very cool they also throw in a couple PCIe 1x plus just in case you need him and remember guys if you want to run it way to card configuration you're gonna go here and here they're conveniently color-coded four-way configurations will go here here here and here and 3-way will be 1 2 3 don't forget guys you can also plug in PCIe 1x cards into 16x slots or 2x or 4x or 8x into a 16x lot no problem other than it'll have less bandwidth available which won't matter unless you're running like really I on Drake cars or anything like that ok moving right along haha ok so back port 2 eSATA ports 1 2 3 4 USB 3.0 ports optical audio out ok 2 USB 2.0 presumably under this sticker which I think was actually supposed to be up here but whatever there's two USB 2.0 ports under there trust me there ha I can reapply stickers hey soos can hire me to work as a playing a sticker player okay yes b22 intel gigabit ethernet ports can't emphasize that enough dual intel gigabit lan 7.1 audio we've got hdmi and displayport out for the onboard video built into your IV Bridger Sandy Bridge processor and right there last but not least Thunderbolt so besides all the BIOS tuning in software who odd that asus has to go through to get a solution like this working they also had a very special approach that they took to the traces as well as the location of the Thunderbolt chip on the board itself see see those curved traces as opposed to here let's find a more traditional trace ha over here I hope you guys can see this in the lighting but can you see how these traces go at 45-degree angles right here and they're kind of sharp angles these ones use a curve shape that Asus found was better for the transmission of data at very very high speeds and the physical proximity of the thunderbolt tip to the thunderbolt port is also conducive to allowing it to have better weld data integrity between these two points here not only that but isus also hasn't taken any of these traces and routed them through the different layers of the board's this also once again reduces interference and increases that integrity so as far as solutions go for modern generation products this is as good as it gets guys where they've taken everything that they know about designing motherboards and they're a soos just saying and put it here to make this Thunderbolt solution as fast and reliable and pain-free as possible so guys we're gonna have lots of Thunderbolt stuff coming on NCIX tech tips over the next little bit we've got cool stuff like dips which is Thunderbolt ready we've got cool stuff leg thank you slick this which is also founder already and don't forget guys Thunderbolt looks the same as the mini DisplayPort but it's not it is capable of carrying mini DisplayPort or carrying DisplayPort signals but you need a specific Thunderbolt cable in order to run fun durable because it actually has processors at either end of the cable in addition to the processors on the devices in order to make the 10 gigabit per second throughput a possibility remember guys Thunderbolt will also continue to scale so we are going to take these storage devices and this monitor and we're going to show you guys what Thunderbolt is all about in terms of cabling convenience and no fuss no mess it's great on the desktop great for notebooks and I think that pretty much covers our USB BIOS flashback don't forget about that great feature you don't even have to have CPU memory installed you just throw a USB stick into this port right here press the button and it'll flash that BIOS to the board making it so that even if new CPUs come out or whatever else your BIOS isn't compatible no big deal you can get that taken care of no problem and don't forget to subscribe to - tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer and videos oh yeah and the sexy matte black PCB ah so nice