Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of CES 2014 is brought to you by NCI XCOM your source for great technology selection and service along with Corsair memory and Western Digital here in the asou suite they've got a number of cool demos running we're gonna start with the components so first up is the ROG a front base so this is a dual Bay display / knob / front panel connectors device that allows you to control your overclocked monitor fan speeds control fan speeds as well as pass through your front audio it adds another USB connector to the front and it uses the same interface as that that right there The OC panel so it's compatible with the rampage 4 Black Edition as well as any of the z87 motherboards that feature that OC panel header connector the second thing in here is one that I'm actually personally a little bit more excited about this is the Zeus Poseidon gtx 780 now there will be a 780ti version that i've heard rumblings about but basically guys the Poseidon concept which we first saw at Computex is an air cooling / liquid cooling hybrid product now asus is telling me that from an air cooling perspective the poseidon only runs a handful of degrees warmer than a regular card that doesn't have the built in liquid cooling and while they're not giving us an exact number with these standard d 1/4 fittings in the ability to hook it up to whatever liquid cooling system you could possibly want I can assure you that if you're going from error and you're thinking about upgrading to liquid it's gonna be worth a look to consider the ability to easily add liquid cooling to it if and if all you're sacrificing is a couple of degrees when you're running on air next up we've got what looks like a standard Isuzu z87 deluxe board except no this one has some pretty different looking connectors on the bottom corner here this is the first time I've seen SATA Express in person now what the connector looks like is three discreet connectors all next to each other but they actually serve as one interface to a single drive so two of them look like standard SATA 3 connectors and then there is a third that actually is a direct PCI Express 2x link so what this enables once you connect a drive to it is transfer speeds of up to 1000 megabytes per second or one gigabyte per second so we're finally getting to the point where we are removing the SATA 3 bottleneck that exists on many modern SSDs without taking up a PCI Express slot at the back of the case by going with something like an asus Raider or other PCIe SSD solution rounding out our components showcase we've got the thunderbolt ii x2 now going back to z77 even we've seen these TB underscore header ports on a suits motherboards that promised the ability to add thunderbolt 1 to your motherboard as an as an aftermarket upgrade option now we never actually saw that productized and i mean maybe it was a certification issue or something like that so for me personally I was like oh that's a little disappointing because I was kind of hoping that we'd see that well guys it's here now this is Thunderbolt II x2 and you can plug it into the TB header plug it into a PCI Express slot and you can actually add Thunderbolt connectivity to any a seuss motherboard that has that TB underscore header even the older ones so the older TB underscore header is just as compatible with Thunderbolt 2 as it was with Thunderbolt 1 so you can get that full 20 gigabit per second connectivity now speaking of 20 gigabit per second connectivity asus is also showing off their okay now this one's this one's got a bit of an odd name on it so this is their z87 deluxe quad which has two Thunderbolt 2 connectors so the quadrat Iles this is four times the potential total bandwidth that you would get with a single Thunderbolt 1 connector now speaking of total bandwidth in order to even demo this they grabbed a couple of a seuss raiders they built a custom PCB here so you can see we've got a daisy chain coming out from the back of the board and then from one Raider to the second Raider and then they're using a real-time test to show you data throughput of these two cards together on thunderbolt 2 now to be clear Thunderbolt 2 is actually capable of even higher speeds than this but it just should give you some idea of what we're looking at in terms of capability of this technology moving forward and that is running off of just one of the Thunderbolt 2 ports on this motherboard of course there are two of them which makes it the quad motherboard so thanks for checking out our Asus component suite update here at CES 2014 remember our trip to the show is powered by NCI XCOM your source for great technology selection and service as well as course our memory and Western Digital without those partners we wouldn't be able to be here bringing you guys these videos so a huge thanks to them