Gadgetory

- tech tips coverage of Computex 2013 is powered by Western Digital our trusted gaming gear partner is Corsair Vengeance and our trusted retail partner is NCI XCOM welcome to our OG the only thing missing here is jayjay because they have an unbelievable amount of cool tech on display this right here is a gtx 770 Riis card it is which is usually a good sign at a very cool thing and this cooler design is called their cool tech fan so it actually has an enormous fin array that's that not all of it is even visible to us right now but it's okay because there's an exploded one over on the right it also has a hybrid cooler design that is able to do both air cooling and see those right there those are G 1/4 fittings this bad boy can be liquid cooled as well so let's move over to the right here where we can see the way that the design of the card actually works so they've got a jg + v RM with s AP completely custom card over there so the idea is that ok we got a custom PCB design that gives us more efficient cooling more efficient power delivery so that you're not going to have any excess heat to get rid of then you throw a cooler at it that can get rid of all the excess heat anyway so that's the direct Cu h2o with their cool tech fan and they're claiming up to 10 degrees better than reference just when your air cooling it and finally of course it's an ROG product so there's a sweet-looking shroud on it now let's move over to this is this is sort of what's really interesting about this so up to 20 degrees cooler with a liquid cooling setup versus a reference cooler which you can see here is using full custom fittings this is one of the few things that I criticize about some of the previous asus liquid cooling capable products was the fact that they had built-in Barb's and they were too small and you know most enthusiasts weren't gonna want to use that now you can okay the to the tubing itself within the card it's quite restrictive you can actually see it's very narrow but at least you can hook up whatever fittings you want and you can actually liquid cool your CPU with an aftermarket block this right here is a Maximus six formula which has built-in liquid cooling and then you've got the Poseidon card which has built in liquid cooling as well now right now it's all over a test bench but trust me when you put this in your system it's gonna look pretty freakin sweet and our og motherboards they just keep pushing the envelope don't they now we first saw this with the deluxe class z77 ITX performance motherboard that has been stepped up a notch with the Maximus vi impact this features the full array of rog features so you got their supreme FX latest generation technology which has to check this out this is really cool so you get a visual indicator of where sounds are coming from in-game at all times so if the actions in front of you you're gonna be able to see that if it's behind you you're gonna be able to see that as an indicator you've also got an incredibly compact power delivery design that won't be a that move so let's just kind of try to look up here so much like the last generation board which was only a channel series deluxe board this has a riser PCB because there wasn't enough room in the ITX form factor to fit all of the power delivery and all the features that they wanted to on this particular board this is a z87 board so you've got full support for the latest fourth generation has well processors and the way that they've got these boards demoed is actually phenomenally cool so there's gigantic thermal write coolers on them that not only cool the CPU but also the memory and the vrm as well as the generally the PCB of the board itself and they're showing off their direct Cu mini GTX 670 this is a short PCB card allowing it to be used in all kinds of creative configurations with the with that said let's move over to the left here where we're gonna see something very unique so this is a high performance machine running on a cool little ROG pedestal here similar configuration except check this out wears a graphics card whatever sorry what the graphics card is on the bottom on the back with the power supply I'm gonna turn this around so you guys can see it check that out so you've got an SFX power supply as well as a ribbon cable that runs from the PCI Express slot all the way under this over to this GTX 670 graphics card so this is what I'm about it being a modders dream and enabling all kinds of cool new form factors without compromising anything in terms of performance so Gary from a soos has actually dug up a bear board that we can show you guys rather than the one that was on the build now the reason that we want to see it in all of its gorgeous glory is that you can't really was covered in a big heat sink and you couldn't really see some of the unique technologies that went into it so it's an ITX form factor so when I say a soos was wanted to deliver everything you get in a standard rog board then I mean that was a real challenge so one of the things that you could sort of see before was the raised PWM so this is the voltage regulation modules and all that good stuff this is where the power goes from something that your power supply outputs to something that a CPU and all the other components on here can use so there wasn't room for that there also isn't room realistically on an ITX board for a proper sound solution so that's where a soos did their usual thing where they upped the ante and they built an actual external PCB that's just for the impact board that goes right here so that way you can get high-quality gaming great audio without having to sacrifice the one expansion slot that you usually end up having will always end up having on a mini ITX board the last thing that you couldn't really get a clear look at before was the EM PCIe combo - so this supports the m-dot - standard which will allow you to plug drives in and also known as ng FF which will allow you to plug drives in directly without using up one of your SATA ports because it is an MITx board you only have four of them and I think that's pretty much it now you guys can really get a closer look at what makes this truly ROG DNA but in a much smaller form factor thanks Gary you're welcome this is what I love about these shows there's all kinds of stuff here that actually doesn't exist this is the front base which unlike the OC panel which we've already seen on the Maximus six extreme completely designed for overclocking you can adjust base clock by increments of 0.1 you can monitor temperatures down to sub-zero all kinds of cool stuff you can do with that is more optimized for gamers so it's more like that that higher level control so you want to be able to do things like monitor your CPU frequency your fan RPMs I think we were playing around with this before and I messed it up but don't worry too much about that you can monitor your CPU temperatures your time but that's not really it because there's other cool stuff that they want to enable through this that this thing that doesn't exist yet so number one is there's gonna be a one button overclocking method so you click the button CPU level up which already exists on the motherboard is enable turns your CPU speed up next thing they're gonna be enabling is game recording button so if you're a gamer who's into gameplay videos Let's Plays any kind of cool thing like that all you got to do is press the record button which is going to be right here and I'm sure there'll be a way to trigger it through software or whatever else as well and you can get that going as well last but not least it integrates perfectly with a Souza's onboard audio solutions and they want to have a way for you to actually select different audio profiles simply using the dial on the front of your case rather than fussing about in the driver now of course not everyone's an extreme overclockers and there was a there was a maximus 6 extreme over hooked up to the OC panel and all that stuff but this is the formula this is optimized for gaming as opposed to pure overclocking so they've got rog armor now that they've implemented not only on the saber-tooth series but also on their rog series now it doesn't necessarily contribute a whole lot to the actual cooling of the board but what it does do is it increases the rigidity of the board when its installed in the case so it's got a top piece as well as a backplate that asus has validated to not cause interference with your case so you should still have excellent case compatibility they've completely redesigned it completely rethought the way that they do motherboard cooling as well so check this out this is the cross shield thermal design the only complaint I had about the integrated liquid cooling on the Maximus 5 formula was the fact that it did not have replaceable Barb's they have addressed that so now they're using standard G 1/4 fitting mounts so you can see here there's some just random Swift tech compression fittings that they're using there are as no weird interference points or anything like that this looks like it was designed by a water cooling company so you're supposed to touch here and touch here but you guys obviously al won't be able to do that because you know it's video so check this out you can actually look at their OC panel right here which is taking temperature readings from the liquid cooled side and the air cooled side so there's heat loads under these and it's about 20 degrees cooler with liquid cooling versus air cooling now let's talk about the new supreme FX se soos is really driving the industry forward when it comes to onboard audio I personally hate onboard audio but the one on board audio solution that I'll accept is from Asus because they take a separated dedicated part of the PCB and they put audio quality components on it this is what everyone refused to do for years and they have dramatically upgraded even the redline audio that we already saw in the Maximus 5 formula so check this out you're getting Elna premium audio capacitors why am i film caps I don't even understand half the stuff but the point is that they are taking the engineering that went into products like zonar and adding it directly to their motherboards this guy right here is a dedicated headphone amp and that's I can certainly tell you a larger headphone amp than I've ever seen on any other on any other motherboard it can handle up to 600 ohm impedance headphones and I don't see where it is right now but there's a cirrus logic cs4 t3 98 DAC asus is claiming up to a hundred and twenty decibels sound to noise ratio on this board now that's not to say that features have to look bad this is what a soos is expecting you to build with a motherboard like the Maximus 6 formula so you can see here the integrated liquid cooling that we've got on the motherboard back there it's using bits power fittings for these extremely clean and beautiful cable runs you've got a red liquid that's running around - it appears to be probably a GTX Titan would be my assumption but I'm not able to tell because there's an e K backplate covering the entire card right there now the one thing I'd say is missing this as a high-end build normally as a dedicated sound card such as a Phoebus but you actually are getting to the point now where you can get onboard audio that is as good as high-end dedicated on a motherboard if you spend the extra on ROG board for me personally not being an extreme overclocker I'd be looking at an ROG formula board as opposed to an extreme even though it's actually less expensive thank you for checking out our coverage of the asus rog booth at Computex 2013 don't miss any of our coverage and as always don't forget to subscribe to Lynas tech tips