Gadgetory

this video is brought to you by Coolermaster featuring the site and 240 millimeter all-in-one cpu water cooling system check it out at WWE master usa.com welcome to my unboxing and first look at the a soos z87 deluxe this is from their channel series of boards where you find models like pro and Evo and deluxe and all those kinds of things traditionally and they have done a lot of things differently with this generation of product on the LGA 1150 platform so these support the latest fourth generation intel core i3 i5 and i7 processors code-named has well you've got full support for nvidia sli and you crossfire as well as DTS audio so that's a license that they definitely did have to pay for I'm also going to talk a fair bit about the 4 way optimizations enabled by their dual intelligent processors generation 4 technology on the rest of the outside of the box you know what we're not going to worry too much about that let's get this thing opened up so the first thing we see once we get her open is the motherboard itself an asus has gone with a serious departure from their traditional color scheme on these boards which has been black and blue for quite some time now we have a black and yellow and gold color scheme that looks quite striking so without further ado let's put that away next we're gonna get into more I do which is all this other stuff in here so we've got an i/o shield Q connectors for easily connecting your front panel connectors saw our soft flexible SLI bridge this is interesting so you guys are you guys are gonna like this this is a wireless AC dual band antenna and I've actually seen a live demo of this running at in excess of 850 megabit per second which is very very cool 6 SATA 3 6-game bit per second cables including 3 right angle and three straight cables as well as a user guide with vented intent driver disk which you probably won't need because you're gonna download the latest from the issues website round out the accessory package so not as rich as what you might find on something like an ROG board but I think that is expected given that this is a lower tier of product so I want to clarify something right from the start this is a channel board this is not necessarily a gaming oriented board but that I mean you he was gonna be an rog board for that but you're still gonna find great performance and gaming great performance and overclocking and all that stuff but it means that the features particularly what asus is talking about these boards are more focused on other things and that starts right with the power so you've got your 8 pin CPU power connector up here at the top left in its ideal location and you've got a nice beefy heatsink arrangement with a heat pipe on the chipset as well as the power delivery system which is quite beefy as well next up you're gonna find this little guy right here this is an e pu chip and this is where their dual intelligent processors for really come into play so it allows you to do a number of really cool things through the software you can control things like fan speed you can control how much power your system is consuming you can even set a TDP target so you can set a power consumption target for your CPU set it and forget it and the EP you will automatically go okay yet we'll make sure that CPU never goes over that power consumption so you can make your system more efficient you can do a number of other cool things with this including turning off or on certain USB ports when the system is powered off remember guys on/off charging has been a feature on motherboards for a couple generations now but what if you didn't want all the ports powered on while the system isn't turned on what if you had things like LED lighting as an under global well now you can actually selectively do that which is really really cool the epu also allows you to control a well the epu combined with the TPU also allows you to control performance profiles with the TPU giving you two different tiers of of overclock performance one of which is more like a more aggressive turbo boost and the second of which enables XMP and starts overclocking all of the cores concurrently all of this is enabled by a Seuss's fully digital power delivery system as well as some of the other cool things they're doing like building in only 4 pin fan connectors which is really neat because it allows you to take full control of these fans which can also be configured as part of that whole system control so you can control performance power consumption as well as cooling and not only that but it has a special away mode that's going to be able to reduce your CPU power consumption and detect when you're not at the computer so that it doesn't take as much power but what it does do is allows you to still do passive things like download or access files remotely and all that kind of cool stuff so speaking of 4-pin fan connectors there's a special CPU fan connector that's built into their new generation of boards that automatically detects whether you have a three pin or a four pin fan connected so that it can use either analog or PWM control for your CPU fan you've got full support for four dims of ddr3 running in dual channel and higher memory speeds are supported the board supports natively up to ddr3 2800 megahertz which is incredibly cool the 24 pin connectors in its ideal location along the right-hand edge of the board and I like to see this more for pins over on the right-hand edge of the board so many boards hide all of their fan connectors like back here and I'm sitting here going mul who has all of their fans on the back of their case nobody there's usually like one there whereas you often will have a couple fans on the front of the case and these can reach them easily your front USB 3 connectors and it's ideal location along the right-hand edge and you've got 10 say the 3 6 gigabit per second connectors six of which are powered by the Intel chipset you've got hardware buttons built in for your TPU and epu modes so that's for your energy efficient processor the EP you and your TPU which has one and two so it's actually got three positions so TPU off TPU one TPU 2 so those are those multiple profiles I talked about before you've got your USB to front panel connectors two LED post readouts so the potential here is endless there's all kinds of four-letter words I wouldn't mind putting on my motherboard if given the opportunity as well as a clear CMOS button allowing you to well clear the C Mo's you've got built-in power and reset boards which belong on a high-end board but are not necessarily you know colored cool like on the ROG board and located in a more prominent location because fewer people are going to be using this in an out of case sort of environment 7 expansion slots total with 4 PCIe 1 slots and three PCIe 16x slots however it should be noted that two of them are going to run in either 16 X or 8 X 8 X and one of them runs in 4 X so this board supports two-way SLI or up to 3-way crossfire with a potentially a performance hit because that 4/3 card is only going to run at PCIe 4x now this brings me to one of the things that I think is coolest about this board so this Wi-Fi go guy right here it has built-in wireless AC and I just think that is really really cool especially with some of these software things that Asus has done so they allow you to use your computer as a Wi-Fi hotspot they allow you to easily take remote control of your computer and they allow you to use the software as a DLNA server and it enables easy file transfer so this is all cool stuff that is important to your your main stream or your channel customer also on the back of the board we find that someone put these stickers on the wrong spots these stickers are supposed to be up here give me a moment and we're ready to have a look at the rear i/o so we've got a multitude of display outputs including mini DisplayPort full-size DisplayPort and HDMI so we've moved away completely from DVI and VGA and remember guys what's cool about Haswell chips is they do support multi display outputs meaning that from a Productivity standpoint so sure you're not gonna be gaming on a surround setup but from a Productivity standpoint that's really really cool we've got 6 USB 3.0 ports with full support on the as media controller for you asp which does improve USB 3 performance with supported devices we've got an optical audio out a a USB BIOS flash back button and I have used this and it does work if you brick your board you can use this to reset it as long as you follow the instructions that you find online we've got 4 USB 2.0 ports and I think the point of this was to say hey plug your keyboard and mouse in here because some USB 3 ports still have some compatibility weirdness with some keyboards and mice there's nothing a soos can do about it it's not really their fault I think it's gonna be a long time before we see any motherboards with no USB 2 or at least it'll be a long time before we should we've got an Intel gigabit network controller as well as a different one use this one because it supports a Seuss's eye control software which allows you to set network prioritization and cool stuff like that with an AI suite and last but not least we've got 7.1 Audio out now a lot of the improvements that isus has made go beyond the hardware such as in the UEFI bios and i call it a ua 5 io size even though I know it's not correct it's called the UEFI so they've got a bunch of really cool stuff including ways that you can segment away sort of your most frequently used settings they've got the simple mode much expanded so it includes some of the more frequently used things where people were just not even bothering to use it because it didn't allow you to do the things you needed to do they've got full control of every fan in the system now which is very very cool and they actually ran a demo for us showing how quickly the system can actually set itself up to do things like figure out the RPMs of all your fans figure out the cooling that it all needs and it'll just self optimize itself which is very very neat you can also make notes within the BIOS which is cool now I've always liked features like BIOS profiles because they allow you to kind of you know say oh well this is my aggressive overclock this is my safe one that I know works if that one bugs out or whatever else but you could never really label them all I could do was put like 4 gigahertz stable and that was all I could really do now you can make notes within the BIOS and it even keeps a log of the last thing you change so when you're tweaking and overclocking you can be like oh well it was working before and now it's not what did I actually change and you can go back and fix it quite easily the main information is pinned to the bottom and from the demos that I've seen I haven't actually fired one of these up for myself yet it looks much more efficient to navigate which is really saying something because it was already quite strong thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the z87 deluxe from asus don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos