Gadgetory

it's pretty hard to get me excited about a motherboard by putting a bunch of flashy lights in my face these days I haven't even been on the DIY PC scene that long compared to some folks but I still feel like at this point I've kind of seen it all and I've become jaded enough about these often barely functional features that all I want is a motherboard manufacturer to make a product that is shoes all that nonsense and gives me a back to basics board that just plain works no matter what you throw at it I'm starting to get the feeling the deep down Asus knows this because in spite of the fact that they just launched like a dozen z97 motherboards or something like that they offered to send me a grand total of one of them the z97 WS or as I'm calling it the Linus Edition the CM storm SF 17 uses a massive 18 centimeter fan to cool your gaming notebook and it adds a four port USB hub click now to learn more the ws in the model number stands for wonderful stability and when a soos it does build a board in this series on a given chipset they only do one because when you trim the fat and leave only the good stuff you only need one model it's boring looking with no LEDs doesn't have any OC panels carries almost no consumer friendly features like onboard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and lacks some of the really hardcore overclocking tuning options that you might find on an ro G Series board and yet it costs the same as these feature Laden you know racecar type options so what the heck is up with that well the money that would have been spent in R&D on features that a small fraction of a fraction of the user base will use gets spent on workstation grade componentry extremely flexible expansion and on validating WS boards with a huge variety of hardware that goes beyond the traditional well it works with AMD graphics cards an Nvidia graphics card so I guess it's okay treatment that many motherboards get we're talking raid cards high on NIC cards PCIe storage cards and even much more obscure stuff than that alright so what comes with it you get an IO shield a USB 2 slash firewire pci bracket a serial pci bracket 8 SE 2 3 six gigabit per second cables two-way three-way and four-way SLI bridges those cute connector blocks that make it easier to plug in your front switches a manual a driver disk and finally the motherboard itself now I said already it's boring looking but I guess now you guys see my point I prefer the full-on Borg Azzam look with a black PCB and just plain silver accents but I guess if I had to have a gold motherboard I'll take a practical looking one like this over a blingy tacky one like some of the ones I've seen in the past our feature tour begins at the CPU socket where we'll find support for current generation LGA 1150 has well and has well refresh processors with promises of future Broadwell support a nice little thing to have in your pocket those CPUs all share a common memory support scheme so to the right of the socket you'll find four ddr3 memory slots that run in dual channel mode power to the CPU and RAM is handled by a next-generation all digital power design with eight phases for the CPU and two for the memory and it includes some pretty seriously impressive Japanese capacitors that are rated at an industry-leading 12,000 hours of operation at 150 degrees Celsius well higher than any PC should get on the top edge we find hardware buttons for TPU and epu optimizations I generally don't touch them but if you want to then TPU boosts CPU performance a bit and epu reduces power consumption a little bit next to those switches we've got a couple more useful switches the mem ok button boots the PC with super safe memory settings so even with finicky run you can get into the BIOS and make the adjustments you need to and the XMP switch lets you enable performance optimized memory profiles without any software configuration this could be handy since the board does support memory speeds up to 30 300 megahertz out of the box moving down the right-hand side is the 24 pin connector that aside from being in the correct position on the right-hand edge as soos claims is exceptional because it uses a new design that improves contact with your power supply connector reducing the risk of burning output contacts neato under that are 2 USB 3 front headers for a total of 10 USB 3 ports on the board and then the dr. power switch that enables OS monitoring of your power supply to help you detect a failing unit haven't got a dead power supply that I feel like plugging into a working board to test it but I guess that's sound pretty cool continuing on down we've got either eight say two three six gigabit per second ports with six of them coming off of an Intel chipset and two off of a secondary as media one or four Intel SATA three ports and two SATA Express ten gigabit per second ports one powered off the Intel chipset and one off the as media chipset this will provide a ton of expansion options as SATA Express drives start showing up but it also doesn't end there there's an m2 slot right next to them for a total of three SSDs that can be plugged right into PCI Express rather than just say that for improved throughput and latency right on above the usual contingent of audio firewire serial USB two TPM and front panel connector headers are the only necessary onboard buttons that you might find useful for testbeds use like power reset and clear CMOS no you know fancy esoteric functionality there you'll also find a four-digit post readout that will give you useful diagnostic information but if you can't see it because you know the numbers move too fast or because there's a graphics card in the way of the board and you you know you can't see it don't worry you can dump the logs onto a USB drive using the cue code blogger button right next to the USB BIOS flash back button on the rear panel that lets you flash the BIOS without a CPU installed wicked expansion is another pillar of WS boards and with four PCI Express gen3 16x slots that can simultaneously operate an 8x mode this iteration doesn't disappoint that means you can throw for an D or Nvidia graphics cards in here in SLI or crossfire for gaming or you can simply load it up with a bunch of compute cards for workstation use you can also fill it up with red Rockets raid cards or whatever else you want to do because boards like this are made for future growth love it just make sure that you use that six pin auxiliary connector above the top slot if you want to load her up so to speak even the fancy 24-pin connector likely won't save the board from quad overclocked r9 290 X's if you don't use that auxiliary connector finishing up in the corner we find a quality if unexceptional onboard audio solution that uses the realtek ALC 11:50 codec I use a separate amplifier anyway so this is more than good enough for my needs but if you're expecting your motherboard to drive fancy 300 to 600 ohm impedance headphones you may want to rethink something about your setup on the back of the board we find some good stuff and actually my first complaint about it I'll start with the good stuff 2 USB 2 port 6 USB 3 ports dual Intel Gigabit LAN 7.1 analog audio out with gold plated connectors eSATA 6 gigabit per second optical audio 2 DisplayPort output and an HDMI port now the glaring omission in what is otherwise a perfect workstation grade board that mini DisplayPort connector while it does enable three concurrent displays it really should in my mind be a Thunderbolt 2 port on a board of this caliber Asus does have their Thunderbolt header to allow this functionality to be added with an add-in card but I still wish it was on board and they weren't asking me to spend more money and wasted wasted PCIe slot on it after the fact well that was it that was my only complaint aside from the stuff I just mentioned you've got the usual asus essentials including they're easy to navigate UEFI BIOS onboard temperature probes they're on a magical fan speed tuning that can create fan speed profiles with the 6 onboard 3 or 4 pin fan headers that dynamically adapt to your system load and finally due to its build quality and BIOS optimization this ws board has enough overclocking options to run with the best of them so it's all basically there but that's not the focus here and you won't find marketing blurbs about that on the box or on the product page no well as usual a Seuss's messaging is a little rough when they try to emphasize their quality control standards and compatibility testing the message still gets through and based on my experience with their ws class boards I can't recommend anything more heartily I still like some flashy lights on my fans and water cooling tubing or whatever but when it comes to the motherboard an often overlooked component that does so little for performance these days but so much for smooth operation I'll take a WS board any day of the week if I could choose any board on the market which I can so I did thank you for watching my overview of the z97 ws just like with all of my videos you can find a link with pricing and availability that includes my affiliate code in the video description under the like share and dislike buttons which I'd love for you to use accordingly also in the video description is a support link where you can give us a monthly contribution buy a t-shirt like this one or change your Amazon bookmarks to ones that include our affiliate code so we get a small kickback whenever you buy lozenges or whatever thank you for watching guys I hope you enjoyed this video as much as we enjoyed making it and don't forget to mash that subscribe button if you haven't already by the way that bit at the beginning about how WS stands for wonderfully stable or whatever I said it stands for workstation I was just messing with you all