Gadgetory

by a qualifying Intel product and get entered in the Intel dynamic ticket giveaway for a chance to win great prizes is it Intel Gaming promo comm to learn more this you guys is the board that people like me have been waiting for ever since EVGA released their nforce 4n ATX sli ready board the whole concept of high performance fully featured small motherboards is extremely exciting to nerds like me who get excited about small fully featured motherboards so this is about look I mean look how look how full to the brim the accessory package is for the first M ITX ROG motherboard so here we go let's get into this because I'm pretty darn stoked one of the big problems with mini ITX systems is that you can only have one expansion slot which means that if you're a storage enthusiast you're fine throw a raid card in there if you're a graphics enthusiast you're fine throw a graphics card in there if you're an audio enthusiast you're fine for a great odd sound card in there but what if you happen to be enthusiastic about two of those things now you're boned because it's only got a single PCI Express 16x lot even on high-end boards a soos has addressed that in a very very meaningful way so we'll start with the accessories here so first up oh yeah high-end networking enthusiasts don't worry you'll be fine wireless AC that is dual band 2.4 5 gigahertz wireless AC is built into this board on their M PCIe combo 2 module so this acts not only as a wireless AC card but also as an NG F F or M 2 expansion slot so you can put upcoming SSDs in there as well so these two go together just like previous generation Intel X antennas you can actually stick this to something that's made of metal which I go figure don't have here but anyway you can stick it to the side of your case or whatever else as long as it's not made of aluminum alright next up we've got some SATA cables so there's four SATA cables two straight all straight no right angle SATA cables this board unlike the IEEE deluxe board only has four SATA ports compared to six on the other one because this is more of a gaming centric board as opposed to a you know storage or media center centric build with that said it has a cool media center feature I'll tell you about later all right no I'm saving this one for later we've got a couple of different screws for mounting various things to the board such as the wireless module okay we've got whatever the devil this is looks like it whoops and I'm knocking the box around who knows what he's gonna do next oh this is way better they should include this on all of their new boards instead of the Q connector which I've always felt as a very cleansin because it dramatically increases the profile of the front panel connectors as well as like just you know not feeling very sturdy and just being very wobbly this right here is an expand or is an extender for it so it plugs in has one unit just like the Q connector and then you can actually extend them somewhere where it's more convenient to plug them in that's great Asus if you're watching and I know you are this on every board get rid of Q connector love it great idea all right we've got an i/o shield and then finally this my friends is where I start to geek out this is the supreme FX impact this is a sound card that is also intended to be used at well as a sound card and can be used without taking up your PCI Express slot so remember guys you can get 5.1 output by reconfiguring jacks so that's that's a thing but you're going to be probably mostly using this as kind of your headphone out and microphone in I mean what does this board design for more like land use and if you really wanted to run a whole bunch of speakers off of it you're probably going to want to use an external DAC and the optical connector right here but this my friends is what makes it possible to have a truly high-end machine from every perspective that I can think of on an MIT X board so what they've achieved here is probably something similar to like Zeus is telling me this is second only to the Maximus vi formula in terms of the supreme FX implementation so you have there I forget what they call it but it's a yes sonic radar feature which allows you to see visually where sounds are coming from but that's much less important to me than the fact that you've got a 115 decibel signal-to-noise ratio and you've got a lot of the technologies that we've come to expect from zonar cards built into something that comes with your motherboard and so this is probably equivalent to somewhere in the range of a thirty five to fifty dollar dedicated audio solution and it comes with your board it also is able to drive up to 600 ohm headphones so that is very very high impedance headphones either off of the rear port or even off of the front port so they have configured it so that you're not going to get necessarily a hugely deteriorated audio experience off your front panel port like you see with many audio solutions that might otherwise be very high-end so extremely exciting they've also got one other cool media centric feature that allows you to if you have it configured correctly have the board completely powered off as long as it just has standby power and you can actually plug something into the line-in in the front of the case so that would be a microphone jack is would probably be coated on on the front and then have that come out of the line out on the back of the motherboard so you can actually run content through the speakers that are connected to it even when the board is not powered up so that's that's kind of neat as long as they're amped speakers so let's move on to the actual layout of the board itself so right here this is impact power compact dynamo of full scale power these chokes can handle up to 60 amps of power so it uses the same black-winged chokes and 10k black metallic solid state capacitors that are going to give you better temperature tolerance cooler operation much longer lifetime than generic capacitors and all of this is on an EM ITX board the first time we saw this was with the PhD 77 Ida Lux which was the MIT X board last generation so this is an even higher end implementation it looks better looks better here's the like huge solid metal connectors that lead from the general PCB to the thing I hope you guys can see that those like massive think of it in terms of like you know thicker thicker lines for transmitting power means less loss and more more stability for the current to flow so there you go they're taking it very seriously putting the vrm up here alright let's move along to the valve that looks up so good water cool this but like a nice block they're dead sexy anyway to ddr3 dual channel slot so you can run up to 16 gigs with currently available ddr3 modules the 8 pin and 24 pin connectors are right next to each other this I've never really seen before and that really depends on the EM ATX case you use whether these are optimal configurations for them but you shouldn't have too much trouble on board start as well as on board hopefully this is reset but it's not actually labeled so guys let me know if I'm wrong on that one we've got an onboard USB 3 front panel header as well as those four SATA ports I was talking about before the M PCIe combo 2 actually goes down here at the bottom of the board as opposed to on the larger desktop boards we're used to seeing it up closer to the top you've got four four pin fan connectors that are all configurable from within fan expert 2 so there's one here and then three actually clustered up here in the top left corner including their patent pending one that detects and automatically configures for three pin or four pin fan control for your CPU you've also got an LG 1150 socket I guess that's important so you can run the latest Haswell processors including the 4770k and then you can overclock the snot out of it because you're on a very very sort of desktop grade like Mini ITX board on the back in terms of i/o we've got that optical audio port that I talked about before hdmi and displayport out as well as their impact control and what the impact control on the back here does is it adds more functionality so you can see it's a little PCB riser that would normally be on the board itself but there wasn't enough room so we've got a post readout which is cool because you can actually read it from outside the case as well as the memo and direct key BIOS flashback and ROG connect which they no longer include the cable for but the hardware implementation is still there so as long as you have a USB a to a cable you can get that going no problem for USB 2.0 ports for USB 3.0 ports eSATA is something we've started to see less of but there it is it's on this board and an Intel gigabit NIC supporting their game first packet prioritization technology through aces AI suite 2 now they also include their usual value-add software with rog board so that is Kaspersky antivirus daemon tools as well as their RAM disk software so I think that pretty much covers it guys would I recommend the Maximus 6 impact the answer is yes if you want the very best possible experience for gaming for an MIT X build this is pretty much the way to go they have a new generation I deluxe if you want more SATA ports then that one I guess looks pretty compelling if you want their 4 way optimization which is their EP you as well as CPU clock speed the vrm control there's a but there's a bunch of stuff that it does to optimize your system for power as well as performance that is not how ROG boards overclock with their one button overclocking whereas the other one is like it's like dynamic and it figures it out on its own these use CPU level up so if you really want that functionality then go for it otherwise I really would prefer personally to go with the ROG board and do it manually because between this and the NV 6 formula like I can't think of another board that I would necessarily buy don't forget to subscribe - tech tips from unboxings reviews and other computer videos don't forget to like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave me a comment and let me know what you think about this board and I know you're considering not leaving a comment James but you should probably do it