Gadgetory

welcome to the second installment of the 100 ish dollars ed 97 motherboard showdown as you know from the last video we normally focus on badass top 2 your mother boards which are uncommon in the real world and as we've demonstrated in the past don't really impact performance in a positive or negative way so this series will focus on the more sensible affordable motherboards which most people will actually be buying and we're going to explore their pros cons and trade-offs in this episode we will be covering the experience of building a computer with these motherboards things like PCI layout fan header and plug positioning when installing into a case accessories and even color selection will be covered and videos for stuff like BIOS usability and finish system experience will be coming after CES so stay tuned the Coolermaster Neptune 240m features an exclusive pump design and their new Silencio fans to provide impressive near-silent performance click now to learn more one thing on weatherboards that gets a lot of attention is the PCI's layout even people that I've built for in the past have been overly worried about the future proof aspect of PCI layout despite them having no real intention of adding more than one GPU or any other card for that matter to their system so for most people it is unlikely to make a difference but it's still worth considering just in case the top two slots and the bottom three slots on these boards are all identical and those will be the most u slots anyways because even when someone does decide to add more cards they're unlikely to use the ones in the middle that did vary somewhat because of their proximity to the top PCIe 16x slot which will render one useless with any dual graphics card setup and the other not recommended to give after mentioned cards some breathing room the fan headers however are of much greater importance if you want to take advantage of the fan speed control that's built into your motherboards many if not all of these headers can be used in a normal system and there position can make or break the appearance of your cable management every board accommodated having a rear case fan but after that they varied quite heavily gigabyte had a pretty balanced setup overall although only having two headers near the top may limit your selection of a i/o cooler slightly if the pump must be powered by a fan header asrock had the most included fan headers at 6 but the positioning of them while quite good for an air cooler will no doubt be frustrating for anyone who wants to install a liquid cooling system in the top of their case as none of the fan headers are at the top of the board and only some of them were actually 4 pin pwm headers a sous slacked quantity with only 4 available fan headers but at least the layout was fairly balanced and MSI had in my opinion the best layout of all of them with header spread out all around the board giving you the versatility to play around a little bit with the placement of your setup something to note is that the positioning in general here is the key point not amount of headers don't forget you can mostly fix availability issues with inexpensive splitters onto other connectors luckily for the PC building community motherboard manufacturers seem to have come to a good old consensus when it comes to positioning of standard CPU and motherboard power and standard case headers we've passed the dark ages of randomly placed headers halfway up your freaking motherboard and 24 pin or 8 pin power plugs randomly placed where they really really shouldn't be for the sake of system airflow I like right angle sockets for SATA but not all cases allow the stiff USB 3.0 front panel cable to be installed this way so I understand why most boards offer a non angled socket but I must say I really like MSI's implementation with two sockets one angled and one normal because even though very few cases actually have 4 USB 3.0 ports this gives you the flexibility to even either have tidier cable management or better compatibility as for the rest of the headers USB 2.0 front panel audio and front switches Asus gigabyte asrock all had varying degrees of good enough labeling but MSI's front panel switches labeling was kind of off in the middle of nowhere which was a little bit annoying - they kind of find and could be first waiting for some people a Seuss Emma sighing gigabyte all featured some degree of plastic guard around their headers which can help you not screw up when tediously plugging in all your various headers but the Azeroth board did not feature any of these but not a huge deal the accessories included with these boards were essentially all the same standard fare you'd expect on a value board exactly what you need with no flashing LED displays and OC brackets or any of that kind of stuff each included a user guide of some sort an i/o shield two SATA cables one driver disk and every board except for MSI included a case badge with gigabyte and asrock also giving you an sli bridge as they support that feature in terms of colors every board had an unfortunate shade of brown for their PCB except for as rock and as rock gigabyte in MSI all went with fairly standard blue or red color scheme with a soos deciding to be a hero and go with gold I get it they're trying to communicate their whole we are the gold standard motherboards thing but personally I would prefer a propaganda sticker on the box instead of tacky gold on my motherboard although if you want to go for that Iron Man look matching it with some red components may work out for you all one of you who's ever going to do that mr. Downey jr. in summary this video is about the importance of paying attention to how all your components will work together instead of just how many raw features each one of them has individually thanks to standardization your case will probably determine how well your cable runs work more than your motherboard your cooler will probably determine what fan header layout is best for you and your desired color scheme also the colors of the rest of your components in all likelihood will probably determine what color you want your motherboard cooling heat sinks to be so the moral of the story is to plan for what you will actually use and not to overspend based on what you think you might possibly use in four to five years when you'll probably be replacing this board anyways by the way the next video coming in the series will be the BIOS usability rundown of all of these boards which will also be very important so stay tuned for that guys in the comments down below let me know what you think is important about motherboards and in the finished system experience and BIOS usability videos let me know what you guys want to see again comments down below or on the forum while you're commenting down below or before you leave to the forum be sure to like or dislike this video depending on how you like the fact that we're doing kind of lower end motherboards and we normally do share the video if you think it's good and subscribe to the channel if you have not already over on the forum if you don't like the ads on the forum you can become a contributor if you notice that new office campaign banner at the top that will soon be going away for those of you that don't like it for those of you that might be interested click on that you'll see how the new office campaign is doing also in the description below this video you can check to see any shirts if you're interested in buying one of our cool shirts like keep on diggin I think that's still going and if you jump back over to the forum again one last time there should be a support us kind of box chill in there if you click on that it'll show you different ways to change your Amazon affiliate codes and stuff like that so you can support us in other ways thank you guys a ton for watching and I'll see you next time