Gadgetory

Corsair Vengeance RGB ddr4 memory modules feature customizable multi color lighting and are designed for overclocking with XMP 2.0 support give your build a unique look with vibrant RGB LED memory by Corsair click the link in the description for more information what's up guys welcome back to Pauls hardware today by popular demand I'm going to be doing a review of this new motherboard from Asus this is the asus rog strict x 370 - f gaming and i've actually been asked quite a few times to review this motherboard I think there's a couple reasons why I'll be doing an unboxing going of the features and then doing a setup and demonstration but before we get into all that let's talk about position in the marketplace because when it comes to rise in people investing they import platform I think a lot of the draw for that is that it has a very good price to performance ratio and this board costing about a hundred and ninety dollars as at retail as of the filming of this video is not the most expensive X 370 motherboard on the market but it's definitely not the cheapest either when it comes to investing in rice and you've got the super budget range which is about 75 to 100 bucks for a motherboard and that will get you a micro ATX maybe be 350 motherboard and I'm only looking at be 350 and X 370 by the way because I think you should stick with an overclocking a bit a capable motherboard if you go with Rison 5 horizon 7 and then the X 370 stuff which I think you should be investing about 150 to 200 dollars in so this is towards the high end of that but again I think the reason why there's been so much interest in this board is because of the existence of this board the crossfire 6 hero which has been used for a ton of demonstrations overclocking this was the initially introduced at launch motherboard that was high-end from Asus for Rison so you probably saw a lot of coverage of this however this one cost about 250 bucks so well it's going to be the difference from the quark crosshair 6 hero going to the X 370 - F gaming besides about $60 less price so here's a look at everything that comes in the retail box that's the box that's the motherboard everything else includes of course the manual and user's guide you get a driver disk which they still do these I guess I guess they do you get a set of stickers so these just some started blinking stickers with RG Strix logos on them you know love them or hate them they're there these a little bit more useful rog cable labels you can actually stick these on SATA cables and that will allow you to more easily tell from their point of origin to drive they're connected to which is which actually kind of like these hey you can get 20% off of the cable mugear if you want to get some RGB LEDs to go along with your motherboard then over here you get the more useful stuff so for serial ATA cables in all black that's nice to have you do get an extension for your LEDs here it's only one but it's fairly long so at least one of your LED strips you could position a little bit better in your case of course have an i/o shield and I would say this is a good one because it's got a nice flat black finish on the back and instead of being the cheapo version with a little metal prongs stick out everywhere that are annoying it's got the nice squishy EMI protection there in the backs that's nice to have a couple tiny screws here the one I'm left there is just going to be for your MDOT to drive since you've only got one of those on the board and then a couple more small ones here these are for the 3d printing mounting points that the ACS is ready to put on some of their boards so you got a couple of those for mounting and then they've also included a high bandwidth SLI bridge so HB SLI for two-way SLI configurations and you know it's not the prettiest one but it is rigid PCB and if you are doing a two-way SLI set that will get you up and running oh and they've included some zip ties too that's nice to have next let's run down the board features I'm going to start off by pointing out all the fan headers so you get a total of seven on the board and they're all four pin PWM capable starting up with three right up here in the top right two of them are CPU main and CPU optional you also have an a i/o pump option that's right there moving all the way down to the bottom right you got a couple more down here one of these is for a water pump and one of them is a main even the ones that are labeled water pump you can still connect fans up to so don't worry about that but they are also set up a little bit more so they're suitable for AO pumps or if you're doing a water-cooled build one more chassis fan header down here in the lower left and then one more chassis fan header right here for an exhaust at the rear so it gives you total set of seven and you can access those via the fan controls that are in the UEFI BIOS as well as using the AC software as for power delivery on the board here in the left we can see there's two fairly substantial heat sinks over the main power delivery areas it's actually an eight plus two power delivery configuration the ACS has gone with eight main phases for the CPU two more phases for the SOC functions on the CPU and then a pretty nice clean design overall there's also an accent light right here on the rear i/o and there's actually multiple LEDs within that it can change different colors to give you a nice sort of contrasting look as its switching between stuff or rainbow or sort of the it works with a lot of different effects features that are available in the ACS or a software of course you in the top right you have your four ddr4 dimm slots for dual channel ddr3 standard for any be 350 or X 370 motherboard here's a 24-pin main power connector for the motherboard there is a USB 3.1 header right there and that's actually coming straight from the chipset so that's a native connector and it is the new style connector that Asus worked with it's we've seen it implemented on a few more motherboards lately but there are some case manufacturers out there who are working to get that header implemented on cases as well and definitely a huge upgrade over the standard USB 3 connector the chipset heatsink is right here it's got a nice clean look to it note that there is no LED lighting on the chipset heatsink that's actually one of the big differences between this motherboard the X 370 - F gaming and the be 350 gaming so the X 370 has the accent light up here the V 350 - F gaming has the accent light on here and it can get blocked by by graphics cards if you have dual slot graphics cards in there so it's up to you whether you think one is better than the other but I do want to point out that that'd be 350 - F gaming from Asus costs only about 130 or 140 dollars MSRP and even as of this morning I saw a new egg for 109 plus a $15 million rebate although it wasn't in stock so bear that in mind if whether or not you can actually find it now all rising CPUs are going to give you 24 PCI Express gen3 lanes and here's basically how they're configured four of them go directly to the chipset to provide chipset functions 8 go to this top slot here actually can do 8 or 16 all to the top slot here if you're using a two-way configuration it will be by and in the top by eight and this one here if you're counting up that's four plus eight plus eight that makes twenty gives you four left over and this four left over ones are going to the m dot two slot right here so you get a full pci express gen3 by four connection four and m dot two nvme drives down there and asus has actually got all the way up to the one ten lengths here so 2280 is going to be pretty standard right there but even if you have a longer n dot to drive you can fit it so that's kind of cool it is the only m dot two slot on the board but that is pretty common with these rides and setups simply because there's not enough PCIe lanes without using a splitter or something like that but for most people a single m dot 2 m vm e slot is all you're going to need that's probably where your main SSD will go with your operating system on it and if you do decide that one isn't quite enough for you you can get a riser card and put it in the second expansion slot here and that would work now as for the PCIe lanes go into the chipset the chips that has a bit of a splitter going in there to break off certain stuff like connection for SATA ports as well as USB ports however it does also control these two by one PCI Express gen 2 slots here as well as the by 4 slot at the bottom and bear in mind you can't use all those at the same time so you can use this slot and not use both of those or you can use both of those and not that slot the top slot fortunately has its own connection so that doesn't conflict with anything and then finally down here on the bottom edge you have of course your front panel connectors previously-mentioned chassis fan headers a couple USB 3.0 connectors so that's nice if you have case it doesn't support that USB 3.1 connector only a single USB to head around here so bear that in mind if you need a couple of these you might want to get splitter from NZXT or something like that there is a LED I'm sorry not an LED but a temperature header right here where you can connect a diode and position that wherever you want to new case to monitor some temps and then of course you have the RGB LED header there's actually two of these on the board one of them is down here on the bottom edge and then there's one up here on the top edge as well so you get the RGB accents on the i/o then you got to RGB headers where you can add additional RGB LED strips to your case do of course make sure you get a compatible one from someone like cable mod or fantex or something like that then finally Hana bottom-left you get your audio front panel header as well as some of the supreme effects on your hardware their audio great capacitors this is the supreme effects s12 28 channel High Definition codec in there has 120 decibel signal-to-noise playback and I having 13 decibels signal to noise ratio recording and then of course you can see the connectors for that for a channel out as well as an optical Toslink out as well as the mic and of course rounding things out here in the rear i/o you got a couple USB 2.0 ports DisplayPort and HDMI out if you happen to install an APU on this those aren't available yet they're going to be rising 3 APs I'll talk about those when they come out 6 USB 3.0 ports that are natively controlled by the chipset and Intel Gigabit LAN a USB 3.1 connectors actually two of them a full-sized type-a as well as a Type C those are controlled by an adze media add-on ship and then of course the aforementioned audio connections so here's a quick side-by-side with the hero on the left and the X 370 dash F on the right this is by no means exhaustive but I really quickly wanted to point out some of the differences between the boards as well as the similarities you might notice that the layout is going to be extremely similar between the two of these especially if you look at the layout of the PCI Express expansion slots over here they both work the same way they both have the same m dot to support right down here the big difference is with the crosshair 6 here are going to be you have a bit more connectivity and points down here for doing stuff like engaging L into slow mode compatibility with the RG extender for example and you do get a bit more connectivity on the i/o this is the crosshair up on top so you get a couple more USB 3.0 ports a couple more USB 2.0 ports you don't get the video outs but I don't think that's a big deal since we're not too worried about the are three processes right now same connection points as far as Ethernet and USB 3.1 but on a crosshair you do get a rear-mounted bios reset button as well as I believe this is for a memo Kay function which you can activate as well and that's actually pretty helpful of course you're also going to get a better power delivery configuration on the crosshair and the X 370 dash F gaming is missing a few other key useful features you can get by without these but I do like to have them there's no LED post indicator up here in the top there's no surface mount of power reset button this down here at the bottom and holy crap I almost forgot to mention this but another similarity that this board shares with the crosshair six hero and especially when it comes to board layout is it has support for am-3 mounts so right now that's careers lined up at the am for mount you notice that hole right there that lines up with a m3 so if you have an older heat sink fan or something like that that only has a m3 and not a m4 yet you can mount it to this motherboard although do bear in mind that when you're going at that up with that route often you will need to maintain the a m4 back plate or an three back plate a lot of the CPU coolers actually use this one that come comes with the motherboard so you might need an am three back plate for this board if you go with an m3 cooling solution so after putting in a bit of elbow grease I have managed to get my test system all put together so I can demonstrate some of the lighting as well as some of the functionality of this motherboard and now the components i'm using are the fantex and through pro old-school case has had this one for a while so it was just on hand and easy to use enter max cooler that is the 80s T 40 no RGB on that one so it's just they're kind of getting the job done keep things cool incidentally I did use the a and three mount for that so taking advantage of the m3 mounting holes on this motherboard for memory I have the G scale credenzie kit that's one of their RGB kits this is actually a 4 by 8 gig kit but I only installed two of the 8 gig Stix is rated for 3200 speed caps latency 14 and I was able to plug those values in then get the memory to work just fine so hopefully that is a testament to increased memory support and compatibility I did also update to the latest bios version a zero eight zero eight which is available on the Asus website for storage I just have the Patriot Hellfire 480 gig nvme SSD and then to sort of flesh out the RGB features on the system I have installed an Asus GTX 1080i which also has RGB lighting and then I did add a cable mod RGB LED strip which I have just sort of we placed along the bottom of the case just to show the connectivity there as well once everything is plugged in and up and running it's just a matter of getting into Windows 10 and loading up the asus or a software and depending on the hardware you have connected the asus or a software may or may not be able to address it i haven't use all hardware that's compatible so it can control the g.skill trend and the RGB memory as well as the asus graphics card of course the LEDs on the motherboard and the LEDs on the RGB strips that edit at the bottom of the case i've already gone over the software before but asus has continued to update it and develop it so this is definitely a great option for anyone who is looking to build not just a nice high-end gaming pc but also to customize a little bit with the beauty and majesty of RGB LED lighting and I think this configuration is pretty nice because you could also as I always like to say turn them all off - if you decided that you got sick of them or you just wanted to get some shut-eye so with all that said let's wrap up this video with some pros and cons the pros for the X 370 - F gaming are going to be that at 60 bucks less than the crosshair 6 hero while providing you with most of the functionality you get with that motherboard second I really like that it's got that USB 3.1 front panel connector it's also got excellent BIOS support asus has already done three different BIOS versions of this board just in the past few weeks and you do get a nice SSD secure race function in the BIOS this one of those little added extras that I like memory support at higher frequencies is also very important with Rison and we're seeing great support from Asus with this board as well and then finally RGB implementation you know I've seen blinging your boards when it comes to RGB but I like what they've done with the accent up here having to RGB headers is great and for anyone who is looking to get an awesome gaming computer as well as getting that RGB functionality in as well I think you'll be pretty happy with this board as well as the coordination that you can get if you get an Asus graphics card as well as for comms though I do have a few of them and the first is going to be the price it's 190 bucks and that's still a decent twenty to forty bucks cheaper than you can get other comparable X 370 motherboards for also if you go back to my top five favorite motherboard features video that I did just a couple weeks ago you'll notice that actually four of the five of those features aren't included on this board no surface mounted power and buttons no debug LED no rear CMOS clear button that's easily accessible right there either and no USB bios flashback which is just one of my favorite Asus features I don't know why they're not including it on these AMD boards so far but you do have at least a USB BIOS recovery option that you can get into if your BIOS gets corrupted it's just not the same function where you don't need a CPU and memory as USB BIOS flashback and how that works so guys that is my review of the X 370 - F gaming definitely an excellent motherboard to add to a Seuss's lineup on the AMD side and I think great to have a lot of these options and the look and feel of the ROG motherboards without having to pay that premium that you had to pay for the crossfire cigs hero I think this would be a great motherboard for something like a rise in seven CPU stepped a little bit more higher-end that's not necessarily to say you couldn't put an r5 in here either just bear in mind that if you are looking for the best bang for your buck this might not be exactly the board you're looking for this one's a little bit more blingy a little bit more higher high-end but if you wanted an RGB build and you want something a little bit fancier I think this would be a great choice for you thanks for watching this video guys of course hit the thumbs up button if you enjoyed it we'll see you in the next video