Gadgetory

excellent what's up guys welcome to Paul's hardware it is a brand new launch of a new series of both CPUs as well as motherboards from Intel well the CPUs are from Intel the motherboards from our Intel's partners such as Asus and as I've been doing kind of a tradition now I've been bringing JJ over to take a look at as many of their new motherboards as we can so that's what we're doing today we have a wide range of a suzi 270 motherboards here they all support the new KB Lake processors that should be out now we're out very soon from Intel and they've all got z2 some of these chip chipsets and there's actually four different product lines so let's start out with that JJ what are the four different product lines in which segments of the market are they sort of aimed at so first up we're going to have the traditional series that kind of we've been I think most known for so this is historically covered boards like that deluxe the pro are the - a which has been really popular and these are all now designated underneath what we call our prime series of motherboards that easiest way that you'll probably be able to see them is that they're going to be the board that are essentially white so if you see essentia board that's got that kind of bum black PCB and then that white design aesthetic that's going to be that series and in terms of generally who we're trying to target I would say that the prime series is really kind of the foundation from Asus you're getting you know best-in-class design so you're going to get improvements in pretty much every key category that you would want whether it's audio networking fan controllers UEFI all that really great stuff build qualities can be elevated but it's really kind of designed for really anybody whether you're a gamer whether you're looking to be able to build a hybrid system so content creation advanced productivity maybe a little bit mixing of all of those things it's going to make a really great foundation for all of them cool next up we have the Tough Series I've been a longtime fan of the Tough Series are there any changes to this is this kind of maintaining where it's been pretty much it's going to be pretty close to it probably the biggest change is that people when they're looking for the board they might be thinking that they're going to put like saber-tooth historically the board zombies that we've generally messaged because we did have some variance in the such as like the griffon um there's no more Sabretooth so everything falls under the tuff so it's going to be the tough 270 and there's going to be a mark 1 and then there's going to be a mark 2 and that's just gonna be like previous generations and we'll go into some of those differences in general but yeah both of them here in terms of kind of your target demographic really first and foremost I would say this is really for advanced productivity for content creation enthusiasts for prosumers and professionals that are looking for validation with specialized equipment especially stuff like Quadro cards Tesla Xeon Phi things along those lines and definitely I'd say any type of cooling and water cooling enthusiast anybody it's really interested in fans and a lot of control and monitoring these cards are purpose-built for them we've also updated a little bit of some of the overclocking functionalities so definitely still enthusiast gamers can find this as a foundation as well beautiful and more on that when we cover the boards Strix of course I was sort of introduced as a sub brand of ROG is that a fair assessment of that uh somewhat so uh so so in the previous generation we had what we called our pro gaming line so that existed for a little berry adduct I'm but now essentially we've folded everything underneath the Strix banner so Strix along with ROG pretty much make up the dedicated gamer segment series of motherboards have you produce no like we said the prime and the tough can definitely be gaming oriented boards but when you talk about Strix rrg they're purpose-built so everything from the features the functionality and the software stack that all goes in there is going to be designed for gamers first and foremost so with Strix you're going to predominately be it a little bit more focus that's a entry and high-performance mid-range series of motherboards in terms of the price band okay um and it's going to be kind of like a trickle-down effect where a lot of the cutting-edge features and functions that we saw in the highest-energy boards start to kind of get incorporated into those strict series so if you're building a system for gaming first Strix is probably where you're going to want to go oh that's not again not to say that any of these other boards can't do gaming and then of course the rog series the cream of the crop basically whatever you guys can think of that you want to throw into high-end boards that's where the ROG goes but you've expanded the line too there's there's there's both the more expensive feature-rich ones but also the sort of more affordable ones as well now correct so for ROG you know we now have a very expensive product line and when you tie in Strix there's a lot of boys that you're going to be able to pick one but from specifically the launch boards you're going to have the hero you're going to have the code and you're going to have the formula if Coke is new yes code is brand new and so these are going to definitely sit at the higher end of the spectrum so for users that I think really want to focus first and foremost on aesthetics extremely specialized features and functions advanced audio design really robust overclocking and really looking for attention to detail I think a lot all aspects of the board for an enthusiast already built a course you're going to want to gravitate towards RG okay and we have the hero and the formula today so I'm going to put links down in the description to shortcuts if you want to jump straight to the overviews any of these sports we're going to be doing a little bit more detail on each one before we do that what would you say are kind of the non-negotiables that you have that sort of cover all the boards from sort of a certain point up the features that you were like every board has to have this and so every board does yeah so historically with the way we've always tried to frame this as usually kind of from our perspective would call non-negotiables of design right and so these are really kind of the foundation and making sure that if you go about building a system you're going to get this kind of guaranteed level of experience so I think the first one is aesthetics aesthetics has increasingly become really important when you go about building your system even when we talk about quote unquote budget real builds like if you're building like a $750 system doesn't mean it has to look bad it's not a match that yours can match you still want it to look good you still want to be able to have I think a consistent ID and a specialized look and feel so I think regardless of any of these boards you look at you're going to see that they've got a really strong and specialized design aesthetic and we've tried to also make sure that they complement I think that the targeted kind of themes that we see in terms of color builds that are popular in the communities of course with the prime you get that white so there's a lot of different types of white chassis that are on the market and of course white components like a dual series of graphics cards and a number of other types of peripherals and products that are out there and I also like white purposely for contrast perspective too so I like sometimes throwing it in black or silver builds oh yeah just to be able to add contrast it doesn't always have to be white on white I'm so I think that's interesting so like just that there's no real strong like color theme with any of these I mean maybe a little bit more some of the military theme with the with the tough boards but even that's very subtle so if you wanted to have like oh I want a purple build or a yellow build or something like that any of these should pretty much match up with that of course with the right touches but that's a that's kind of the beauty of making your onion system make it make it work for you and you make a perfect point there and that's probably the ending point I think on the aesthetics is is that we consciously made an effort especially with the gaming series of boards where we know that there's going to be probably more of a focus when it comes to RGB lighting and having a lot of secondary colors whether it's only components or accessories whether it's a C's or cables or fans or whatever might be to make sure that those boards are essentially monochromatic right so that you're looking at kind of silver gray and black tones so that that's always going to complement any color color scheme that you want to go with so any other non-negotiables that across the for sure so that's actually the next one is I would say that a big focus for this generation is going to be RGB lighting so right now just a little bit before the launch of this is e2 somebody's chipset we had just finalized what we called our era or a sync initiative so this was essentially the ability to have all a seuss components be synchronized in terms of how you can control the RGB lighting experience so that went from the motherboard to the graphics card to LED strips to compatible chassis x' to our Claymore keyboard to our spot the mouse and now even DRAM modules so across the board it's really the first time that you can have a consistent lighting experience that can be uniquely controlled and so for this generation of course all the boards have been phased and to be able to offer this type of synchronization which i think is fantastic and we've upped the ante by pretty much the majority of them you're going to see are going to have to RGB headers that are built on nice and we've also strategically placed them so generally when you find that there's going to be the two headers one is going to be placed at the top of the board and then another one at the bottom of the board so that works out really well when you have to kind of run the LED strip maybe on the top end and you want to have it kind of hidden in the internal cavity for the top of the chassis or maybe you're running out to an LED strip that's built into the chassis or something along those lines so I think that's really awesome and a question that you had asked as well is that we have also incorporate even more granularity and control so you're going to be able to have the ability to customize things like sequencing where you want the LED chain to start off and then you can also go ahead and independent control for each one of the connected devices under the Auris office what are you talking about other devices that are connected individual zones on the board itself as well as the individual RGB leads that come off of there wonderful for everyone except for the few people who are just totally sick of the RGB trend but you know what you can just turn the lights off too I mean that's always that's always an option yeah and you don't know and I think you know one touch little point there too is that you don't always have to focus on making it flashy like a lot of times what I tend to do is that end up having just a synchronized kind of more ambient light and I think that when you execute it like that even we have all the devices it can look really clean and just it adds a little bit of pop to the system but it's not necessarily like you're trying to have everything just be lit up like a Christmas journey so tons of flexibility there sorry for the train rolling by but we're going to press on other non-negotiables so next one way I think would be the audio design so we've really been kind of an industry leader at trying to incorporate specialized audio design and we've pretty much seen now that every competitor out in the marketplace has adopted what we originally innovated and implemented our tissues motherboards which was the isolated audio design right and that's pretty much par for the course all these boards of course all have an isolated audio design they have an operational amplifier built on board they have a deep pop filter they've got a lot of really great stuff but what's really special is that we code work with real tech so this is the first time in quite a number of years that we have a new real tech codec that's being implemented so this is the s12 20 and this is a really special audio codec and you're going to pretty much find this on every board with the exception of the mark 2 okay that we have here so all of these now feature this very very high-end audio codec and one of the really special aspects about is is that as significantly improved dynamic range which is really important in terms of it capturing you know your your lows and then your maximum highs and then also the signal noise ratio on both input and output has been significantly improved and the reason why that's really important is that if you're doing anything like streaming are you doing any tape recording and you're using both your line in and your lying out if don't want to necessarily make the investment in like a prosumer like DAC or something like that to be able to really be able to get a high quality level you can now feel really comfortable to the line level input quality is very good on the board next and of course for some of our higher-end boards I like the rog series they take it even to the next level where we've evolved the work that we did the foundation with on working with Sabre and we've incorporated even a more advanced ESS 9023 Sabre DAC on there so we'll talk a little bit more about some of that cool stuff but I think audio for this generation is really awesome so music movies games videos whatever you can be doing you can get a really great audio experience wonderful alright uh any other any any fan controls hand controls of course you know you know me I'm a stickler for when it comes to fan controls I think they're always super interesting and super important I think about making sure that your system is not only efficiently cooled but it's also quiet right I mean I could having a system that's loud and I want to be able to really manage how everything works so all of these boards they feature our fan expert technology so that means that brasstacks when you get either into the UFO or into the operating system you're going to be able to go ahead and have unique control over every single header 3 pin or 4 pin a new addition for this generation is that for all the chassis fan headers we can automatically detect whether they're a DC or PWM based fan before you had to manually go in there and select whether it was a PWM or DC fan but we can now of course do all the previous stuff that we were able to do so we can calibrate every single fan figure out its minimum and its maximum also another very important point that a lot of people forget about is that there's temperature input mapping on all the boards oh nice so that means that historically your CPU fan and any of the fans you have connected only respond to the CPU temperature but course with our boards you can have the fans respond to different temperature input sources so for this generation we've even phased in the GPU for them so if you want to have a let's say your front intake fans and a chassis respond to the GPU as opposed to the CPU you can do that and that actually makes a lot more sense a lot of times when you're playing game the CPU is very well cooled and it might be sitting like at 50 60 degrees but your GPU could be getting into 75 80 degrees so it makes more sense to actually have the ramping or intake airflow respond to the GPU and not to the CPU because and most gaming situate scenarios the CPU is actually going to be running cooler than the graphics card exilim so great to have that option yeah and there's definitely even a lot more that's packed in in terms of the fan controls will touch a little bit when we kind of talk about the formula in some of the add-on functions okay but definitely three users they don't want to forget the granularity and control of also being able to assign the output signal for the fan headers which is pretty cool so while we're going to talk about maybe number of fan headers people forget that if I can set any fan header to a PWM output that means I can buy cheap just PWM splitter cable mm-hmm and then power that but from the power supply but have all my fans actually controlled by the motherboard so that's great like a chassis where you might have like three friend intake fans mhm just connect those to one single header because they can be grouped and controlled by one single one so even though the board might have six which maybe you're in your chassis or your build you're going to use twelve you could actually cover that easily by one single board because we have the ability to do that output control nice save money on fan controllers yes okay uh so shall we start in on the prime board sure all right guys so this is the z2 78 - a yep so part of the prime series black and white aesthetic of course like all the boards cable across sister's as well as support for ddr4 and this board has a lot going on I mean considering that it is what you would kind of consider your main stream offering yeah what we consider our entry level type entry level entry level board so it's going to be sitting around that how about $150 price point but you're not really missing anything you got our full digital power delivery controller design so of course you're going to get a great management experience for being able to course overclock it or tune for efficiency you've got USB 3.0 you got USB 3.1 speaking of that also of course we have our new specialized USB 3.1 internal header oh yeah which is great because for the latest generation of classes that are coming to the market from companies like in when the anvi there's a header that's going to allow you to go ahead and have flexibility that you can just run that straight into it and be able to maximize the throughput updates from some of the previous generations are also going to be that we've incorporated the safe slot design there too so while really most users don't necessarily need to worry about that legitimately in terms having their piece I saw break or anything if you do move your system from place to place or you just want to switch you have confidence in there it's nice in terms of an addition to have on the board it's also important to note that every bore that we're going to talk about fully supports Intel obtained okay CH is going to be a requirement if you want to run Intel opting in conjunction with your hard drive whether it's a mechanical hard driver and SSD it has to be a Z 270 chipset it has to be using a KB Lake series CPU okay so and we are of course a valid a partner with Intel in that respect if you're looking for other cutting-edge IO tech - just like in previous generations all the boards including this one they can support Thunderbolt VR just our Thunderbolt 3 adding card ok so you don't have to pay the immediate cost of having that built on board one of the nice thing to also say on this board is that it like all our other boards is it we talked about that all these boards have a high number of fan headers but some unique things that in addition is you got the fan extension card which is a great little add-on 20 bucks gives you three more additional headers or four views it like a splitter so you can even have more connected fans you've got a dedicated all-in-one water pump header which is nice especially for all the users using those type of things and you've got a high amperage header so the high bridge header a lot of people kind of wonder well what is that really all about and it can really be used in a couple scenarios of course you could just use it to power fan but it could also be useful in situations where you want to power actually a higher performing a water cooling pump so you usually see those broken down in terms of white here so you can see that we've got one that says a i/o and then the other one says high amp that's pretty straightforward and then in terms of all the standard stuff that you would expect you know a course have on you know an Intel NIC and you know both type a and type C connectors for USB 3.1 and you know great build for all of you throughout so this is a yes for got m dot 2 down here as well yeah so you got do Linda - so you got one right at the top and then we have another one down here like it is we've tried to maximize a thermal isolation so in most situations let's say if you're initially going for one use the bottom of course because this is going to generally get the best airflow from the front and you're minimizing ah hot hot air from the GPU and from the CPU section you're going to be running too then of course you've got to go in that configuration that says many u dot 2 connectors this time rather than any reason behind that I think it's just because you're seeing there's not as many drives and the additional drives that have come out to the market outside of the Intel 750 series their focus a little bit more towards the professionals here segmentation of the market okay so it is still awesome though and it definitely if you're looking for big capacity drives keep in mind that you can now get you to and over 4 terabytes and so pretty awesome that was nice that's why it's a little bit more common on let's say like our x99 series and if you really do need it you can use the hyper get to exactly add that on with an MDOT 2 slot alright moving over to the Tough Series and we'll start off with this one this is the mark 2 tough Z 270 and this board a little bit more lightweight a little bit smaller the slightly reduced ATX size so it's not quite as wide so it should fit in slightly smaller cases depending on your situation but this is a much more affordable Tough Series board than we've seen before yeah well it it's pretty similar to the mark 2 right now in terms of being a price aggressive board so it's very similar to the price ban that you're going to see for the dash a and really kind of some people with a wonder what's the big difference between like the dashing and the Tough Series is really it's in the heart of the software so with dashingly give you the full complete auto tuning technology so for dynamic real-time auto overclocking which is really awesome right CPU specific cooling specific all that great stuff Tough Series doesn't have that but for this generation we have updated the Thermal radar software to include performance tuning so it doesn't have the same level of customization for a complete dynamic real-time auto overclocking that the prime series does but you can still get one-click optimization really where the differentiation is going to come in for tough is going to be in the validation for specialized items so things like I said like Xeon Phi quad row cards Tesla cards things along those lines also the componentry all the componentry gentling is a very high level in terms of its specification so we've got like 10k rated capacitors versus like 5k rated caps you're going to find on the prime series of boards the ESD connections a lot of people forget about this but the most common point of failure I'm pretty much on always on motherboards unless it's like end-user induced is going to be electrostatic discharge sometimes from like plugging in flash drives removal of different devices or shorting on metal metal contact and so all the i/o throughout the entire port not only on the back but also for your front connectors have much much higher performing what are called contact and air discharge ESD diodes okay so that allows the board to essentially be much more durable in the long term so if you really really really care about having the most durable type of board it's a great choice also for cooling purposes most of the basic boards like prime only have a few temperature input sources and so outside of the CPU with the tough series you're always going to have a huge amount of thermal input sources generally a minimum of at least 10 so you can really manage your fans to respond to exactly the different type of temperature points it's like you've got your top PCIe zone and your lower PCIe zone yeah but you there's lots of zones I also noticed you still have two M two slots on this board which is also freaking awesome a lower profile seems like in this area over here is there any particular reason for that no it's just it just says it's just a cost factor in terms of trying to maintain it but we still do a lot of intelligent design aspects so these are all still right angle to allow for easy connections right and you still have a total of six ports on here so there's nothing really compromised about really the only thing that's I'd say clear drop down would be the audio it's still a very good quality real tech I think 8087 audio codec still has isolation operational amplifier and not as nice as that update that's on the the primate okay and there are a couple mount points here for the 3d printed stuff that you guys started with last generation they're actually a couple of those on the prime board as well just on over on the side and that will allow you to mount 3d printed things that can do things we've got a if you check out the community page that will I'm sure we've linked in the description you can get pretty much all types of things like name plates fan holders cable combs on all kinds of different items that we've produced to allow you to go ahead and customize the board's awesome alright let's move on to the mark wait this is the mark to know mark mark I'm sorry I got them backwards I kept doing that before as well alright so this is kind of the full fat version of the board not only do you have the full thermal armor covering the entire thing which I've always really enjoyed just because it gives a really cool look to the board and this one in particular I was mentioning to JJ earlier just a lot of a little design element details kind of scattered through here just some texture stuff going on in here I mean it's a little bit of like a digi camo look with some something different texture I don't know it's it's a weird aesthetic like attention to detail that you normally wouldn't expect to see on something like a motherboard but I feel like it works really well it's actually inspired by modern advanced warfare kind of concepts okay so like in the latest generation you know like Call of Duty where you have like machinery built into the soldier right and it's the same type of concept so that's kind of what our ID team kind of went for it's just kind of infusing this kind of digital camo but that has also a little bit of kind of like an armature perspective to it awesome um but really the areas that you get the improvement on here is that this one gets the bumped up audio codec compared to the entry board we've got the far more advanced thermal armor design which not only looks cool but has all the channeling technology like previous generations you can drop in the assist fan there and there will you go off the variants exactly you've got the flow technology so you can channel the different air you've got leb RGB LED lighting zones on here as well so you can go ahead and control them these can customize the colors on there you've got the RGB singing that's been incorporated you also have the dust offenders like always too so that if you want to kind of go for a more blacked-out level of look there's also a subtle difference in terms of the fan control technology this one still uses the more advanced what's called tough ice processor which is an independent processor that does all the load balancing and all the pull monitoring on a low level so that CPU doesn't do it this allows for a faster response and more accurate monitoring information so once again if you're really looking for the board that's kind of kind of have this insane level of cooling and monitoring control this is really going to be a cup before that you're going to want to take a look at there are ten four pin fan headers on this board there's four here there's two more right where'd they go there's four here there's two more here and there's four more along the top and then keep in mind this one can still use the veneks then you can stem extension cart you can still add more yeah tough for a fire metal backplate as well I also really like that both for building and the look and just keeping things durable so yeah good job on this board yeah that's a cool all right let's move on oh wait we forgot I don't know just a one update some people also wonder about a recent update that we did on tough syriza's most of now fulfill on having dual NICs Oh previously in previous generations you didn't have ones that had just so this one has two gigabit Intel Ethernet ports if that's something that you can you can leverage oh and I also was going to mention also 2 m dot 2 slots one that's covered up by here by this little protective piece as well as a vertical one because they ran out of space but vertical still works yep well it's also about thermal isolation I placed in a different place but we also want to try to make sure that we're always taking thermals in consideration there's always at least two reasons for everything all right we're moving over to the Strix series we have a single board from that series this is the z2 70e gaming and JJ told me that there's actually going to be a pretty wide variety of boards in the strict series since that's kind of the main gaming series so if this wasn't doesn't line up to your expectations or if you wanted something that's a little bit less or a little bit more there are probably other options as well yeah if you generally want more you're probably going to start stepping into the ROG territory okay but definitely if you're looking for a little bit more price aggressive but you still want a lot of the core Strix features you could drop down so this is the - II so if you want to drop down take for instance you go to the - F but I really love the look at this board I think that it's got an absolutely really clean monochromatic design it's got this laser etched PC edge design which I think looks really interesting there's a distinctive if it's polygons on it yeah it's got a 2 zone RGB lighting of course you have the aura sync a connectivity you got the slave slot updates of course have the improved audio design and one really interesting thing too for this generation 2 is their dual operational amplifiers now historically on most boards when you have an operational amplifier it's only designed for the front headphone connection but now for the line level out so depending on how you had your setup connected right you might not essentially get the benefits of that isolated design in that respect just when I was one for you yeah so here you have it for both so that's another nice area in terms of the improvement and also for some people that maybe if they're upgrading from older platforms so like you know z68 P 60 70 77 X 58 any of that era and they were familiar with our G boards our G boards never had the opportunity technology only until the last generation they formally incorporated it in so it's really cool that I think that first Strix and for the ROG they all feature that Auto tuning technology that fanox for technology so all the great stuff that you might have seen and wanted in the prime Series in the past is now available on these boards that's what I hope there's also a very big update to the sonic studio software and well we're going to get into the ROG boards this kind of does cover something that is consistent on both of them so some of the really cool things that we do have is that you can have assignable audio assignment per application and all the customization for audio profiling can be done per application acetate for instance that if you want to go ahead and assign your game to output through HDMI and then maybe something else to output through the line double output and then something else that output through your headphones you could have each individual application have different audio sources set for that you could then uniquely set in a previous generation we had our advanced profiles that we were developing for music movies and games but they were blanket audio profiles now we can actually apply the profiles per each application so if you want to actually purposely have game for let's say you know your game that you're jumping into so you're jumping to grand theft auto or evolve or whatever it might be then you jump back into chrome and you're you know you're listen to Spotify you're watching YouTube you can have a different audio preset so the level of granularity and control that I think that we're offering to gamers and enthusiasts for this generation is something that's really awesome and once you kind of really get used to being able to have this subtle level of control it's going to become addictive you're really going to go I can't go backwards that's kind of effect that's gonna be really beneficial for streamers yeah totally like yeah that's 100% where we really got a lot of the inspiration and focus is for heavy multitasking so what we find is people they're jumping in applications and then for streamers that want the ability to kind of customize and this also will work with our perfect voice technology so our perfect voice technologies and it has advanced post-processing for not only incoming but outgoing audio and you can also now set this up specifically to that so if you want to have just the perfect voice set to be processing let's say your incoming game audio but you don't want to active on anything else you can do that so a lot of really cool advanced little controlling all the stuff that we'd expect like we've already talked about um two USB 3.0 one to them tattooed yeah all that stuff is going to be I love having to him that two slits also this one has the RGB headers both the top and the bottom and what else oh and Wi-Fi yeah so that's another kind of think call-out is that for the previous generation to programming or it didn't have Wi-Fi so this is a two by two eight eleven AC that's extremely fast you know for people are wanting for a reference benchmark on average with a good AC router you're talking about three to four times the speed of a 10100 Ethernet cable so very very good throughput very good range and you get bluetooth on there too so glorious the z2 7te gaming I think that is a wonderful all around gaming board from the Strix line but let's kick it up a notch yeah with the are oh geez we're going to start off with this one here which is the hero named after my dog hero not not exactly but in close enough he's right over there snoring so if we have will honor him at least so this the hero was it was the hero first started last generation was that to now it's actually been now multiple generations there you can go back for more yeah Wow time slips by so quickly yeah so the hero was very welcomed by a lot of people because ROG boards were typically a little out of reach but the hero kind of kind of entry yeah brought a dance it to being much more enriched I know I think Steve got one of the first hero boards right when it first launched so we have metal heatsinks which look really cool and just want to point that out until that fresh metal that's actually a good point and so that some people might wonder overclocking capabilities and pretty much all these boards are going to be identical in terms of having a great reliable solid OC experience whether you're talking about 4.6 4.7 we're winning plus gigahertz it's not going to be an issue what you're going to find a difference is is that in the vrm components and in the heatsink designs are going to get more advanced on the higher imports you go with really the main benefit there is you're just talking about thermal efficiency and across the entirety of the vrm and how it dissipates temperatures so generally if you can keep the vrm even cooler and you can distribute it more efficiently you're going to maybe get a little bit better stability under heavy loads and under aggressive overclocking so it's not a question that you're necessarily going to guarantee better overclocking experience but you can help to ensure that the overall that our long-term reliability under heavy consistent load okay so especially if you're a gamer that's going under really demanding workloads or you're simultaneously doing stuff maybe streaming and gaming it may be a little bit better option if you know you're consistently going to be hammering the system but other areas that are course going to be different of course is the id design it's got a far more specialized id design and the audio is going to be even further kicked up in comparison to what we had on the Strix pre-selects you get all the great stuff that we already talked about on the Strix and all the previous generations so you know pre input power regulator we've got the D pop filter the audio grade capacitors the isolation that S audio codec right but this one incorporates the ESS zebra DAC so we get some serious high-quality DAC processing that's on here and you tie that in and with everything that we've done in terms of the sonic studio suite that we talked about plus some really new cool things that we've done in sonic radar sonic Raider it's got an overhaul that we've been working on for the last two years it's an entirely brand new algorithm it has a new type of display mapping that works a really really really granular in terms of showing you I'd say a the result but with a varying level of brightness on the actual radar feel so before all sounds wait essentially be prioritized at the same time and so that can be difficult in the line of fire figuring out which one is the one that you want to focus on but now there's a lot more granular control on how it's displayed and for users that don't necessarily want to focus on a specific audio type that we haven't processed in you can now select specific frequencies that you want dialing to so if you want to have like more so if you really subtly pick up things like bass tones or treble tones in certain types of maps or game engines you can have it display those so a lot of really cool customization the chav on there but one other really cool thing that you're going to have on the RG series ports is also a commitment to people that want to have high performance real water-cooling configurations and so what we have down here on the board is going to be water temperature sensor connections so for input and output so usually depending on how you set up your radiator and everything along those lines if you really want to be critical and monitor everything you can go ahead and can make connections for your fittings that have those sensors and you can monitor that information and if you also want to monitor a flow rate you can also go ahead and connect that there as well so when you talk about the level of fan control flexibility the ability to run and control your pwm pumps and add to that I mean the water cooling level control and connectivity is just absolutely awesome wonderful and I also want to point out dual MDOT - once again this one also has of course that USB 3.1 header debug LED and surface mounted jazz nice nice solid start button they're dead to kick things off and on the headers - some people might always wonder we're still also actively supporting the OC panel in the ROG front bases accessories so for users that want to be able to have that really high quality audio connection all the way from the board all the way to the front of the chassis those accessories are fully supportive on this one again has the RGB outs at the top and bottom for RGB LED strips I've been waiting so long all right um this is the m9f Maximus 9 formula and it is it's wonderful I've I did some some footage of it earlier hopefully that's playing right now and it looks it looks wonderful so you have but so it's not called ROG or to the thermal armor when it's a it's ROG armor it's ours on here yeah but it's essentially performing the same tasks I it's a little bit on on the tough series it's actually functional I was ok because it actually has channeling and venting really on the ROG board we it's really first and foremost anesthetic ok yeah because I don't have the same type of assist fans or shunting or flow rate that control that you can have them ok well I stand corrected this does have of course water cooling support in the vrm so vrm our cooling updated for this generation aidid and already designed from ek for this we actually developed an entirely new cinch micro channel design buckle so we even get better performance in the previous generation it's a it's copper it's absolutely awesome of course it's fully hybrid though so you want to run it entirely pass it just like this you're still going to get a great experience but if you want to drop in water your band you're good to go still do that they ditch the g1 quarter fittings up and I'm just kidding they still do and quarter but other than that I mean like everything I feel like you could want just about what are you guys going to do with the extreme I don't know just gonna have to wait we'll have to wait and see what the extreme does alright so SLI support that I mean a lot of these are pretty much thing is optimized for two-way cuz you're not going to do anything more than that on this platform but RGB different RGB zones I'm guessing yeah multiple multiple RGB zones so you got a the PCIe you got down here for the PCH you also have it here and then even actually for this generation we've gone back and customized this ah in the past it's been a little small point but people are kind of like I I just want that much more I said that's okay yeah that was actually one one thing that I pointed out with the last version so nice to update that as well the i/o back here has a fixed IO shield yeah so this was actually brought over from the absolute highest end board that we've pretty much ever made with our rampage v extreme anniversary edition board so is this fully integrated IO shield so for anybody that's ever forgotten to put an ayah shield they will absolutely love this so it makes things even easier there's actually also additional durability benefits because of the direct proximity that we can make with all the actual contact headers for all the IO ports it significantly improves the air discharge and direct contact discharge nice so on that same thing that we talked about like I'm tough boards where we get superior protection our G boards already get upgraded ESD answer diodes but that's also put in place so this board really is absolutely just packed to the gills you know one of the little thing that we didn't really touch up it's hard to see is the software package it's been updated across the board so there's new versions of RAM cache and RAM disk software they've also been updated - Felisa for nvme day solutions so you can get some really nice healthy performance gains from trying that stuff out and that's one of those things that definitely you want to spend a little bit more time to find out about if you are interested rog don't sell the software short because some of the software that gets included really takes things to that next level whether we're talking about from a gaming perspective and packet priority software audio customization or some of those other pieces in terms of performance oriented software fabulous and of course still has the ROG armor yeah ROG backplate yeah the RG backplate on the back that is all metal as well and it's just heavy I don't know I like when a board is heavy is if it's a premium board is seriously if you're looking for a really high-end build where you want to be able to control I think the aesthetic it looks fantastic and I think when you incorporate also the customized 3d pieces if you look to get some of those produce we have some really really nice ones like we have specialized ROG I cable holders to allow you to kind of right angle all your cables that really complement the look and feel the board so some really really cool stuff that we've got there and if I didn't mention it don't lend out to again one is a protected by the panel back down here in one is vertical at the bottom yep there's dual MDOT two everywhere edges it's makes me so so happy um but that's all the motherboards that we have to talk about today guys I'm kind of sad that we're at the end but it's been wonderful JJ thank you so much for coming by today as always it's been awesome to be here and thanks all you guys for watching of course leave comments in the comment section down below let us know what you think let us know which of these boards is your favorite because I know I can't decide but I'm sure I'll think about it a lot more maybe I'll come up with something leave me a thumbs up if you want to and subscribe to the channel for more content come at you very soon thanks for watching and we'll see you guys next time