Gadgetory

excellent what's up everybody welcome to Paul's hardware this is a special video I got a guess here this is jayjay from Asus you have probably seen him before I have been working with him for many years thank you for being here JJ thanks for having me man of course we're here to talk about new Asus x99 motherboards there are actually five that we're going to talk about today we have three of them here to show you close up and basically Intel has now launched Broadwell II there's a new stack of CPUs although CPU still use the LGA 2011 - three socket and they will slot into existing x99 motherboards correct but the existing x99 motherboard is all suck they're terrible no no that's not exactly true but there are some subtle differences from the old x99 boards to the noon x99 boards and of course there are these new ones from Asus which all have sort of unique distinguishing features and that kind of thing so that's why JJ is here to give us all the information on them and I'm I'm excited are you guys excited definitely I'm pretty I'm pretty excited alright so let's start off before we even get into the motherboards and let's talk a little bit about Broadwell ii in general so we have four new CPUs the only one I've memorized so far as 6950 XO that is the 10 core 20 thread monster cpu it's also fairly expensive but you know we'll leave that to your decision whether or not you think it's too expensive or not and it will slide into any of these boards and give you just a pretty significant performance boost even if you comparing it to like a 59 60 X correct I mean you've got you know in general all the things you would expect you've got a huge increase in terms of the cache got the IPC improvements and then of course you have those additional course and you've got you know of course the ability to overclock it and you talk about of course just a extremely beastly CPU I mean you know not necessarily going to be that target demographic in terms of just building a great gaming system but if you're really looking to have that system that does everything right you know contact creation advanced productivity gave me whatever might be you know this is going to be platform for you so that CPU and indeed I think any CPU and the haswell-e or Broadwell arranged are aimed at enthusiasts or people who are putting heavy workloads on their systems you know if all you're going to be doing is gaming then you're probably okay with skylake err after coming KB Lake but what we're talking about here right now is systems that do more than just gaming more than just web browsing so all of these are obviously geared towards those people but even amongst those people there of course some who want more features or less features of that kind of thing so let's get into actually some of the features that you'd say across the board for all these x99 new x99 boards as kind of an unintentional fun neighborhood features that that match up everywhere and I think actually the first thing that jumps into my mind is just the aesthetics right yeah for sure I mean I think our focus for this generation was to make the best even better you know I think we really say a great foundation for x99 boards and we do a lot of really cool stuff for that first generation of x99 that was already the first white boards that really consciously put out the right motherboard vendor and we had a lot of great response there's one right there yeah and we can play that through a course with the secondary refresh for x99 as well as in z170 and so we followed suit for these two new boards here you've got the - a and the deluxe they're both going to be followed up by a - to designate essentially that they're that new version of the board that's too confusing to you it's looks good I like it it's it's the most simple like new version of a board ever just make it - just make it - um and so I think you know we even cleaned up the shroud a little bit in terms of the coloring so you've got the white with just a little bit of silver and kind of gray in terms of the contrast monochromatic pretty much throughout the board there's a little bit of light blue exiting they're going to see on the primary top of the various Sam and then on the PCH but it's really subtle I don't think it's going to conflict against anything I think it's going to look fantastic we then jump over into the Strix board though and this is a little bit different I think it's going to look very very similar to a lot of people that love the look of the Maximus a formula which is pretty much that kind of complete blacked out board monochromatic the big distinguishing point in terms of color will of course be the two zones that you have here in terms of the the IO shroud and then here in the PCH where you actually have decals so while the prefix decals are in orange you can entirely remove that and go for a really just kind of blacked out look which would fit and pretty much just about any type of build or you could use the decals that come included with the board and you could change the color out to pink you can change out the grain you can change it out to white I'm big fan I really like the white and but so yeah you got pink in there I have the Kyle have something to do that definitely I think we looked a little bits of his content great it's nice so will you guys have reach to the other other color decals that you could maybe get as well I definitely say if you guys have feedback on that drop it in the comments section you know I think that's one of the reasons why we went that route is that it's an easy way to just be able to add a little bit of contrast color easily to the to the look and feel on the board without adding a high degree of cost and it's very easy for us to kind of shift in different colors if users are interested in this so if you guys want to see different colors let us know okay but speaking of colors I mean RGB has really been kind of this this onslaught of all types of RGB right it's about the rewards graphics cards peripherals all types of products and we've let definitely that focus you know we have the z170 ROG boards that had the RGB header and then RGB lighting on the boards and now for this generation we've really taken it to the next level so all of these boards are going to feature multiple points of RGB lighting so if we take a look there let's say that the the - a we can see that we've got RGB lighting it'll be present here on the PCH we've got RGB lighting for the PCIe slots and then we also have RGB lighting for the crystal sound 3.0 audio section of the board so that's all fully controllable you can go into the our software customize it to your heart's content and all the boards also have our RGB header so that I think is a really awesome addition and I like this is an implementation for LEDs on a motherboard we haven't seen before which is they're actually sitting right beneath the little clasp on the PCIe slot yet the brand new clasp which is kind of it's kind of a smoky clear yeah it's so much nicer yeah it's very similar to the actual bit housing that you're going to have and when you take a look at like the high-end mechanical keyboards and where they allow for superior diffusion and lighting so that's going to be present so all these boards whether you're talking about the Strix or the blocks of the - they all feature these multiple zones of lighting the Strix is going to take it a little bit further where it actually has RGB lighting built in here - the IO shroud so there's a strip that'll light up right here but same thing PCI lighting and then also here in the center of the board the Republic of gamers that is full RGB it's gotta light up the qiraji and then for the deluxe you'll pretty much have it where you just have the shroud here on this board which also has the custom Bible customizable RGB lighting now one of the things that kind of talk about the general aesthetic and I think the going to make a great foundation for however you want to go whether it's you know white black bills or however you want to set the look and feel your system is when talking about these PCIe slots they look a little bit different not just because of that retention mechanism which is clear right but the actual slot itself is something that we've gone about and redesigned and I think this is something that I know when you kind of first look that you're like they look a little bit different all right they are I mean it's got it's got metal reinforcement here and granted we have seen that before on other competing boards but Asus has done it special yes for us you know we were trying to think about how do we go about really reinventing the PCIe slot so we went ahead and developed an entirely patent-pending process now for the vast majority users realistically it's not going to be something that they really need to concern themselves with it a board that doesn't have this or a slot that doesn't have this as all sudden the guard for graphics card is going to drop off or anything like this it's really going to be targeted for users that may be helped there are very high end graphics cards that are much larger you know maybe something your Strix triple fan card maybe older generational cards that might be two and a half or three slot cards or maybe you're moving your system to like a land and something like that or you've got complex water cooling setups and you don't want it to make you take out the cards and you have that additional movement you just want to be able to have additional torsion resistance and security and you're saying for system integrators as well people who are building systems you know for as a business and jump in are places that's also a big thing that was actually one of the probably the biggest reasons why we went ahead and developed this design is clothes combination with leading partners you know whether you talked about companies like Puget systems Falcon Northwest digital storm a lot of parties that we work with we were going to get feedback on that on so when we take a look at these words all of them have this but just a little bit to varying degrees with the Strix and with the - a you're gonna have a single slot and then with the deluxe you're going to have four slots but every single slot regardless does have the new soldering process that's been implemented so it's actually still regardless and improvement for movement or previous generation boards let's transition though for any of you guys out there like the true enthusiasts who really don't care or give a damn what the board looks like let's talk about actual performance connectivity so across the board again okay I'm going to keep saying that how can you connect external devices storage to these boards well externally if we went externally route I guess I'm thinking external that I'm Emmett how can you connect any storage devices right board so we can a little bit above so first and foremost for the internal stuff that a lot of us are going to be interested in we've got all the cupboards bases so you got serial ata you got m dot 2 and you got YouTube and we also have SATA Express and we'll talk about set Express in terms of an external connection in a moment but that means regardless of whatever type of connection you're going to put on this board in terms of the interface for your drive you're good to go you don't need to worry about it two things I do want to know is that MDOT - if we take a look at the boards we were very conscious about making sure that we want to isolate it from where you don't have the heart the largest buildup for temperatures or CPU heat or GPU heat buildup a lot of times you see an MDOT - directly underneath that primary physical by 16 or above the primary by 16 that's going to be an area where you have the largest amount of heat that pulls up from the graphics card or from the CPU so on boards like the - a you can see that it's all the way down here at the very bottom of the board right so that's isolated away same thing here you're going to have that with the Strix and with the deluxe it's actually vertically which is something that you notice even in previous generation because we had the same type of design so it's really isolated away from primary heat zones so that's a really nice plus point with you dot to implement on all these boards you don't have to worry about doing something like we have with our previous gens where you had the hyper kit adapter which while it's awesome now you just have that ability you can natively interface and you have to benefit with you - of course they go to much higher capacity so you go up to 1.2 terabytes and newer drives that are coming to market we're talking two to three plus terabytes of ultra high-speed assist the story is you just physically can't fit that much storage on a standard MDOT - you know stick a gun style drive exactly so you know for here it's the best of both worlds it's entirely up to you and we still continue also have on all our raid software that's built into the UEFI so if you want to easily be able to raid volumes at a touch of a button it can automatically go ahead and do that for you now speaking of externally you did make a quick note on that all of you boards do fully support Thunderbolt 3 also we have a specialized header that's on the board that we had just like in previous generations so you can go ahead and drop on our Thunderbolt expansion card and so that gives you Thunderbolt 3 if you want to have high-speed external storage or display connectivity or whatever you want the dual export actually even comes included with the Thunderbolt card inside the box so that's a nice touch point and for a lot of people that ask about the serial ata actually SATA Express connection on the board that's there for one because it's tied in with PCH directly so those are SATA ports you don't have to use it ascetics rs.20 site Express dries but if you want to leverage the PCI Express that's that Express gives you we can use that for front USB 3.1 connectivity so we have two breakout panels one is a type-a in the elements type C with the type C also offering USB power delivery for essentially for next-generation devices so like external hard drive and stuff like that you won't have to have like AC adapters that you can just bus powered so on top of all the USB connectivity that you already have on all these boards and there's USB 3 and 3.1 type a and type C type a and type you got all the connections covered every boards gonna have USB 3 3.1 type a Type C it's all onboard and then you can add another one via that SATA Express which I'm glad there's some good use for setting Express to be yeah yeah well that's our goal is that we just want to be able to provide value to the PCI Express signaling and same thing also for you guys that are building in those nicer higher inch a C's that have up to 4 USB ports all the board's have dual front USB 3 headers as well nice for the fan aspect of it this is where things just get utterly insane this fan expert which version are we on bore for Quatro for you guys so it supports for fans yes no more than for quite a bit more than four so for every one of the boards they all feature pretty much the best fan controls in the industry we've taken it to just the next level when we talk about this stuff so every single header fully supports DC and PWM output controls so that means doesn't matter what type of fan you connect to it it's going to fully be able to control it we now have full automatic fan detection for DC or PWM fans so that's great because that means when you run the automatic fan profiling not only are we gonna know what type of fan you've connected but we also fully figure out the minimum and maximum operating curves are dedicated water pump header so if you're throwing in like a closed loop water cooling solution you have a dedicated PWM pump for your custom water cooling setup you had to have a dedicated pump that you can calibrate and control we have a high amperage dedicated fan header for you crazy guys that want to be able to run really high-grade rpm based fans but you can use it like a traditional fan they're good to go you can also fully customize all the parameters whether you're talking about fan speeds or even ramping aspects not only in the operating system but also fully within the UEFI so if you don't want to use our software interface you can even do the full calibration and all the targeted level of controls inside the operating system and I think one of the kind of last couple of really cool points that we have here and I think something that you when we were talking about you really impressed with is the temperature input mapping yes traditionally when you take a look at a motherboard most people realize that the CPU fans as well as all the fans on the system respond to just the CPU temperature but if you got a great cooling solution you jump into a game let's say like Starcraft 2 that CP type is going to be pretty low so your intake pens might not necessarily really ramped up to provide more airflow to your graphics card but now with our boards we have multiple temperature input sources so for like the CPU the vrm the PCIe slot the motherboard the PCH different places every single header can be mapped to a different temperature input source so that that fan can respond most effectively to how you have your system set up and to what your demands are within your system it's all the touch of a button which is cool with the v optimization auto overclocked calibrate your fans and then if you even want to do some crazy stuff we have our new turbo app application which allow you to customize being do like unique profiling so that you can have specific fan profiles and even specific overclocks based on the programs that you open and close and launch so it's something probably a little bit creative for you guys to think about it consciously about how you work with your system but imagine you know being at full stock with your system low power consumption quite operation when you're in Chrome then you're jumping in just cos three your fans ramped up with your overclock and then maybe jump into your editing program with a different clock speed across all the cores different prioritization for your network and different fan profiles and you didn't have to do anything because you customized all those profiles before all right JJ how about audio we have supreme effects this is actually something that was a little bit of a distinction between the Strix board and the x99 records all the board's feature are isolated audio design which kind of everybody is familiar with at this point so you got you know audio grade capacitors you got an operational amplifier we have our D pop filter which helps to reduce any popping they might hear when you restart the system now a shielded codec all that good stuff but two unique things is one with the Signature Series boards we have what's called a pre input power regulator okay and that's because ultimately you're still sharing power with the rest of the motherboard right and so we were trying to clean up additional noise that can sometimes present itself still have maybe users get a little bit of that maybe humming or certain noise that can kind of introduces itself for the front headphone connections so this is a way of helping to really reduce that down to the lowest that we've ever had on a motherboard so that's a further well that we've improved the audio experience on the Strix board a unique attribute is that unlike the a the are the deluxe which have a single op-amp there's actually dual op amps on the board and this is nice because if you're using headphones either on the line out connection or the front headphone connection you actually can receive that amplification to give you a little bit more punch up in the volume open up the soundstage so awesome nice improvements there on the audio side beautiful next I want to give you guys a little bit of a closer look at each board I'm going to ask JJ to quickly tell us what makes each board distinct unique or what his favorite features are we're going to start off with the most budget-friendly board the x99 - e which we don't have right here but here's a picture of it and JJ what do you what do you thing about this board very competitive price point 229 $219 youto 220 bucks for a board that's going to give you a CS quality great premium design it's got the fan expert for it has actually lighting on the board for the audio section and for the PCIe slots you've even got a single save slot you got all the great connections on it it's really just a reduction in a couple of the key aesthetic attributes and some of the connections things like Wi-Fi or some of the additional connections you have in terms of Morse added things along those lines but great foundation for anybody looking for a more aggressively price bill so JJ what's your favorite thing about the x99 a version - you know I think it's just an awesome bang for the buck board I think it looks great I love the fact that you've got those three zones of lighting you know with the PCH the PCI slots and you know on the crystal sound 3.0 area but I think it's just it's got everything packed in and it's pretty much everything I want and nothing really extra superfluous but it's just got it's all packed in there and all the nice little things on the board that you know are hard to come find it's call out but they're all there - you know you got an easy exit piece which you know you've got the digital power delivery for the membrane for the CPU you got those great quality power components you know quick LEDs that you bug the board is really nice when you put together the system for your CPU for your memory for your DRAM for your storage devices so I think all those little things baked in are just really nice and overall I think the aesthetic looks great look really those Tim's that you put on there look - oh yeah had g.skill memory definitely gotta love it check it out guys super sexy here is the x99 Strix JJ you got it there's got to be a lot of love for this absolutely love it I mean I think you just look at it right off the bat I love just that kind of that dark monochromatic look and feel in some ways that angles I think also have a really nice just aggressiveness to it without just being overbearing and I just love the positioning of all the lighting on the board too I think that having that centralized RGB lighting for the Republican gamers logo is killer and even little things actually I really like - as I like that we made this compatible with our ROG front base so that if you really want to maximise the front headphone quality you can bypass the NIR chassis unit that is an optional accessory but I think where anybody is seriously taking a look at a board that's got a really clean aesthetic the fact you know that every single slot on here is pretty much all blacked out I think it's going to really complement the really nice contrasting colors especially if you want to go with bright colors you know blue why red anything like that it's gonna be great looking combination so love this board and here's the x99 deluxe version - I really like this board do you guys just let you know I will be doing a full review of this board although probably not until I get back from Computex yeah I think this is a beautiful looking board and I love also just the the beefiness of it when you look at it you know those huge heat pipes you've got one here in the central portion of the board that extends into PCH and then you've got that really big heat pipe that extends from the primary Bri heat sink all the way into another heat sink goes into the i/o shroud I think that's just awesome helps to keep the board really cool but all the little subtle touches on this board are great in terms of you know things like dual you die - with I love the vertical you got - and the vertical MDOT - on this board oh yeah I think that's a really nice touch but I didn't even notice the vertical you dot - yeah so you can see right there that's fun vertical and vertical so side by side all those little touches I think on this board in the fact that it just it comes packed in with the fan extension card the Thunderbolt 3 the secondary hyper m dot - expansion card are all inside the box and the three zones of lighting and that really clean crystal 3.0 shroud which is RGB I think it's just an awesome board and that's just about gonna wrap it up for this video guys thank you for sticking with us all the way through all of these boards will be available if not now very very soon so check out your favorite online retailer for them JJ thank you so much for coming by today and doing what you do thanks for him here and that's been awesome you should and and guys let me know in the comments section if whenever asus has launches like these you want JD to come by and tell us all the information because I know I get a lot out of it and I hope you do too thanks for watching this video hit the thumbs up button if you enjoyed and we'll see you next time