Gadgetory

as rock in 2017 have been hitting so many nails on the head I'm surprised they even have a hammer left first they have the x-37 itachi which is arguably one of the best x3 17:4 motherboards out there they've also introduced some really cool mini ITX boards and now they've got the x2 99 gaming i9 which has all the features of the x2 99 Taichi has but also features 10 gigabits per second Ethernet so like all the motherboard reviews around here let's put this thing through the paces and see if it is worthy of your money welcome back to tag yes City and where do we begin with this motherboard well there's a 13 phase vrm with Intersil is l99 2 to 7 B MOSFETs these rated up to 60 amps and you get 13 of them which I believe 12 are dedicated to the CPU so that allows up to 720 amps of power available for the CPU now 65 amp magic are 15 chokes these are 65 amps and then you've got niche con 12 K capacitors so some of the best components have been put onto this VRM and when testing this thing out I had absolutely no problems taking the CPU to 4.7 gigahertz now the problem there was that the CPU was starting to hit a hundred degrees at four point seven I got even boot into four point eight but honestly if you guys are getting at 7,900 X I'd recommend taking it back down to four point four four point five and when I was doing some vrm temperature tests even at 4.6 gigahertz this VR and was only getting up to sixty degrees on the heatsink itself and it has plenty more room to go they'll see our hard core of cooker and you do want to get really high speeds on the 7900 X which will get insane amount of power draw then I do recommend maybe upgrading to some water cooling on the vrm as definitely this 13 phases will be able to take a lot more punishment and I know there will be some people out there that are wondering is this eight pin power connector enough for heavy overclocked and in my opinion yes it has been upgraded from a typical power connector so they do put thicker components on there and that will allow you to get more power drawn especially if you've got a really expensive power supply that 8 pin power connector on the power supply will allow additional power delivery over your standard 200 30 watt reading I mean even nowadays on even a standard cz 270 motherboard you should be able to get a lot more than the typical 230 what power draw so before we get on with other parts of this review this motherboard features a 10 gigabits per second Ethernet port and now one of these cards one like this will set you back a few hundred dollars so the fact that this motherboard hasn't integrated onboard is a really cool thing and upon testing out the speeds they will religious you could get up to 10 units per second Ethernet connection speed and that's the one thing you will need very fast storage in order to properly utilize these speeds so moving through this multiple we have eight DIMM slots quad channel memory it supports up to four point four gigahertz of OC on your memory however I could only get my memory to three point three goats which is limited to the memory itself but Steve from Hardware unbox who also has this motherboard said he had four gigahertz XMP Pro involves working perfectly fine on the gaming I nine moving along down the ball we also have two USB three out and one of them is angled as well for better cable management and you go to USB 3.1 a and C front out first that I've seen and I actually don't even have a port to test this thing out down below that is 1033 ports and you also get to RGB headers and five four pin fan connectors one of which is they've water pump and civil support double the power of a typical four pin fan out and then you get a power and reset button and a doctor debug LED BIOS readout however speaking of the five four pin PWM fan connectors they can be directly controlled by the bias itself and now in my bias you have a lot of things that you can do first of all is this simple and advanced overclocking I prefer the advanced overclocking features you can control core voltage memory overclock and also save overclocking profiles on the fly there's all these ability to instantly flash your bias if you just have an internet connection which does save a lot of time also if we bring in overclocking tutorial on this motherboard with the 7900 X so stay tuned for that and you can also control the RGB lighting via the bias or you can control it via the software itself and in Windows the asrock tuning utility as well allows you to overclock on the fly which is great for extreme overclockers you have to slowly raise the speeds otherwise their system could crash when going for liquid nitrogen overclocks then running along the bottom of the bottle is you've got to USB to front out and also a TPM connector and a Texas Instruments any five five three two headphone amplifier on the front audio out which is connected to the Sound Blaster cinema 3 however that is the software suite the actual codec itself is the realtek 12:20 which has really good audio out when i connected to my b motor headphones and also the mic input is really good too even with things like noise suppression turned off this sound was really good i'll let you guys have a listen here's what the v-moda boom pro mic will sound like plugged directly into the x2 99 gaming home motherboard with a volume input level of 50 and a plus 20 decibel gain and then turning this thing back around to the center of the motherboard we have four PCIe 16 speed slots which support the steel armor which adds strength to those slots themselves however two of those slots are only eight speed and these are all Gen 3 and then you've got that one speed mini which according to the boss only supports up to pcie 2.0 then besides that we have 3 m dot 2 slots which are bootable and can be stored in different raid configurations as for the cosmetics asrock have gone with a gunmetal and black style theme and this is pretty much throughout all directs $2.99 motherboards very subtle and you also get RGB included on the south heat sink which is controllable in both the bios and windows itself and the software is really easy to use and you can also configure different RGB lights coming out of the to RGB headers on the board so you can seem it to things like music and also different static and breathing lighting effects so the last thing on this board is the rear input and output you get two USB twos which support a thousand Hertz polling appears to put dual band AC Wireless which also has support for Bluetooth and support speeds up to 433 megabits per second and below that you've got a boss flashback button which on this board of course you have dual BIOS feature however I must say that I do prefer the old school bar flip button where you can just switch between the different blasters this however if the boss is faulty on the main you can just flash back with the backup boss to the original boss that you had below that you get a clear CMOS button very handy and then below that you get three rj45 in out ports one of which of course is the Tangier you per second port there's also four USB 3 ports one 3.8 and one 3.1 types see below that you have your audio input output with 5.1 analog support and also support for 7.1 channel surround sound so in conclusion if you are in the market for an X 299 motherboard and you want to get the extra features of the gaming eye 9 offers for instance tangu bits per second Ethernet the onboard power and reset button which is great for a test bench it's also got that USB 3.1 front out connection and as well as the upgraded software suite on the sound side of things with the creative cinema 3 sound however here's where things get tricky with the gaming i9x $2.99 motherboard it currently costs 400 USD which is a lot to ask for a motherboard however feature wise I personally couldn't ask for anything more from a motherboard so it does have it all however that price is expensive though keep in mind again you are saving a few hundred dollars if you were to go out and buy a 10 gigabits per second Ethernet add-in card so that is up to you guys but it definitely offers more features over the Taichi if you certainly don't need things like this in the on-board power buttons and the USB 3.1 front out then the Taichi would certainly be a better recommendation for you and of course the last thing I'll touch on is considering how early in the phase it is 4 X 299 I'm surprised the asrock boards are as stable as they are I didn't really have any real big hiccups when testing this thing maybe some old ddr4 memory not being recognized but again as BIOS updates come into play those things will be supported by memory compatibility and also any little bugs will be ironed out that I'm sure of anyway guys hope you enjoyed today's review if you did then be sure to hit that like button and let me know in the comment section below what you think of the gaming ai9 I personally think in 2017 as well have just been doing a phenomenal job on their motherboards anyway guys I'll catch you in another tech video very soon peace out for now bye