Gadgetory

every time there is a new motherboard release there is a new comparison and today is the ultimate x4 70 motherboard showdown with three different boards here on the line we've got here the crosshair seven from Zeus we've also got the gaming seven Wi-Fi from Oris and then on the left we've got the Taichi ultimate from asrock all three of these boards I'm gonna say straight away they're all really solid of course they all come in at a premium price we'll talk about the prices related to the features a little bit later but today we're gonna go through all the things like Auto overclocking VRM temperatures em to shields and I see speeds USB 3 speeds and even the audio and the crosstalk and also the noise related to that so let's find out which motherboard is the best for you welcome back to take your city first up we have the crosshair seven and this has a ten plus two phase power design I our three five five five sixty and power stages on the MOSFETs also they have micro alloy 60 amp chokes Zeus claims these do better than other chokes of course it's not that important when it comes to air and water overclocking but for the capacitors they're using 10k nichkhun capacitors then we move over to the gigabyte horas that's using again a ten plus two phase power design however in the middle of the phases that put the two SOC phases because they believe that separates the heat on the vrm with the four phases at the top and then the two phases being in the middle of the six phases down the bottom being directed to the CPU they're also using 40 amp ir35 5/3 power stages for the MOSFETs 60 amp chokes and then 10 km each econ capacitors moving over to the Azeroth this is a 16 phase power design 12 plus 4 got four phases which essentially are doubled then we've got 12 phases using textures in cements next fetes and MOSFETs these are rated at 40 amps each chokes are 60 amps and they've got 12 KH con capacitors so asrock are implementing in on paper what seems to be the most solid vrm however in practice when we look at what a 4.2 gigahertz overclock does on water we can see that's using up a hundred amps these boards are rated for like 400 amps plus so you can see just how much overkill all three of these motherboards have on the vrm design they will have eight plus four pin power connectors however you really only need to use eight pin on your standard water and air overclocks even if four pin might just do you find those speaking of Auto overclocking a big question that gets asked here a lot on the channel when it comes to selecting a motherboard if you buy one of these motherboards is it gonna be able to do a better auto IC than the others well the crosshair has an auto four gigahertz overclock and after I tried this I realized that the 2700 X actually Onix xfr technology boosted higher than this thing did out of the box so on water if I've got a hate 1/10 for instance it was going over 4 gigahertz anyway so if you are into auto overclocking all three of these boards will score relatively the same but because the order overclocking on the 2700 X is actually quite good this time around and that's got to do with AMD programming the CPUs relative to the motherboards themselves and of course how cool your CPU runs now you can have the best vrm in the world if the cooling design for that vrm isn't any good then you could see overheating in the real world especially in a stuffy case with no airflow but I was happy to report that all three of these designs were doing a phenomenal job of staying pretty cool on a 4.2 gigahertz overclock the max I saw on all three boards was under 70 degrees I think Zeus edged out with one degree better than the other two solutions so they're all coming relatively close but I will give props to gigabyte and their fin design on the heatsink I really saw a difference with the thermo camp you could see that the heat was dispersed really well across this vrm heatsink design so there's one thing the old-school fin design is definitely worthy of coming back on the motherboard VRM I love it when companies say hey even though this may be not looking as good aesthetically it's gonna do a better job in functionality and that's exactly what this heatsink here from gigabyte is doing even though it doesn't really make a difference in the real world you could probably run all these VRMs without a heatsink at all at 4.2 gigahertz but it's still one of those things that's just attention to detail though these motherboards being as expensive as they are one must wonder about audio and if you've got a good pair of headphones what can you expect out of all three of these motherboards moving on to cross talk it's important because we're not isolate these two motherboards here the crosshair 7 and also the asrock Taichi ultimate they had really good crosstalk however that was below a volume level of 91 soon as you up the volume over 91 it introduces some slight leakage into the right channels I don't know exactly why this is happening I just know it's happening so for the best listening experience you'll want to leave your volume under 90 on these two motherboards the gigabyte one in the middle this is an interesting kettle of fish as well because when we had the audio plugged in the rear output I couldn't get anything out of it it was a little bit buggy so I had to depend on the front audio output on this motherboard however there was really low crosstalk going down levels of Nemo - 90 dB same for these other two solutions here one thing to note with the Gigabyte the volume level was a little bit lackluster even with the headphone amp level three I was sort of a little bit not used to this because I know in the past gigabyte have implemented some really heavy headphone amps on their motherboards and that has really given a lot extra volume level this time around the volume level is a little bit lower as opposed to the other two boards of course all three of them are scoring really well on the frequency response curves I was just shocked again as I said in the Tai Chi ultimate review if you want to check that out independently I'll put the link up here the frequency response goes is the best I've ever seen it's like onboard audio just keeps getting better all three of these boards had such a tight range I think it was like minus 2 decibels below 10 Hertz after 10 Hertz there was no drop-off at all so if you love sub bass you're gonna get a really good experience depending up your headphones of course with all three of these motherboards so what about the mic inputs well the Zeus and also the asrock I believe they're using noise suppression all the way up to 30 DB plus a hundred volume there was no noise coming in the Gigabyte had the option to switch noise suppression on and off when we switched it off the sweet spot was 50 volume plus 20 DB this is a level I recommend using if you want your voice to sound natural especially if you have a decent microphone if you've got a real tinny microphone and you just want to play games then maybe just turn noise suppression on smash the volume up and then everyone can hear you easily so now we're gonna go through the BIOS feature set and also other features on the motherboard this might take a little while because all three of these motherboards are feature packed first off we're going to look at the M 2 slots nvme m dot 2 x4 gen 3 the azouz board has 2 of these onboard so yes you can do raid 0 nvme across gen 3 if you wish to this is going directly to the CPU itself rather than going via the gen 2 chipset this is important if you want to get the maximum speeds possible and you want raid 0 across a scratch drive for example if you're editing videos absolutely phenomenal speeds the other 2 boards they have only Gen 2 on one of the slots and Gen three on another and the gigabyte makes a big statement of saying it's ratable but there's I don't really see a point in especially doing a raid zero for example maybe doing a raid ones okay but doing a raid 0 with a Gen 2 slot is really just gonna have your speeds especially if you feel like a Samsung Eva for example that can go up to around 3 gigabytes per second transfers so the asrock is similar as well it's got a Gen 2 slot and you've got a gen 3 slots so azusa definitely leading the charge in this one because you can select the speeds to take it down - Jen - if you wish to on the nvme device so it's great to see that as OOOs are innovating here but this time around gigabyte also have two heat shields on their nvme drives I think that's what I'd like to see a Zeus do since they do have the two Gen 3 options but all three of these devices have the heat shields that actually work when I tested the temperatures there was a significant drop when we were using the heat shields both on the thermal-imaging camera and also in the thermo sensor on the actual software itself so we saw drops indicative of that of 20 degrees + across all three devices they do spread the heat quite well again you only get one heatsink with the Zeus model and the asrock model but you do get two heat sinks with the Gigabyte model which is props to them especially in the case of a Zeus because they've got two gen three slots I'd like to see two heat sinks on the Zeus model in particular so now if you want sick of this x4 70 comparison already then you may be getting sick of it right now because we're gonna talk about all the little gritties on these boards in particular and first of all the fan headers you get eight fan headers on both the Zeus and the gigabyte models the asrock only has five fan headers that are PWM controlled so I would like to see them especially on their flagship board add more fan headers as I know a lot of people nowadays are building computers with literally like 6 plus fans and they're all RGB so it is good to see that control on the motherboard itself you don't have to go through any controllers so if it's one thing to continue about the asrock what I would like to see a few more you do get power and reset buttons on all three of these models the gigabyte for some reason has decided to go with that power button on the actual IO shield itself on the rear interesting move personally I like to see it on the model board it's more of a testbed feature I mean if you've got this installed in a build you're gonna have that power button installed to the motherboard anyway though what we're seeing on the rear of the board here is IO shields that are already attached pre attached to the Xu's crosshair and also the gaming seven the as Mark doesn't have this feature I personally do really like it I think it's a very cool addition especially to a flagship board so I would like to see as well add this on in terms of rear input and output they all come in pretty similar the asrock tide she does get separated from the other two which have 10 USB slots on the back also a type C and also their dual band wireless 2.4 gigahertz and five units across all three models now the antennas are quite different the azouz in the gigabyte model have their stand-up detachable antennas the asrock includes the two antennas that just directly attached to the slots themselves all three boards have clear CMOS on the back and the Taichi ultimate has a ten gigabit solution Nick installed now if you do go with the normal types you will get two extra USB slots so the one thing that is limiting the Taichi ultimate as it only has seven standard USB slots on the back and of course that type C as opposed to the other models which happen ten also testing out USB three speeds across all three devices is absolutely fine and testing out the one gigabit per second Nick speeds were great and the kit 10 gigabit Nick speed from asrock was absolutely fine - so they're all delivering consistent performance across the board whether it be the vrm the audio or the functionality of the board itself they're moving deeper into the BIOS which is an important thing if you are into overclocking all three of these boards have their own unique biases I will give the edge to the Zeus model however I do believe it's absolutely feature-packed and if it's one thing when it comes to extreme overclocking a lot of people use the Zeus motherboards every time I go to an overclocking competition it's just laid out with crosshair boards so I guess that does speak lengths to the BIOS features that azouz implement though for standard air and water overclocking you've again got more than enough in these three boards if I had to critique gigabyte I'd like to see them implement all the features you need for overclocking in one different tab it's one thing that azuz and as rock do quite well there's also the ability to control fan speeds and of course update your boss on the asrock from the internet within these this for some reason does it automatically if you've got an internet connection plugged in it'll just start updating your bias and so all three of these boards have dual bias implemented gigabyte has a switch for it so you can change the bias if you wish to manually or you can change it to have dual bar supported from the get-go moving through the inputs and outputs on the mother bore themselves they all have addressable three pin RGB headers as well as four pin RGB headers if you wish to use those they've all got three 16x slots and two one-speed slots if you need PCIe connectivity there's also 3.1 USB 3 outputs on all three of these boards as well of course USB three out now on to the most important part of a motherboard ladies and gentlemen and that is RGB if you don't have RGB on your motherboard well unfortunately I don't even know if you could overclock or not the all jokes aside all three of these boards have addressable RGB you can control that within the BIOS or windows itself via all three of their apps however I will give the edge to the gaming seven I just think this thing looks gorgeous I love the way they've implemented the RGB from the board itself around the PCIe slots and also the RAM DIMM slots themselves but speaking of the RAM DIMM slots I did forget to mention that they've all got two phases dedicated to ram overclocking and I didn't find a difference between overclocking on all three boards I also did test the 2700 out as opposed to the nan X because I will have a video of that upcoming later and they all scored 4.2 gigahertz absolutely fine so that was good to see there was no real difference between these three motherboards when it came to max overclocking so now here we are at conclusion time and a big question I get asked all the time with motherboard comparisons is which one of these three boards would I buy personally and that all depends of course on the price they all actually have different prices and different features that differentiate them so let's start off with the Zeus crosshair formula seven first this is 299 u.s. dollars in Australia four hundred and sixty nine dollars so I would like to see that Australian price at least a PPP terms come down a little bit but what you get for this money is of course the Ducks nuts of motherboards it's got everything that want from a motherboard of course you've got that dual nvme you've got a very solid vrm design a BIOS that's absolutely gorgeous and one thing I didn't talk about before was the Xu's grid option that's enabled in the BIOS and if you've got this enabled as soon as you install Windows it'll pop up and say hey do you want to get the latest drivers installed so it's very handy and it's a great innovation it's things like this that I notice and they are going in the right direction in terms of overclock ability onboard audio everything this thing is a complete package and it's got the address of blah GB - I couldn't ask for more from a motherboard phenomenal job of Zeus so now we're moving on to the gaming seven Wi-Fi and this is coming in a lot cheaper than the crosshair so it's coming at 237 bucks and in my opinion it offers the best aesthetic out of all three designs of course you do get those orange accents they may not be for everyone but that comes with the orange LED lighting out of the box and as I said before I think it looks absolutely gorgeous heatsink design I think it's a step in the right direction even though some people think it's going a step backwards I would rather the cost of aesthetics for the increase in performance if that makes any sense and in this time around I think the aesthetic actually looks gorgeous on this board anyway of course VR and design phenomenal BIOS could use a little bit of tweaking onboard audio is really good but keep in mind I did come into a little bit of a problem where I had to use the front audio out if I was a headphone user or speakers that needed amp from the motherboard themselves so do keep that in mind though in terms of everything else it's only got a gen 3 X 4 it's only got one of those on the nvme so even though it says readable the bottom slot is Gen 2 so other than that absolutely phenomenal board this one is definitely hitting hard for the price and now the last solution on the table here is the asrock tachi ultimate this comes in at 299 US dollars in Australia there's actually no pricing at the moment but this is a solution that you get if you need on board tanki bits per second Nick's solution though as I said in the dedicated review which I'll put a link up here if you do need to get to a second Nick solution that I sort of suggests grabbing one of those dedicated PCIe add-in cards and then porting that over from build to build I believe this would be a lot more efficient because there is the tai chi regular version which comes in $70 cheap off and has pretty much the same feature set and in the Stratos 339 Australian dollars you do get two extra USB ports on the tai chi regular two of course big thing about this motherboard 12 plus for phase power design it's huge it's a monster it's really good the boss feature sets really good onboard audio is phenomenal however it doesn't have an i/o shield like the other two automatically implemented from the get-go it's something that I do like personally and I'd like to see asrock follow the trend of these other two here and follow that and implement it into their own motherboards anyway when it comes down to all three of these boards are absolutely phenomenal of course they are expensive that's one thing to keep in mind they do include the story my license technology too but they all are going a step in the right direction in my opinion I could see myself using any of these boards in my main rig I'd have absolutely no qualms with any three of them of course you probably wondering where's the MSI board MSI I mean if you know pick up pick up the phone send me some text back I don't know what's going on there but yeah I'd love to have their motherboard on the bench here to do a four-way comparison for you guys but as it stands can recommend all three of these options in terms of the feature set just watch the whole review and see which one best fits your needs as that at the end of the day is what it's about which one is best for you hope you enjoyed today's review if you did the be sure to hit that like button if you have any questions or comments about any three of these boards be sure to drop a comment in the comment section below I'll catch you in another tech video very soon these out for now bye thing about a motherboard and that is RGB if you don't have RGB well I don't even know if you can overclock because the gigabyte this is where but what we're seeing with these where is that however there was really croak really croak I a 3/3 yeah thank you is it as it only has seven