Gadgetory

hey what's going on everybody welcome back once again to TECA tomorrow we're bringing you all the tech all the time and what tech is on the table today will you guys all know intel is releasing their new z97 chipset and JJ from a Zeus is here to talk about one of their latest boards now this is their Pro Series board we're going to be seeing right here it is one of your mainstream products but a lot of the features on this board actually go all the way across your entire series of mainstream products correct correct we're pretty much going to be talking and highlighting the z97 Pro as far as the specifics where we're going to talk about you know i/o connectivity features and functionality but a lot of the features and functions that we're pretty much talking about are going to be consistent on our z97 - a so it's our entry level performance cue the Pro of course as well as our z97 deluxe and even to the majority of degree the z97 - i+ which is the mini ITX mainstream board as well so there's pretty much be consistent and also while we're also going to be doing other videos here on the channel you guys want to make sure to check out for tough for rog and for ws series you're going to see a lot of continuity in the core consistency in those features as well on those series of boards as well so let's go ahead and jump straight into it so first off you guys can see right here we've got the brand new Asus C 97 pro board and one of the first things that just right off the bat you can see is it got an entirely different aesthetic so we've got a big old yeah it's actually they're anodized as opposed to being a pure brush process but what we did from the previous generation is we maintained that gold feel but we've gone ahead and gone for a little bit more aggressive and I think cleaner look and feel to the board overall and the big changes is we've gone with a softer gold accenting we've introduced what's called our concentric circle design so this is actually the similar type of design that we actually had implemented on our spun metal finish books like our ultra books and other products that have kind of been very famous from the Asus product family that featured kind of metal type of designs and in addition to that we've gone with of course a definitely we've gone with a more monochromatic almost looking feel not completely more chromatic but we have secondary accents of dark gray and black for the PCIe for the SATA and then for the DRAM so overall I think it's got a a great look and feel - it feels clean modern a little bit aggressive and it's going to really complement just about any type of system that you want to be able to throw it I like it because the goal before the pre generation board I thought that goes a little bit too much in your face and a lot of users agree they're like what's what that crazy go but this gold is more subdued so it kind of looks a little bit more classy and not so much in your face of golden I like that and I think a lot of users not they're gonna like that as well yeah I actually I'm the opposite I actually liked our previous gold even more that's how Anthony is Anthony likes it all buggy and blingy and go but I like this much better I don't know that it was necessarily blingy but I think what most people have to remember too is that we had blue for such a long time that any color change was going to seem dramatic because we're going to such a different color plus you're also had a much larger color change because the accent colors were also brown and yellow so there was a lot more visually to look at than necessarily here where regardless that color is going to be a little bit more subdued this looks almost a little bit like the tough series colors you know because it's a little bit more subdued kind of reminds me of somewhere in between now interesting well let's go ahead and just jump straight into the hardware design so first and foremost of course if we take a look at the primary top of the board so we've got the arm heatsink of course all the boards are always going to have great quality vrm heat sinks and along with the PWM and the v arm components are going to be great so if we just tackle overclocking you regardless of whether going to be doing manual overclocking or using our five way optimization technology which you guys should check out the video that we did on that you're going to have an outstanding overclocking experience so you can feel confident whether it's the a the probe deluxe it doesn't matter any board they're all going to be able to do 4.6 4.7 4.8 gigahertz it doesn't matter so don't worry about overclocking he's trying to save basically focus your overclocking experience regardless the boards you buy you're going to get a great overclocking experience you'd have to buy a higher-end board to get better overclock Gangstar yes you're definitely going to want to buy the board based on the feature set that you're going to have in terms of the components though the pro for this generation is going to head and been improved previous generation we had 5k rated capacitors here we've gone ahead and introduced the 10k rated capacitors that we previously only had on the ROG and the Tough Series motherboards so that's a twice as long in terms of the overall lifespan these caps also have significantly higher temperature and significantly lower temperature tolerances as well as very high ESR performance which is going to be superior than PA's caps which are used on some other boards that are out there in addition that we continue use very good quality MOSFET and driver solutions and digital power delivery and control not only for the CPU but of course even more importantly for the DRAM whereas the fiber which is built into the CPU that now handles a lot of power and Dillian control doesn't do power delivery control for the CP excuse me for the DRAM so still having that digital controller there gives us more tweaking and tuning options as well as the digital controller on the board still gives us the ability to manage a lot of BRM operations such as phase loading phase response OCP a lot of other parameters for you guys that want to be able to tweak and tune for either efficiency or for maximum performance so that's going to cover us there in terms of this section of the board now if we talk about connectivity from fans asus has really always led the industry there and the pro is going to give you six four pin fan headers throughout the board just like previous generations though every single one of these headers that's on the board supports both three pin and four pin control but for this generation we've gone ahead and done some really cool stuff so outside of having every single header be fully adjustable in the operating system as well as in the UEFI we've gone ahead and giving you the ability to have pure output control for the signal so you can either set this header as this fan header DC and if you want to set a different fan header so this fan header to PWM you can do that so you can assign whether you want it to be DC or PWM individually to each one correct and then in addition to that the benefit of setting it to PWM is what we were talking about earlier which is really cool is the header yeah is that you're going to be able to go ahead and put Ana PWM fan splitter and then be able to run that out to additional fans so even though the board only has six fan headers you could control you know six seven eight nine ten fans right in total in your system and still have those be controlled by either the UEFI or by the operating system in AI suite 3 with fanox 4 3 so some really awesome control functionality it's going to really bring unmatched control now in addition we've also introduced fan calibration not only within the operating system but within the UEFI as you saw you're able to go into you if I click a button and over on full fan calibration for every single one those fan headers plus we added grammar that's totally what you're going to hear is it going to hear your system ramping up and then ramp it down it's it's really killer the other option too that we've gone ahead and integrated for fan controls is we have temperature input mapping for every sin for every single header to do front locations so instead of traditionally what would happen is let's say you know if we had this chassis fan header connected it would always respond to the CPU temperature but that's not something that we always want to have happen in some situations you may actually want it to ramp to a different temperature so we've leveraged some of the technology we had on tough motherboards which had multiple sensors on the motherboard and we've gone ahead and mapped different sensors so we have the ability to either map to the VRM to the PCH to the motherboard temperature as well as an optional temp header that's on the board itself where you can go ahead and put that type header wherever you want maybe on the back of a graphics card maybe you want to put it on top of your SSD maybe you want to put it in a certain part of your chassis but you have a huge degree of flexibility when you take a look at that total set of fan control span x / 3 is unquestionably going to be the absolute best fan controls that are out there really awesome stuff and free but you don't get that clear what that means basis if you want to increase the cooling in one of those areas you can actually increase your fan speed in that area and cool that certain area off more yeah it's a really just awesome level control flexibility that I think is going to be just awesome for you guys once you begin to take advantage of it especially with so many chassis x' that you know at a minimum have usually five to six fans in them you know this is just helping to make sure you can keep everything quiet cool and laid out and configure the way that you want it to be so in addition to that of course we've got the four DDR banks there for ddr3 boards been validated in excess of DDR 3000 so definitely D Ram overclocking is not an issue we keep the cue dim which means that it's easy single latch design so you can just go ahead and pop in the memory even if you have the graphics card installed it's a very simple process to either insert or remove memory no issues there we've got that of course the memo K button which is a great one touch feature to either be able to go ahead and troubleshoot memory compatibility or failing memory or it can even be used like a clear CMOS button for users that want to be able to go ahead and revert the board back to a safe parameter of operation but without clearing out all their settings like their fan settings their SATA operation and any other parameters and sometimes that's good too because sometimes you if you have some memory you change that to some higher and overclocking memory on the initial boot sometimes it won't recognize yet the mem ok button they usually will make the memory work and they'll post your board for you yeah correct so it's just a really nice option now getting back to memory and something that we've talked a lot about is you get a lot of uses that sometimes don't realize that they need to enable a XMP profile right well guess what we've made it simple we have an XMP switch that we've built on the motherboard so now all the user needs to do is install the memory flip the switch into the on position and will automatically enable XMP for you how come they just don't might make that just took features so the XMP memory just automatic then you can't because XMP is a profile based standard and it's technically an overclock profile and by compliance the memory has to follow what's called J deck policies so the memory can only initialize the J deck profile and outside of that any other profile has to be manually induced the reality is because there's also the possibility that for certain memory dividers they may not be supported by the CPU such as high speed memory dividers like 2666 2800 DDR 3000 even if it enabled with XMP your CPU may not be able to run that speed so it's always just ensuring essentially that they can make sure that you're going to get the best experience in terms of initial compatibility versus defaulting it to be turned on and not having to be functional but of course for ease of use we've also talked about that we have an easy XMP option in the UEFI single touch option or if they run auto-tuning it'll course automatically enable XMP for them as well so we're moving down from here of course we've got a front USB 3 header where we actually have one right here and we have another down here so we have dual front USB 3 headers on the board which is fantastic a course for front USB 3 we have the USB 3 boost to be able to prove the performance of USB flash drives or high seed external assess these that are coming out nowadays AB check external USB threes yeah so that's a pretty awesome feature and of course for some of the corresponding ports we also have USB charger plus which allow you to do quick charging for let's say your mobile device like a smartphone or tablet even though if your systems off down here in the storage it gets really interesting we've got tons of storage connectivity where we have sat Express which is the newer standard replacing the SATA previous protocol but keep in mind set is not going to be going anywhere because it's default part of the chipset this is just the next evolution in terms of offering faster performance now for SATA Express because there's not any defaults at Express devices available on the market ACS will be releasing a device like this guy right here which is called the hyper duo Express excuse me the hyper Express which will essentially allow you to take either 2m SATA or 2 m2 based SSDs put them in their will to create a hardware raid for you and once you go ahead and do that you can then connect that directly to the SATA Express port to get fast than single SSD based performance so it's a really awesome just conveniently feature as well yeah yeah and in addition that we've also worked very extensively to be able to incorporate advanced testing and validation and SR is which is a special type of protocol transmission standard in the cabling and clock signaling to be able to ensure the best SATA Express performance this is extremely important because even if you look at other solutions in the marketplace that may have SATA Express you may not necessarily always get the best SATA Express performance so from there of course you've got your standard PCH SATA 6g ports we then have two more ports that are provided by the a s media 1061 and then right next to that we've also got another set of standard which can be MDOT 2 with this MDOT to base connection it will support either MDOT 2 PCI Express or MDOT 2 SATA so up to you the board will actually support both but keep in mind that if you do MDOT 2 SATA it's essentially the same performance as a SATA 6g SSD and it also is kool-aid with that port meaning that if you use the MDOT 2 SATA you'll lose a set of port on the board so if you use of course the PCIe PCI you can potentially be faster up to a by 2 pcie-based SSD offering even faster performance and faster throughput now when you use the PCA does it have any impedance up on the lanes at all or no of course because everything's being leveraged from different Lane allocation and definitely depending on the board that you look at there's going to be slightly different effects to the PCIe configuration so you want to make sure to check out the manual for how that board may be figured out ok now moving on from there we've got the TPU and epu switches that's great for single touch hardware based on overclocking so TPU switch you can just flip it in the on position it enables a quick overclock like a 4.3 gigahertz along with enabling your XMP profile if you don't want to be able to run an overclocking you want to run stock but you want to have lower power consumption lower temperatures flip the EPU switch won't affect performance is just going to provide an under bolt giving you lower temperatures and lower power consumption moving on from there we've got our scott right over here we have the USB BIOS flash back button and so that's going to course give you that advanced feature that if we take a flash drive and we plug it into a corresponding port here we have the ability to directly update and recover the actual chip that's on the board even if there's no CPU no memory no graphics card all you need is just power connection for the board plugged in and you can go ahead and update the BIOS update the UEFI as simply and as effectively as that this is also a great recovery feature where if you get things like a surge spike sag or brown out guess what and your system fails to post on you can also attempt to manually recover it and it's a very awesome feature that we've had now for multiple generations but one that still is very critical and lastly rounding that out a lot of vendors also have a difference in terms of even the BIOS implementation this is a non soldered based solution so even in worst case scenario if you had a Fae there you could contact our service department have a new one shipped out replace it as opposed to where if it's soldered then you have to send the board in so moving from there of course we've got the power button pretty straightforward here this is a special connector this is going to be our Thunderbolt header with the Thunderbolt header guess what we can go ahead and utilize this really cool card which is the Thunderbolt II x2 card so for users that want to be able to the absolute fastest io standard you know maybe you're doing content creation audio/video image editing maybe doing high high grade large volume backups whatever it might be and you want to be able to take advantage of Thunderbolt any one of the pretty much a CC 97 series you can add in that Thunderbolt II X card to this bottom PCH excuse me to this bottom PCIe slot and you're good to go so in addition to that if we take a look here in the audio we've made big improvements we've leveraged the audio design that we had on our og we brought it over to the mainstream series so we have the full audio isolation path that we've gone ahead and implemented we're on our G it's called supreme effects for our mainstream series we're calling it crystal sound - now we still maintain the full isolated audio design we have an operational amplifier built on full shielding for the audio codec and we have niche akan audio grade capacitors that are on the board so is the sound crystal it is quite nice and definitely for you guys you know the biggest things you're going to see is an improvement in the overall gain so the volume as well as in the noise floor for the actual crystal sound to implementation now one thing that we've done that's also really cool for this generation is we have specially set profiles for in air monitors over their headphones and desktop speakers and what we've done is we've actually worked with the DTS sound group to be able to create customized sound profiles for games music or movies and what's happen is when you plug in your headphone are your speakers to either the front of the front headphone connection or the line level out you'll actually see three icons that will come up on the screen a picture of either an in-ear monitor over their headphones or desktop speakers pick the one that you want and when you select that it will automatically set the customized profile and preset for that different type of playback device so you're saying there's already basically an EQ setting that's already in there for these different types of things correct because as you know there's different types of overall sound experience that you would have for each one of those different types of devices so we've worked very closely with the DTS group and I've been really impressed by this actually autumn eyes the setup that we have as part of the crystal sound to package what does the crystal sound to what what chipset it today it's the same chipset that we use on the supreme effects so this is the realtek ALC 1150 audio codec okay so from there we got tons of PCI connectivity a course for the z97 a pro deluxe they all support SLI or crossfire and you can see that you've got tons of connectivity there and you're good to go moving over into the back i/o if we just take a look here in terms of what we've got for i/o connectivity you've got a lot going on we've pretty much got everything could ask for USB 3 you've got integrated attitude 11ac Wireless with Bluetooth 4.0 you know and you've got USB 2 ports and tons of digital outputs for all the connections you could ask for now in terms of the Ethernet we're still using Intel and where we feel that that's the absolute best performance best compatibility and lowest CP utilization plus we have our new turbo land packet priority software so turbo lends an awesome piece of software as you can tweak and tune it to be able to get the best gaming performance streaming performance downloading performance and it doesn't care whether you use the Intel integrated controller or the wireless controller or even if you want to upgrade to a USB wireless adapter or an adding PCI solution you can map game for X you can map key turbo Lance software to work with any network controller in addition like we also talked about we maintain the functionality have USB three boost and USB charger for the back ports and that rounds that out now for the Wi-Fi go package though there's a lot more that we're doing for this generation to be able to even give you more functionality and versatility one of the biggest functions that we're integrating that will work through the ethernet as well as through this guy will be media streamer media streamer is an awesome new application that we have that's going to allow you to stream your music movies or images not only in your intranet but even in an extranet so you can go ahead and take it smartphone have the app on there once you go ahead open up the app as long as you got a cellular Wi-Fi connection you can go ahead and stream all your content straight from your PC no issue that's using these things right here no we haven't even got to that yet that's independent of even those guys all you independent the breakouts yes independent of that in addition that we also have a new home cloud application which will light amount your C Drive in the cloud directly you don't need to upload anything to any drives or any host you'd have direct access to your C volume you can manage it you can share files and you can also stream content directly from that there's any array never come from those clouds as of right now we've actually advanced integrated weather control in there so we don't worry about that now outside of that one other really cool feature that we've introduced as part of AI suite 3 but definitely not covering all the features is we have push notice push notice is an awesome new function that's going to allow you to receive remote notification on your mobile device if your system has an issue with the temperature the voltages or the fan speeds such as let's say your fan stops spinning you can receive an actual text message to your phone to let you know that your so you're saying I could be I could be at the gym yep working out also going to get an interruption of my music and it'll tell me that something's wrong with my PC at home and what it is is wrong with my PC at home any one of those three options either the fan the voltage or the temperature and when that occurs you can all excuse me you can oh if somebody it spills the Pepsi your systems alert me about that sadly we haven't gotten to that stage yet but you know what you never know you know who you are but the cool part is our remote desktop application we've also enabled full extranet and internet-based capability so let's say your system alerts you to the fact that hey that band's not spinning guess what you can remote back into your desktop shut it down and you're good to go so some really awesome and advanced functionality and rounding things out we've gone ahead and integrated to great hardware accessories that we have with qi wireless charging so for the qi wireless charging all the users needing to do is just go ahead and put their smartphone onto the wireless charging device i think they can actually see it through that i usually pick they like to really see everything like completely out so that just did not complete shot let you to show at least one of them off nice and gently there so they can go ahead and just sup you know place that on there and they can do wireless charging if they want so it's very simple and then of course we've got the NFC Express box for the NFC Express box they can go ahead and use an NFC enabled device like a smartphone or tablet they can go ahead and pass it over and they can do things like automatically log into their system they can do transferring of photos they can also go ahead and do things like quick launching of applications and lastly we've gone ahead and even incorporated video streaming where you can stream from your device videos to your desktop as well as Bluetooth audio streaming or you can stream any audio that's playing back from your device to your set-top as well so overall a huge amount of functionality versatility and we've also made new updates to the UEFI and we've done even a lot more so just within this basic overreacting you can unquestionably see that the pro and our mainstream series are great for gamers content creators productivity multimedia users pretty much anybody and everybody when it comes to if you're going to be building a new system or upgrading it says great plan one question up these items particularly these come with the pro though or no these eight though they don't come with the deluxe though like I have what you said what to versions also the deluxe as well one that comes of the moment doesn't correct so the deluxe will actually come with the Thunderbolt the NFC box and the Qi wireless charging station but like I noted with the Thunderbolt card those are all going to be offered as compatible accessories for our entire range of z97 motherboards okay so that pretty much gives you guys some perspective on what we're doing for the mainstream series of motherboards alright folks so there you guys have it the new z97 Pro from the people who've read a Zeus broken down by mr. JJ himself but hey don't go away we've got more coming for you ROG baby let's game see you later and be with you