Linus Tech tips coverage of computex 2013 is powered by Western Digital our
trusted gaming gear partner is Corsair Vengeance and our trusted retail partner
is nc.com welcome to Rog the only thing
missing here is JJ because they have an unbelievable amount of Cool Tech on
display this right here is a GTX 700
series card they won't tell me what 700 series card it is which is usually a
good sign and a very cool thing and this cooler design is called their cool Tech
fan so it actually has an enormous fin array that's uh not all of it is even
visible to us right now but it's okay cuz there's an exploded one over on the
right it also has a hybrid cooler design
that is able to do both air Cooling and
see those right there those are G1 quarter fittings this bad boy can be
liquid cooled as well so let's move over to the right here where we can see the
way that the design of the card actually works so they've got a Digi Plus vrm
with sap uh completely custom card over
there so the idea is that okay we got a custom PCB design that gives us more
efficient cooling uh more efficient power delivery so that you're not going
to have any excess heat to get rid of then you throw a cooler at it that can
get rid of all the excess heat anyway so that's the direct cuu H2O with their
Cool Tech fan and they're claiming up to 10° better than reference just when
you're air cooling it and finally of course it's an Rog product so there's a
sweet looking shoud on it now let's move over to this is this is sort of what's
really interesting about this so up to 20° cooler with a liquid cooling setup
versus a reference cooler which you can see here is using full custom fittings
this is one of the few things that I criticized about some of the previous
ASUS liquid cooling capable products was the fact that they had built-in barbs
and they were too small and you know most enthusiasts weren't going to want
to use them now you can okay the TU the tubing
itself within the card it's quite restrictive you can actually see it's
very narrow but at least you can hook up whatever fittings you want and you can
actually liquid cool your CPU with an aftermarket block this right here is a
Maximus 6 formula which has built-in liquid cooling and then you've got the
Poseidon card which has built-in liquid cooling as well now right now it's all
over a test bench but trust me when you put this in your system it's going to
look pretty freaking sweet and R OG motherboards they just keep pushing the
envelope don't they now we first saw this with the deluxe class z77 ITX
performance motherboard that has been stepped up a notch with the Maximus 6
impact this features the full array of
Rog features so you got their Supreme FX
latest generation technology which has this check this out this is really cool
so you get a visual indicator of where sounds are coming from ingame at all
times so if the action's in front of you you're going to be able to see that if
it's behind behind you you're going to be able to see that as an indicator you've also got an incredibly compact
power delivery design that well that moves so let's just kind of try to look
up here so much like the last generation board which was only a channel series
Deluxe board this has a riser PCB
because there wasn't enough room in the ITX form factor to fit all of the Power
delivery and all the features that they wanted to on this particular board this
is a Z87 board so you've got full support for the latest fourth generation
has well processors and the that they've got these boards demoed is actually
phenomenally cool so there's gigantic thermal R coolers on them that not only
cool the CPU but also the memory and the vrm as well as the generally the PCB of
the board itself and they're showing off their direct CU mini GTX 67 this is a
short PCB card allowing it to be used in all kinds of creative configurations
with uh with that said let's move over to the left here where we're going to
see something very unique so this is a high performance machine running on a
cool little Rog pedestal here similar configuration except check this out
where's a graphics card what sorry what the graphics card
is on the bottom on the back with the power supply I'm going to turn this
around so you guys can see it check that out so you got an sfx power supply as
well as a a ribbon cable that runs from
the PCI Express slot all the way under this over to this GTX 670 graphics card
so this is what I mean about it being a Mod's dream and Ena all kinds of cool
new form factors without compromising anything in terms of
performance so Gary from ASUS has actually dug up a bear board that we can
show you guys rather than the one that was on the build now the reason that we
want to see it in all of its gorgeous glory is that you can't it was covered
in a big heat sink and you couldn't really see some of the unique technologies that went into it so it's
an ITX form factor so when I say ASUS was wanted to deliver everything get in
a standard Rog board then I mean that was a real challenge so one of the
things that you could sort of see before was the raised pwm so this is the
voltage regulation modules and all that good stuff this is where the power goes
from something that your power supply outputs to something that a CPU and all
the other components on here can use so there wasn't room for that there also
isn't room realistically on an ITX board for a proper sound solution so that's
where ASUS did their usual thing where they up the ante and they built an
actual external PCB that's just for the
impact board that goes right here so that way you can get highquality gaming
grade audio without having to sacrifice
the one expansion slot that you usually end up having well always end up having
on a miniitx board the last thing that you couldn't really get a clear look at
before was the mpcie combo 2 so this
supports the m.2 standard which will allow you to plug drives in uh also
known as Eng GFF which will allow you to plug drives in directly without using up
one of your SATA ports because it is an mitx board you only have four of them
and I think that's pretty much it now you guys can really get a closer look at
what makes this truly Rog DNA but in a
much smaller form factor thanks Gary you're
welcome this is what I love about these shows there's all kinds of stuff here
that actually doesn't exist this is the front base which unlike the OC panel
which we've already seen on the Maximus 6 Extreme completely designed for
overclocking you can adjust base clock by increments of 0.1 you can monitor
temperatures down to Subzero all kinds of cool stuff you can do with that this
is more optimized for gamers so it's more like that uh that higher level
control so you want to be able to do things like monitor your CPU frequency
your fan RPMs I think we were playing around with this before and I messed it
up but don't worry too much about that you can monitor your CPU temperatures
your time but that's not really it
because there's other cool stuff that they want to a through this that this thing that doesn't exist yet so number
one is there's going to be a one button over clocking method so you click the
button CPU level up which already exists on the motherboard is enabled turns your
CPU speed up next thing they're going to be enabling is a game recording button
so if you're a gamer who's into gameplay videos Let's Plays any kind of cool
thing like that all you got to do is press the record button which is going to be right here and uh I'm sure
there'll be a way to trigger it through software or whatever else as well and
you can get that going as well last but not least it integrates perfectly with
ASUS's onboard Audio Solutions and they want to have a way for you to actually
select different audio profiles simply using the dial on the front of your case
rather than fussing about in the driver now of course not everyone's an extreme
overclocker and there was a there was a Maximus 6 Extreme over hooked up to the
OC panel and all that stuff but this is the formula this is optimized for gaming
as opposed to peer overclocking so they've got Rog armor now that they've
implemented not only on the saber-tooth series but also on their Rog series now
it doesn't necessarily contribute a whole lot to the actual cooling of the
board but what it does do is it increases the rigidity of the board when
it's installed in the case so it's got a top piece as well as a back plate that
ASUS has validated to not cause interference with your case so you
should still have excellent case compatibility they've completely
redesigned they've completely re thought the way that they do motherboard cooling
as well so check this out this is the cross chill thermal design the only
complaint I had about the integrated liquid cooling on the Maximus 5 formula
was the fact that it did not have replaceable barbs they have addressed
that so now they're using standard G1 quarter fitting mounts so you can see
here there's some just random swifttech compression fittings that they're using
there are no weird interference points or anything like that this looks like it
was designed by by a water cooling company so you're supposed to touch here
and touch here but you guys obviously ow won't be able to do that because you
know it's video so check this out you can actually look at their OC panel
right here which is taking temperature readings from the liquid cooled side and
the air cooled side so there's heat loads under these and it's about 20°
cooler with liquid cooling versus Air cooling now let's talk about the new
supreme FX ASUS is really driving the industry forward when it comes to
onboard audio I I personally hate onboard audio but the one onboard audio
solution that I'll accept is from ASUS because they take a a separated
dedicated part of the PCB and they put audio quality components on it this is
what everyone refused to do for years and they have dramatically upgraded even
the redline audio that we already saw on the Maximus 5 formula so check this out
you're getting Elna premium audio capacitors why a film caps I don't even
understand half this stuff but the point is that they are taking the engineering
that went into products like Zonar and adding it directly to their motherboards
this guy right here is a dedicated headphone amp and that's I can certainly
tell you a larger headphone amp than I've ever seen on any other uh on any
other motherboard it can handle up to 600 ohm impedance headphones and I don't
see where it is right now but there's a Cirus logic CS 4398 DAC ASUS is claiming
up to 120 DB sound to noise ratio on
this board now that's not to say that features have to look bad this is what
ASUS is expecting you to build with a motherboard like the Maximus 6 formula
so you can see here the integrated liquid cooling that we've got on the
motherboard back there it's using bits power fittings for these extremely clean
and beautiful cable runs you've got a red liquid that's running around to it
appears to be probably a GTX Titan would
be my assumption but I'm not able to tell because there's an EK back plate
covering the entire card right there now the one thing I'd say is missing from
this as a high-end build normally is a dedicated sound card such as a feeis but
you actually are getting to the point now where you can get onboard audio that
is as good as highend dedicated on a motherboard if you spend the extra on an
Rog board for me personally not being an extreme overclocker I'd be looking at an
Rog formula board as opposed to an extreme even though it's actually less
expensive thank you for checking out our coverage of the ASUS Rog booth at compex
2013 don't miss any of our coverage and
as always don't forget to subscribe to lineus Tech tips