our coverage of computex 2017 is brought to you by the Corsair one and Synergy
you can check them out at the link in the video description I have been
conspicuously silent about Intel's new high-end desktop x299 platform and the
CPUs that they just announced to go with
it and this was on purpose but probably
not for the reasons that you think I've spent the last few days walking the show
floor chatting with industry folks and generally trying to wrap my head around
what the actual hell it is that Intel's
trying to do with this launch before we
get into that though a primer on x299 so socket 2011 V3 is old news
socket 2066 is the hot new girl in class with
the new chipset come support for up to 7
Series Skylake based Intel Core I9 processors we get up to quad Channel
ddr4 memory running at up to ddr4 2666
MHz we get up to 44 PCI Express Lanes
for massive expansion up to greatly
expanded NVMe and obtained storage capabilities and up to two preferred
turbo Max cores that run at higher boost
frequencies well what's with all this up to
I'll get to that first let's take a look at the boards so Intel's Partners have
been out in full force with support for this new tech ASUS was showing about
half a dozen boards based on the same basic DNA each with some standout
features the Rampage 6 Extreme includes
dual water flow sensors to go with the pump headers that are standard on this
generation their Deluxe board includes 802.11 ad multi- gigb Wireless and an
OLED Post in system monitoring display and the tough Mark 1 comes with an the
usual extra thermal sensors Tough Armor
and a freaking graphics card seg holder
gigabytes digital RGB header allows lighting effects with individually
addressable LED strips their smart fan 5
software now allows fans to be turned off outright if system temperatures
allow it a huge boom to silence Freaks
Like Me they've gone Ham on USB 3. one
10 GB ports including like the others support for the new type-c front panel
spec and they were showing off four PCIe
NVMe ssds running in raid which in of itself isn't exactly groundbreaking but
the fact that they were running off of the CPU and they were
bootable is MSI on the subject of NVMe
has boards with Native support for up to five m.2 ssds and is putting a really
strong emphasis on cooling for them like
everyone else they've given a lot of thought to the Aesthetics of their
boards you can even 3D print accessories from templates and swap cooler covers in
some cases and unlike everybody else
this is interesting they've got a white or red LED that tells you what kind of
CPU you've got installed and in turn then how many of the features that
you're looking at on the board are actually going to be enabled which I
guess brings us to a fairly natural conclusion to the nicely scripted part
of this video because I've got some rough notes for some other stuff that
I've got to get off my back but to do that I think it's probably better if we
go for a little
walk going back to my earlier question
uh what what is this platform quite
honestly what it looks like to me is that Intel the themselves can't really
decide it's like they've changed their mind multiple times and the whole thing
just seems like this this knee-jerk reaction to AMD's announcement of their
up to 16 core 32 thread Threadripper
platform and then I mean some of the things they're doing look just kind of
like a a a half desperate attempt to
appease enthusiasts and Gamers who if
they feel anything anything like me where you know the mainstream's been
stuck with quad core processors for the last 10 years and even on the Enthusiast
level we're lucky to get another two cores and last time around we even had
to pay another $700 just for the privilege of going
from 8 to 10 cores with the new Broadwell E Generation I mean to be
clear for me personally a lot of this stuff can only be good I mean High Core
count overclockable water cooled servers
that's that's right in my wheelhouse that's perfect and when you're someone
who doesn't pay for Hardware then uh
it's expensive no problem I mean not to mention that as a hardware Enthusiast
I'm not going to be struggling to pair the correct board and the correct memory
and the correct CPU together to make sure that I'm getting the most out of
the entire platform cuz honestly that's one of the biggest problems with the
platform right now it's really conf confusing KB Lake X muddies the waters
in a way that just makes absolutely no
sense for Intel to do I mean I've spoken
to system integrators here at the show I'm not going to name them by name or
anything but they flat out said we're not going to support this this aspect of
the platform is a mess because what is kbl LX like on the surface it sounds
like they've gone ahead and they've added latest
architecture to this platform in some
you know amazing wow we engineered a new generation overnight kind of way but
what actually happened was they took the existing kbl Lake processors on the
mainstream platform and just like
stapled them on to socket 2066 the only difference between the
7740 and the 7640 compared to the socket
1151 versions is that they rated at uh
20 W higher tdps they're clocked 100 MHz
higher and Intel is promising uh better overclocking on them but at the end of
the day am I going to spend another $100
on a board just for that and why on
Earth would Intel neuter all the
features on the motherboard just for the sake of me being able to run a chip at
like a little bit higher frequency they don't have more PCI express lanes
they've still only got 16 and making matters even more confusing they only
run dual Channel memory still so when you go and you buy an x299 motherboard
it can have anywhere from four to eight
memory slots on it which might support two sets of dual Channel memory a single
set of quad Channel memory or two sets
of quad Channel memory so you might actually have dim slots that don't work
if you install a KB Lake X CPU oh and I
mean right this is crazy too I even
forgot the part how x299 boards aren't
going to have all the connectors for onboard Graphics so the onboard Graphics
are fused off which wouldn't inherently be a huge problem I expect someone
spending you know 300 to $600 on a
motherboard to buy a dedicated graphics card but the issue is that then you
can't even use features that you would be able to on the mainstream platform
like uh Quicks sync for example that rely on the integrated GPU in order to
function kbl Lake just makes no sense at
all okay so now let's talk about those reactionary High Core count CPUs again
I'm not complaining an 18 Core Extreme Edition that's overclockable sounds
great to me but everyone in their dog knows that Intel was only planning to
use the low core count version of their
xon processors to create their high-end desktop platform so that was going to be
up to 12 cores and uh surprise surprise
here at the show the only chips they're showing are based on that one so what
Intel did is they saw oh no AMD has
Threadripper they're they're making us look bad by announcing this stuff that
people really want uh uh uh quick
announce something even though you know we don't know how much power it's going
to consume we don't know what clock speeds it's going to run at we don't know how much we're going to charge for
it we just we need to make sure we're announcing something so that when AMD
launches Threadripper we're not caught completely with our pants down and no
way to react to it but here's the problem they're taking this wait and see
approach for a reason that I personally
don't really like they want to see what
Threadripper turns into before they commit to what they're going to deliver
to the consumer and that's exactly the problem that they're running up against
in the first place here here's some corporate strategy advice free of charge
Intel build the best thing you can for
the best price that you can deliver it and you're not going to get blindsided
by a competitor that walks in and delivers something way better for a
lower price so we've got this really confusing platform we've got these these
midcore count harvested zons on the
high-end desktop platform that are going to be differentiated by having lots of
PCI Express Lanes uh which I think is
what gives them the core I9 designation we're going to have the normal chips
some of which still have lots of PCI
Express Lanes uh and go up to 12
cores all of the ones I've mentioned so far support quad Channel memory and
anywhere from 28 to 44 PCI Express Lanes
then we're going to have KB Lake X which
only supports 16 PCI Express Lanes and get this the motherboard manufacturers
have to support any chip that you could
put in the socket on every single board
how do you build a board around 16 to 44
PCI Express Lanes dual to quad Channel
memory and anywhere from 4 to 18 cores the
whole launch is so rushed that gigabite
flat out isn't supporting Thunderbolt 3 on any of their x299 boards because they
didn't have time to go through the certification process and the whole
thing is confusing as hell to not just
the general consumer but even
enthusiasts and I mean there's other stuff here that just makes no sense to
me as well v-rock okay so I talked about how
you can have you know up to you know better support for NVMe storage than
ever before so this is a really cool feature you can actually run bootable
raid through the CPU rather than letting
it get bottlenecked by the chipset now with NVMe devices but out of the box
Intel is only supporting raid
zero and if you want to run raid one or
RAID 10 you need to buy a $99 physical
key and plug it into the board and if you want to support raid five on top of
all that other stuff you're going to pay another 300
$100 like I get that they're worried about cannibalizing their Zeon sales and
their server and high-end workstation sales with this platform but this seems
like such a step backwards on a consumer
product going back to buying like raid keys and sticking them onto a
motherboard and as if that wasn't anti-consumer enough the word on the
street now and I really hope they reverse this decision if it is one is
that this bootable raid this v-rock feature is only going to work with Intel
branded NVMe ssds they don't make the
best NVMe ssds at least not till opan lands so they're basically going yeah
here's the highest end you know Enthusiast thing oh by the way put some
you know ssds in here for your wicked raate array that aren't even the best on
the market so I'm sorry if this video was a
little more rambly than what I usually
do and uh maybe a little longer than
what I do these days but I guess it just felt appropriate given the the
frustration that I've had I mean you know I've been asking for higher core
counts and I've been you know asking for really a lot of
the things that they're doing right now which like it's funny cuz here I am
complaining about it but what's frustrating is not that
they're doing it what's frustrating ating is my perception of the reasons
that they're doing it so I guess that's pretty much it like leave a comment
letting me know your guys' thoughts am I am I being nitpicky or are the
criticisms Fair um leave a comment below
and let's uh let's at least talk about it if Intel's going to come across this
video I'd love for them to get some real feedback not just from me but also from
you guys so thanks for watching this video
here from computex 2017 in beautiful
Taiwan a huge shout out to Corsair for
allowing us to be here the Corsair one is their 12 L Powerhouse of a gaming
machine that's available with up to a GTX 1080 graphics card with a 1080 TI
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