welcome to my unboxing of the ASUS p8
z77v premium now of note is the fact that
ASUS actually doesn't even always release a premium grade motherboard they
always have a pro they always have a vanilla you know sometimes they'll have
you know leds or lx or whatever else mixed in uh they always have a deluxe
but they don't always have a premium because ASUS only releases a premium
board when they feel that there is some kind of a feature set mix that they can
bring to the table that justifies the premium moniker so in this case uh
before we get any further into it what makes this one super special and super
premium above all else is full native support for Thunderbolt so
Thunderbolt is built right into the boards Thunderbolt gives you up to 10
gigabit per second which is fully capable of running external storage as
well as displays even daisy chained together at the same time moving along
we've got an msata 32gb SSD built in so
that's as a caching solution for whatever hard drive you might actually
connect to it we've also got full support for their wi-fi go technology
including bluetooth as well as the ability to use your board as a wi-fi
access point fan expert 2 is included this is actually a fantastic little
piece of software within the ai suite that lets you manage your fan speeds and
temperatures along custom curves should you see fit to give you guys some idea
how important of a feature i think that is i bought an over a hundred dollar
piece of hardware called an m cube t balancer to use in my system just to
give me that functionality it comes built into your board here smart digi
plus so for better overclocking yes this is definitely an overclocking optimized
board you they've also got their epu and tpu so epu is a one button way to
undervolt and save power with your system whereas tpu has a couple of
different options you can either do it with the one button option or you can
have it tune itself to overclock your system and get better performance we
have full support for NVIDIA sli AMD crossfire x virtue mvp which improves
your performance as well as offers GPU virtualization which allows you to use
uh Intel quick sync which is a quick way of transcoding video even
though you have a dedicated graphics card installed dts dts connect
Intel z77 chipset supports Intel core processors are better
22 and 32 nanometer CPU support so that's second and third generation
Intel core series processors and
here we go we find a whole lot of pretty much the same basic stuff
inside here it does talk a little bit more about fan expert too including uh
your abilities to take advanced control with detailed information about each fan
you can listen and locate the fans you can get blah blah okay this is all good
stuff this is what i'm all about oh no not this one not the RPM fixed mode
that's cool so you can take all of your fans and fix them at a given RPM which
is kind of neat this is the one that i'm all about the one where you can create
whatever curves you want and according to temperatures of various parts you
lock in each fan to whatever you want it to adjust based on you can get your
system to keep itself at exactly the cooling and noise level that you're
comfortable with ah SSD caching too so this is cool so
SSD caching 2 now has a multiple caching option so you have four
four SSD caching capable ports which means you can do all kinds of cool stuff
including having two separate cached volumes so two ssds and two hard drives
and you can tune exactly the way you want to do it you can have one SSD
that's caching like a um
a volume of the other three drives so that gives you more flexibility because
in the past we've only really seen caching solutions that work uh or
third-party caching solutions that work with only two ports okay virtue mvp
we've talked about usb 3 boost this is important so uasp as well as their turbo
mode turbo mood turbo mood that's like when you're like
depressed but like really really really fast
um anyway turbo mode sorry guys um
turbo mode and uasp give you options to accelerate your usb 3 performance we
have a full ncix tech tips coming out about this soon network eye control uses
the Intel mix built into this board it actually has
dual built-in Intel network cards um to
manage things like qos um
for more optimized network performance
Thunderbolt okay up to daisy chain up to six Thunderbolt devices ASUS also put a
lot of engineering into making sure that it would be hot pluggable because by
nature uh pci express is not a hot pluggable interface so they had to do
some special tuning to the BIOS as well as the driver in order to make this
possible on the pc
okay yes we've covered that already we've covered that already so easy
installation for Intel smart response and rapid start technology very very
cool wi-fi go is another really neat feature that we've sort of already
talked about okay so that's good oh yeah of note to do with wi-fi go is
that it is dlna compatible so you can use dlna devices to uh
access stuff that you have on your computer from your compatible media
player such as one from you know pivx or patriot or another uh or ASUS with their
own oh play players as well so uh that'll so that'll be over
the network so inside the accessory package we find a whole lot of really
good stuff i'm just going to take all these out and then we'll have a look at
them outside of the box this has a really big box you can tell that it's a
higher end board because the box is substantially larger than their pro
series board here i'm gonna go get the pro series board box so that you guys
can see the physical comparison so
that's how you know you're getting like more and more like different and more
better stuff so you check this out premium box compared to pro box
see look at that thickness yeah that's a premium board so why did
they need all of that space well because there's tons of cool stuff in here
here's the wi-fi go module with wi-fi n and bluetooth here are the antennas
these are magnetic antennas which are super handy it means you can stick them
to the outside of your case so those are for the wi-fi go module
here are the exclusive features user guide
walkthroughs okay we also have the wi-fi go card specific user guide for that guy
right there we've got the p877v premium
user guide including the installation dvd which you should ignore and download
latest off the ASUS website check this out this is all english so this is a
thick thick user manual for your motherboard which is great because
detail is better than not having detail we have two-way three-way and
four-way republic of gamers check that out you even get like a republic of
gamers uh sli bridge to go with your not republic of gamers
board but i mean with these kinds of features it almost is pretty close to
that level we've also got four SATA three six gigabit per second cables two
SATA two three gigabit per second cables a an i o shield with a few interesting
color codes so they've got the usb BIOS flashback port color coded and then the
button color coded for you as well as your usb 3 ports that are compatible
with uasp so they've gone ahead and labeled that for you can configure them
in the ai suite whether you want to use uasp or whether you want to use bot or
standard mode but the fact that they color code them for you means you can more easily figure out which ones are
going where because these ones that aren't uasp ready you can also use turbo
mode on those so i also like the positioning of these up
at the top because if you do have to reach around the back or if you do have
a case that has a pass-through having it at the top is usually the closest and
most convenient place ASUS q connectors are right here for more convenient
plugging in a front panel of whatnots and hoo-has
and last but not least we've got an ASUS usb 3 front panel three and a half inch
bay since nobody has a floppy drive anymore this is a far more useful thing
to put in your three and a half inch bay than whatever else you were planning to put in your three and a half inch base
so thanks to ASUS for including that and it uses an internal header not an
external passthrough which is definitely ideal
all right moving along to the board itself this is
yeah i mean i was gonna say it's a premium board but if you haven't figured
that out based on the name of the board already then you're probably pretty newb
so uh we're just gonna leave it at that i mean even the fact that i felt the need to
say it's a premium board is pretty noob right there by the way a lot of people
complain about how i touch pcbs let me show you how i'm actually removing the
motherboard so this is the grip i have on it which might look pretty bad on the
surface but let me show you what i'm doing one thumb is on plastic components
here my fingers on the back are actually on the metal spikes coming out of the
RAM slots on the other side of the board i'm not touching the pcv
touching the edge of a pcb once again is fine so if you watch when i hold a board
like this i'm positioning my hand like this so once again i have my fingers on
those metal spikes i'm not touching the pcb the oil from your fingers can damage
pcbs and is not very good for them so
yes i'm aware of that no i don't have my greasy fingers all over the pcb i like
to maneuver boards by slots heat sinks and parts where i don't actually have to
touch it i also avoid touching things like this because your fingerprints will
get on them and they'll look ugly and greasy because they're made of aluminum
and aluminum tends to stain when you get fingerprint oil on aluminum
yes not good i hate fingerprints so that is what i am doing i'm not just
really nearly touching the board all over the place so let's have a look at
the general layout of the board uh right up here in the top left corner i'm going
to start there for a change because uh it's a bit of an exceptional feature
of this board that is where the wi-fi go module plugs in you just put that in
there there's a space for it in the back of the i o shield right there that's
where you plug in your antennas so that's pretty straightforward there's a
screw that is pre-plugged into the wi-fi go card so it doesn't get lost just go
ahead screw that in no big deal the socket so this has an lga 1155
socket which means you can't use 1156 processors it's fully compatible with
sandy bridge and iv bridge so you can use whatever CPU you want and overclock
the snot out of it with the huge multi-phase digital vrm that this
premium level board has going on over here it also has fairly
beefy cooling with your chipset cooled by just a little guy here we got a heat
pipe connecting it to a much larger heat sink that is responsible for cooling
part of the ddrm with another large heatsink cooling the rest of it honestly
these ivy bridge cpus with their 77 watt tdps don't really start to suck back
power and produce a lot of heat until you overclock them so that's how you can
tell when a board is designed with overclocking in mind because it'll have
all that space and all that cooling going on for overclocking so we've got a
lot of logos on the board oh you know what let's here i'll do my usual routine and then we'll go into some of the other
more detailed stuff so right here is our eight pin power connector in its ideal
location at the top left of the board here are our dual channel ddr3 slots so
all ivy bridge and sandy bridge cpus support only four slots that's why you
don't see any 1155 boards that support more than four slots of memory although
technically all ivy bridge and sandy bridge cpus only support up to
2 by 8x configurations for the PCIe
slots but ASUS has clearly cheated on that a little bit so we'll talk more
about that later moving along here's your tpm plug here's
your 24 pin power connector and it's ideal location along the right hand edge
one front usb 3 connector is located here this is going to be running off of
the Intel chipset so that is according to Intel spec you must have at least two
available front panel Intel usb 3
headers or usb 3 connectors okay here's
a set of three um okay say the 3g
port for whatever reason i'm guessing that's probably the same one that's the same
controller that's wired into something on the back panel or something i don't know why that oh i know why that's there
okay give me a sec guys all right not so complicated as all of
that guys this is a seda this is just a regular run-of-the-mill Intel two three
gigabit per second port these are your Intel SATA three six gigabit per second
ports this is another couple Intel SATA two three gigabit per second ports and
this one is running off your fourth SATA two three gigabit per second port on the
Intel controller so that's an msata configuration right there so it is power
and data to an msa to drive which by the way you can swap for something bigger
should you so desire however srt technology only supports up to 64 gigs
on a single drive anyway or is it 60 gigs or something in that neighborhood
so 32 gigs is plenty for some storage drive that you plug in in order to make
sure that whatever games you play most frequently or whatever else is going to
be cached and ready to rock whenever you
want so these guys are special though so i okay
i was a little bit i was a little bit unclear before but i've done i've read
my notes on this board so it's mostly optimized for using
two caching ssds and two storage drives now while the controller itself may be
capable in the future of something like a raid 5 with an SSD cache or something
like that raid 5 on consumer level
integrated chipsets is not really the most ideal thing in the world because it
doesn't give you the option to recover it in the event of a hardware failure or
anything like that unless you happen to have an identical board or identical
chipset handy so it's not really ideal but using them as a cache is definitely
like recommended thumbs up kind of configuration so these are marvel
controllers these are Intel controllers
all right moving right along front panel connectors usb 2.0 front panel headers
there's your clear cmos button is there another one on the back of the board no
no clear cmos on the back of the board that's kind of interesting but there's one here so it's not the end oh i forgot
the mok button so if you're using high speed memory which is far more of a
factor now on iv bridge platforms where we're seeing up to three gigahertz
memory kits being released you want to make sure if you plug those
in you can use the if it doesn't post you can use the memo k button to run it
out to to force the board and the memory at a super safe setting so that you can
post configure all your voltages and settings correctly and then reboot
okay here's your post uh diagnostic led readout which by the way
not all boards have this but ASUS has taken the liberty
of including a comprehensive list
um oh yeah this is another thing they do on their higher end boards you see a
much more comprehensive validated memory
section um okay comprehensive list of aha all of
the error codes that you might see off that so how many times have you guys had
a board that has one of these error readouts and then actually doesn't sorry
guys the battery died but i what i was i don't want to harp on it for too long
but how many times have you guys had a board that has one of these but you
google around into no avail can you even find out what the stupid postcode on it
even means so there you go they tell you what it means thank you ASUS it's basic
stuff like that that really sets apart the products that are good from the ones
that sort of are trying to be good tpu and epu buttons are right here hardware
uh built in power and reset switches are here there's your front panel audio as
well as your spit if out and that pretty much covers it for the layout of the
board however we got to talk a little bit about these PCIe slots first though
let's have a look at the fan headers so what good is a bunch of really cool
software features to do with your fan configuration if you don't have lots of pwm fan headers one two three four five
and i believe i saw sixth six pwm fan
headers are built into this board and they're all 100 configuration
this is cool stuff this is the bee's knees because this is compatibility with up to
and these are PCIe gen 3 those leds show
you which ones are active in gen 3 mode and that is a very expensive chip right
there so this board supports up to 8x 8x
8x 8x pci e3
now even in the event of because remember these two these cpus only
technically support 8x8x but that plx switching chip allows it to achieve
better balance basically it's a it's a switch so it manages where the data
needs to go to to give you effectively more bandwidth for running more graphics
cards not only that but unlike the last generation less expensive PCIe 2.0 plx
chip this will run even in a worst case scenario like if you were going to go oh
well you know blah blah i'm a naysayer of plx chips and i think that if you've
only got 16x PCIe 3 effective bandwidth here then you can only have 4x 4x4 x4 x
even if you only had PCIe 3 4x 4x4 x 4x
that would still be equivalent to PCIe 2.0 8x8x8x8x
which is more than enough for four of any high-end graphics card today so even
worse case scenario this thing is going to be fully unleashed fully functional
for four-way sli and four-way crossfire with four high-end graphics cards which
is very cool they also throw in a couple PCIe 1x slots just in case you need them
and remember guys if you want to run at a two card configuration you're gonna
go here and here they're conveniently color-coded four-way configurations will
go here here here and here and three-way will be one two three uh don't forget
guys you can also plug in uh PCIe 1x
cards into 16x slots or 2x or 4x or 8x
into a 16x slot no problem other than it'll have less bandwidth available
which won't matter unless you're running like really high end raid cars or anything like that
okay moving right along aha okay so
back port two esata ports
one two three four usb 3.0 ports optical
audio out uh okay two usb 2.0 ports presumably
under this sticker which i think was actually supposed to be up here but uh
whatever there's two usb 2.0 ports under there trust me there
ha i can reapply stickers ASUS can hire me
to work as applying a sticker applier okay usb 2. two Intel gigabit Ethernet
ports can't emphasize that enough dual Intel gigabit lan
uh 7.1 audio we've got HDMI and
displayport out for the onboard video built into your ivy bridge or sandy
bridge processor and right there last but not least
Thunderbolt so besides all the BIOS tuning and
software hooha that ASUS has to go through to get a solution like this
working they also had a very special
approach that they took to the traces as well as the location of the Thunderbolt
chip on the board itself so you see those curved traces as opposed to here
let's find a more traditional trace ha over here i hope you guys can see this
in the lighting but can you see how these traces go at 45 degree angles
right here and they're kind of sharp angles these ones use a curved shape that ASUS
found was better for the transmission of data at very very high speeds and the
physical proximity of the Thunderbolt chip to the Thunderbolt port is also
conducive to allowing it to have better
well data integrity between these two points here not only that but ASUS also
hasn't taken any of these traces and routed them through the different layers
of the boards this also once again reduces interference and increases data
integrity so as far as solutions go for modern generation products this is as
good as it gets guys where they've taken everything that they know about
designing motherboards and they're ASUS
just saying and put it here to make this Thunderbolt solution as
fast and reliable and pain-free as
possible so guys we're gonna have lots of Thunderbolt stuff coming on ncix tech
tips over the next little bit we've got cool stuff like this which is
Thunderbolt ready we've got cool stuff like thank you slick this which is also
Thunderbolt ready and don't forget guys Thunderbolt looks the same as the mini
displayport but it's not it is capable of carrying mini displayport or carrying
displayport signals but you need a specific Thunderbolt cable in order to
run Thunderbolt because it actually has processors at either end of the cable in
addition to the processors on the devices in order to make the 10 gigabit
per second throughput a possibility remember guys Thunderbolt will also
continue to scale so we are going to take these storage devices and this
monitor and we're going to show you guys what Thunderbolt is all about in terms
of cabling convenience and uh no fuss no
mass it's great on the desktop great for notebooks and i think that pretty much
covers ah usb BIOS flashback don't forget about that great feature you
don't even have to have CPU or memory installed you just throw a usb stick
into this port right here press the button and it'll flash that BIOS to the
board making it so that even if new cpus come out or whatever else your BIOS
isn't compatible no big deal you can get that taken care of no problem
and don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for unboxings reviews and
other computer videos oh yeah and the sexy matte black pcb oh
so nice