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welcome to the first installment of the 100-ish dollar z97 motherboard showdown

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now we normally focus on really expensive top-tier motherboards which

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are essentially made out of unobtainium and as we've actually demonstrated

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before on this very channel they don't really have a huge impact in performance

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in a negative or positive way

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it's the 100-ish dollar motherboard that the majority of people are actually

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going to buy and that's why we decided to make this series to help people

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understand the pros cons and trade-offs

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that they're going to be making when shopping for a value motherboard and in

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this episode we'll be focusing on the physical features of the boards

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themselves the beginning and the end of what many people are shopping for on

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motherboards but as you'll see in the rest of the videos in this series there's a lot more

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to it than that so stay tuned

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ensure swift victory with Corsair's highly responsive lightweight gaming

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mouse the saber RGB click now to learn more

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one of the big sales pitches for motherboards is the f phrase or future

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proof and that's how a lot of people end up paying 300 plus dollars for the

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motherboard so they have room to upgrade and i guess there's something to be said

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for having a bazillion SATA ports usb ports and headers and pci express slots

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but if you give your future plans some real thought you might realize that

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you're more likely than not to add a standalone

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nas than 18 freaking internal hard drives and if you really need that

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storage space i mean where are you going to find a case for all that anyways

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and you're unlikely to need 10 usb 3.0

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ports as well because by the time you do it might be timed for a new motherboard

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with usb 3.1 anyways so the only real problem future

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proof wise for a value board is that you need to look a bit more closely before

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you pull the trigger something that could save you so much money that you

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could literally buy two motherboards one now and one later when you want to

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upgrade for the same price some stuff is

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less obvious than hard drives or usb ports though and while people that end

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up buying high-end motherboards will often have room in the budget for a

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fancy fan controller the value builder will want to make sure that their

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motherboard can actually support all the fans that they want to put in their case

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otherwise they'll be stuck running fans at full speed connected to the power

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supply or leaving fan slots on their case empty to save some money speaking

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of fans and cooling our physical overview included a look at the cooling

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capabilities of the motherboard this was interesting because while we expected

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the dramatically different looking heatsink and vrm designs to yield

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significant differences in vrm and motherboard temperatures especially

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based on the fancy heat camera imagery we've seen in motherboard a versus

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competitor screenshots over the years and what we really got was a couple

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degrees here or there which is pretty much within the margin of error of our

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infrared thermometer the good news is that while all these value boards

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had slightly different temperatures they all stayed within the operating

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temperatures of the boards but please note our CPU is not overclocked so your

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mileage may vary if you decide to crank things up a bit now with super high-end

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boards you can assume that they'll support at least two-way crossfire and

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two-way sli but with value boards you might discover that the board has

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multiple pci express slots but lacks the certification or appropriate bandwidth

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allocation for some multi-GPU configurations so while these boards all

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supported AMD crossfire they did not all

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support sli of course a ton of you will not be

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running sli on 100ish dollar motherboards but it is a nice feature if

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you are a NVIDIA user and plan to be picking up a cheap used graphics card

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sometime in the future to breathe life back into your build maybe something to

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keep in mind for the long run some general build quality observations we

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made were things like the heat sinks on the board and if they were secured by

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screws or push pins i personally prefer screws as they're less likely to become

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dislodged in shipping or deteriorate as

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the board heats and cools over its lifespan we also checked how the locking

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mechanism worked for the PCIe 16x slots

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lions and i both prefer when the wing-based design has an included notch

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for the screwdriver so that if we need to push it down in that way we won't

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risk a slip which could result in us stabbing the motherboard the normal wing

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design is fine in the top slot because you can more easily get at it with a

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finger and neither of us are a fan of the pull tab design which has resulted

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in scraped knuckles for both of us at some point in time or another in the

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past and last but not least in our speeds and feeds rundown here is the

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warranty while this isn't a physical feature it will ensure that you have

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physical features to talk about for a specified amount of time warranties are

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important at all levels of purchasing decisions but especially when you're purchasing a value computer because you

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probably don't have the spare cash to just be swapping out dead boards all the

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time although warranty can probably be ignored entirely if you plan on doing

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something silly like dunking all your computer components in mineral oil one

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other point here is that checking with buddies especially ones who live in the

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same part of the world as you is a great idea and a good due diligence best

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practice kind of thing to do because the quality of warranty services for a given

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brand can vary dramatically from from one region to another so in summary

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again this video was essentially just a physical feature comparison with the

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main point being that at any given price point you won't actually find many huge

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differences that show up on a spec sheet and that by shopping by specifications

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alone you could lead to the conclusion that it doesn't really matter what you

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buy but that's not the case and in our future videos

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we'll cover things like how easy the board is to build with how finely tuned

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the UEFI BIOS is to navigate and the finished system experience of each

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motherboard now this might feel a bit counter-intuitive but because

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motherboards all perform an overclock basically the same these days thanks to

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Intel moving most of the features that affect those characteristics onto the

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CPU itself throughout this series we will continue to focus on features

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usability build quality and quality of life differences on these motherboards

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instead so with that in mind let us know if you

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have any suggestions for things you'd like us to touch on

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and put those in the comments below or on the forum if you love watching anime

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clicking the link in the video description down below alright guys again let me know in the comments down

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below or on the forum what you guys think we should cover in those in those

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future videos that i was talking about while you're down there commenting be

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