welcome to the first installment of the 100-ish dollar z97 motherboard showdown
now we normally focus on really expensive top-tier motherboards which
are essentially made out of unobtainium and as we've actually demonstrated
before on this very channel they don't really have a huge impact in performance
in a negative or positive way
it's the 100-ish dollar motherboard that the majority of people are actually
going to buy and that's why we decided to make this series to help people
understand the pros cons and trade-offs
that they're going to be making when shopping for a value motherboard and in
this episode we'll be focusing on the physical features of the boards
themselves the beginning and the end of what many people are shopping for on
motherboards but as you'll see in the rest of the videos in this series there's a lot more
to it than that so stay tuned
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one of the big sales pitches for motherboards is the f phrase or future
proof and that's how a lot of people end up paying 300 plus dollars for the
motherboard so they have room to upgrade and i guess there's something to be said
for having a bazillion SATA ports usb ports and headers and pci express slots
but if you give your future plans some real thought you might realize that
you're more likely than not to add a standalone
nas than 18 freaking internal hard drives and if you really need that
storage space i mean where are you going to find a case for all that anyways
and you're unlikely to need 10 usb 3.0
ports as well because by the time you do it might be timed for a new motherboard
with usb 3.1 anyways so the only real problem future
proof wise for a value board is that you need to look a bit more closely before
you pull the trigger something that could save you so much money that you
could literally buy two motherboards one now and one later when you want to
upgrade for the same price some stuff is
less obvious than hard drives or usb ports though and while people that end
up buying high-end motherboards will often have room in the budget for a
fancy fan controller the value builder will want to make sure that their
motherboard can actually support all the fans that they want to put in their case
otherwise they'll be stuck running fans at full speed connected to the power
supply or leaving fan slots on their case empty to save some money speaking
of fans and cooling our physical overview included a look at the cooling
capabilities of the motherboard this was interesting because while we expected
the dramatically different looking heatsink and vrm designs to yield
significant differences in vrm and motherboard temperatures especially
based on the fancy heat camera imagery we've seen in motherboard a versus
competitor screenshots over the years and what we really got was a couple
degrees here or there which is pretty much within the margin of error of our
infrared thermometer the good news is that while all these value boards
had slightly different temperatures they all stayed within the operating
temperatures of the boards but please note our CPU is not overclocked so your
mileage may vary if you decide to crank things up a bit now with super high-end
boards you can assume that they'll support at least two-way crossfire and
two-way sli but with value boards you might discover that the board has
multiple pci express slots but lacks the certification or appropriate bandwidth
allocation for some multi-GPU configurations so while these boards all
supported AMD crossfire they did not all
support sli of course a ton of you will not be
running sli on 100ish dollar motherboards but it is a nice feature if
you are a NVIDIA user and plan to be picking up a cheap used graphics card
sometime in the future to breathe life back into your build maybe something to
keep in mind for the long run some general build quality observations we
made were things like the heat sinks on the board and if they were secured by
screws or push pins i personally prefer screws as they're less likely to become
dislodged in shipping or deteriorate as
the board heats and cools over its lifespan we also checked how the locking
mechanism worked for the PCIe 16x slots
lions and i both prefer when the wing-based design has an included notch
for the screwdriver so that if we need to push it down in that way we won't
risk a slip which could result in us stabbing the motherboard the normal wing
design is fine in the top slot because you can more easily get at it with a
finger and neither of us are a fan of the pull tab design which has resulted
in scraped knuckles for both of us at some point in time or another in the
past and last but not least in our speeds and feeds rundown here is the
warranty while this isn't a physical feature it will ensure that you have
physical features to talk about for a specified amount of time warranties are
important at all levels of purchasing decisions but especially when you're purchasing a value computer because you
probably don't have the spare cash to just be swapping out dead boards all the
time although warranty can probably be ignored entirely if you plan on doing
something silly like dunking all your computer components in mineral oil one
other point here is that checking with buddies especially ones who live in the
same part of the world as you is a great idea and a good due diligence best
practice kind of thing to do because the quality of warranty services for a given
brand can vary dramatically from from one region to another so in summary
again this video was essentially just a physical feature comparison with the
main point being that at any given price point you won't actually find many huge
differences that show up on a spec sheet and that by shopping by specifications
alone you could lead to the conclusion that it doesn't really matter what you
buy but that's not the case and in our future videos
we'll cover things like how easy the board is to build with how finely tuned
the UEFI BIOS is to navigate and the finished system experience of each
motherboard now this might feel a bit counter-intuitive but because
motherboards all perform an overclock basically the same these days thanks to
Intel moving most of the features that affect those characteristics onto the
CPU itself throughout this series we will continue to focus on features
usability build quality and quality of life differences on these motherboards
instead so with that in mind let us know if you
have any suggestions for things you'd like us to touch on
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clicking the link in the video description down below alright guys again let me know in the comments down
below or on the forum what you guys think we should cover in those in those
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