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learn more. This, you guys, is the board that people like me have been waiting
for ever since EVGA released their NF4
NATX SLI ready board. The whole concept
of high-performance fullyfeatured small
motherboards is extremely exciting to nerds like me who get excited about
small fully featured motherboards. So this is about look I mean look how look
how full to the brim the accessory package is for the first
MITx ROG motherboard. So here we go.
Let's get into this because I'm pretty darn stoked. One of the big problems
with many ITX systems is that you can
only have one expansion slot, which means that if you're a storage
enthusiast, you're fine. Throw a RAID card in there. If you're a graphics
enthusiast, you're fine. Throw a graphics card in there. If you're an
audio enthusiast, you're fine. Throw a great sound card in there. But what if
you happen to be enthusiastic about two of those things? Now you're boned
because it's only got a single PCI Express 16x slot. even on high-end
boards. As ASUS has addressed that in a
very very meaningful way. So, we'll start with the accessories here. So,
first up, oh yeah, high-end networking enthusiasts, don't worry, you'll be
fine. Wireless AC, that is dualband 2.4
5 GHz wireless AC is built into this
board on their MPCIE combo 2 module. So,
this acts not only as a wireless AC card, but also as an NGFF or M2
expansion slot, so you can put upcoming SSDs in there as well. So, these two go
together just like uh previous generation Intel uh antennas. You can
actually stick this to something that's made of metal, which I, go figure, don't
have here, but anyway, you can stick it to the side of your case or whatever else, as long as it's not made of
aluminum. All right, next up, we've got some SATA cables. So, there's uh four
SATA cables, two straight uh oh, all straight. No right angle SATA cables.
This board, unlike the i Deluxe board, only has four SATA ports compared to six
on the other one because this is more of a gaming centric board as opposed to a,
you know, storage or media center ccentric build. With that said, it has a
cool media center feature I'll tell you about later. All right. Uh, no, I'm
saving this one for later. We've got a couple of different screws for mounting
various things to the board, such as the wireless module. Okay, we've got uh
whatever the devil this is. Looks like a
Whoops. And I'm knocking the box around. Who knows what he's going to do next.
Oh, this is way better. they should
include this on all of their new boards instead of the Q connector, which I've
always felt is a very cludgy solution because it uh dramatically increases the
profile of the front panel connectors as
well as um like just you know not
feeling very sturdy and just being very wobbly. This right here is an expand or
as an extender for it. So, it plugs in as one unit just like the Q connector
and then you can actually extend them somewhere where it's more convenient to plug them in. That's great, ASUS, if
you're watching and I know you are. This on every board, get rid of Q connector.
Love it. Great idea. All right, we've
got an IO shield. And then finally, this, my friends, is where I start to
geek out. This is the Supreme FX Impact.
This is a sound card that is also
intended to be used at well as a sound
card and can be used without taking up your PCI Express slot. So remember guys,
you can get 5.1 output by reconfiguring
jacks. So that's that's a thing, but
you're going to be probably mostly using this as kind of your headphone out and
microphone in. I mean, what is this board designed for? More like LAN use.
And if you really wanted to run a whole bunch of speakers off of it, you're
probably going to want to use an external DAC and the optical connector right here. But this, my friends, is
what makes it possible to have a truly high-end machine from every perspective
that I can think of on an MITx board. So what they've achieved here is probably
something similar to uh well, ASUS is telling me this is second only to the
Maxima 6 formula in terms of the Supreme FX implementation. So, you have their I
forget what they call it, but it's uh uh yes, sonic radar feature, which
allows you to see visually where sounds are coming from, but that's much less
important to me than the fact that you've got a 15 decel signal to noise
ratio. And you've got a lot of the technologies that we've come to expect
from Zonar cards built into something that comes with your motherboard. And
so, this is probably equivalent to somewhere in the range of a $35 to $50
dedicated audio solution, and it comes with your board. It also is able to
drive up to 600 ohm headphones. So that
is very very high impedance headphones either off of the rear port or even off
of the front port. So they have configured it so that you're not going
to get necessarily a hugely deteriorated
audio experience off your front panel port like you see with many audio
solutions that might otherwise be very high-end. So extremely exciting. They've
also got one other cool mediacentric feature that allows you to, if you have
it configured correctly, have the board completely powered off as long as it
just has standby power and you can actually plug something into the line in
in the front of the case. So that would be a microphone jack is would probably
be coated on on the front and then have that come out of the line out on the
back of the motherboard. So you can actually run content through the
speakers that are connected to it even when the board is not powered up. So
that's that's kind of neat as long as they're amped speakers. So, let's move
on to the actual layout of the board itself. So, right here, this is impact
power, compact dynamo of full scale
power. These chokes can handle up to 60
amps of power. So, it uses the same Blackwing chokes and 10K black metallic
solid state capacitors that are going to give you better temperature tolerance,
cooler operation, much longer lifetime than generic capacitors. And all of this
is on an MITx board. The first time we saw this was with the
P8Z77i Deluxe, which was the MITx board
last generation. So, this is an even higherend implementation. It looks
better. God, man, it looks better. Here's the uh like huge solid metal
connectors that lead from the general PCB to the There you go. I hope you guys
can see that those like massive think of it in terms of like you know thicker
thicker lines for transmitting power means less loss and more more stability
for the current to flow. So there you go. They're taking it very seriously
putting the VRM up here. All right, let's move along to the Oh man, that
looks looks so good. Water cool this. Put like a nice block there. Dead sexy.
Anyway, uh two DDR3 um dual channel slots so you can
run up to 16 gigs with uh currently available DDR3 modules. The eight pin
and 24 pin connectors are right next to each other. This I've never really seen
before. And it really depends on the MATX case you use whether these are
optimal configurations for them, but you shouldn't have too much trouble. Onboard
start as well as onboard. Hopefully this
is reset, but it's not actually labeled. So guys, let me know if I'm wrong on
that one. We've got an onboard USB 3 front panel header as well as those four
SATA ports I was talking about before. The MPCIE Combo 2 actually goes down
here at the bottom of the board as opposed to on the larger desktop boards
where we're used to seeing it uh up closer to the top. You've got four four
pin fan connectors that are all configurable from within Fan Expert 2.
So there's one here and then three actually clustered up here in the top
left corner, including their patent pending one that detects and automatically configures for three pin
or four pin fan control for your CPU.
Um, you've also got an LG 1150 socket. I
guess that's important. So, you can run the latest Haswell processors, including the 4770K. And then you can overclock
the snot out of it because you're on a very, very sort of desktop grade like
miniITX board. On the back, in terms of IO, we've got that optical audio port
that I talked about before, HDMI and DisplayPort out, as well as their
impact control. And what the impact control on the back here does is it adds
more functionality. So you can see it's a little PCB riser that would normally
be on the board itself, but there wasn't enough room. So we've got a post
readout, which is cool because you can actually read it from outside the case,
as well as the memo K button and direct key BIOS flashback and ROG connect,
which they no longer include the cable for, but the hardware implementation is
still there. So as long as you have a USB A to cable, you can get that going
no problem. Four USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 0 ports. ESATA is something we've
started to see less of, but there it is. It's on this board. And an Intel gigabit
nick supporting their game first packet prioritization technology through ASUS's
AI suite, too. Now, they also include their usual value ad software with RG
board. So, that is Kasperski antivirus demon tools as well as their RAM
software. So, I think that pretty much covers it, guys. Would I recommend the
Maximus 6 Impact? The answer is yes. If
you want the very best possible experience for gaming for an MITx build,
this is pretty much the way to go. They have a new generation i Deluxe. If you
want more SATA ports, then that one, I guess, looks pretty compelling. Um, if
you want their four-way optimization, which is their EPU as well as CPU clock
speed, uh, the VRM control, there's a b there's a bunch of stuff that it does to
optimize your system for power as well as performance. um that is not how ROG
boards overclock with their one button overclocking whereas the other one is like it's like dynamic and it figures it
out on its own. These use CPU level up. So if you really want that functionality
then go for it. Otherwise I really would prefer personally to go with the ROG
board and do it manually because
man between this and the and the six formula like I I can't think of another
board that I would necessarily buy.
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considering not leaving a comment, James, but you should probably do it.