Welcome to the second installment of the 100ish dollar Z97 motherboard showdown.
As you know from the last video, we normally focus on badass top tier
motherboards, which are uncommon in the real world, and as we've demonstrated in
the past, don't really impact performance in a positive or negative
way. So, this series will focus on the more sensible, affordable motherboards,
which most people will actually be
buying. And we're going to explore their pros, cons, and tradeoffs. In this
episode, we'll be covering the experience of building a computer with
these motherboards. Things like PCI layout, fan header, and plug positioning
when installing into a case, accessories, and even color selection
will be covered. And videos for stuff like BIOS usability and finished system
experience will be coming after CES, so stay tuned.
The Cooler Master Neptune 240M features an exclusive pump design and their new
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more. One thing on motherboards that gets a
lot of attention is the PCI layout. Even people that I've built for in the past
have been overly worried about the futurep proof aspect of PCI layout
despite them having no real intention of adding more than one GPU or any other
card for that matter to their system. So for most people it is unlikely to make a
difference, but it's still worth considering just in case. The top two
slots and the bottom three slots on these boards are all identical. And
those will be the most used slots anyways because even when someone does
decide to add more cards, they're unlikely to use the ones in the middle
that did vary somewhat because of their proximity to the top PCIe 16x slot,
which will render one useless with any dual graphics card setup and the other
not recommended to give affforementioned cards some breathing room. The fan
headers, however, are of much greater importance if you want to take advantage
of the fan speed control that's built into your motherboards. Many, if not all
of these headers can be used in a normal system, and their position can make or
break the appearance of your cable management. Every board accommodated
having a rear case fan, but after that, they varied quite heavily. Gigabyte had
a pretty balanced setup overall, although only having two headers near
the top may limit your selection of AIO coolers slightly if the pump must be
powered by a fan header. As Rock had the
most included fan headers at six, but the positioning of them, while quite
good for an air cooler, will no doubt be frustrating for anyone who wants to
install a liquid cooling system in the top of their case, as none of the fan
headers are at the top of the board, and only some of them were actually four pin
PWM headers. ASUS lacked quantity with
only four available fan headers, but at least the layout was fairly balanced and
MSI had, in my opinion, the best layout of all of them with headers spread out
all around the board, giving you the versatility to play around a little bit
with the placement of your setup. Something to note is that the positioning in general here is the key
point, not amount of headers. Don't forget, you can mostly fix availability
issues with inexpensive splitters. On to other connectors. Luckily for the PC
building community, motherboard manufacturers seem to have come to a
good old consensus when it comes to positioning of standard CPU and
motherboard power and standard case headers. We've passed the dark ages of
randomly placed headers halfway up your freaking motherboard and 24 pin or 8pin
power plugs randomly placed where they really really shouldn't be for the sake
of system air flow. I like right angle sockets for SATA, but not all cases
allow the stiff USB 3.0 no front panel cable to be installed this way. So, I
understand why most boards opt for a non-angled socket, but I must say I
really like MSI's implementation with two sockets, one angled and one normal,
because even though very few cases actually have four USB 3.0 ports, this
gives you the flexibility to even either have tidier cable management or better
compatibility. As for the rest of the headers, USB 2.0, know front panel audio
and front switches. ASUS, Gigabyte, and ASRock all had varying degrees of good
enough labeling, but MSI's front panel switches labeling was kind of off in the
middle of nowhere, which was a little bit annoying to actually kind of find
and could be frustrating for some people. ASUS, MSI, and Gigabyte all
featured some degree of plastic guard around their headers, which can help you
not screw up when tediously plugging in all your various headers, but the ASRock
board did not feature any of these, but not a huge deal. The accessories
included with these boards were essentially all the same standard fair
you'd expect on a value board. Exactly what you need with no flashy LED
displays and OC brackets or any of that kind of stuff. Each included a user
guide of some sort, an IO shield, two SATA cables, one driver disc, and every
board except for MSI included a case badge with Gigabyte and ASRock also
giving you an SLI bridge as they support that feature. In terms of colors, every
board had an unfortunate shade of brown for their PCB except for ASRock and
ASRock, Gigabyte, and MSI all went with fairly standard blue or red color scheme
with ASUS deciding to be a hero and go with gold. I get it. They're trying to
communicate their whole we are the gold standard motherboards
thing. But personally, I would prefer a propaganda sticker on the box instead of
tacky gold on my motherboard. Although, if you want to go for that Iron Man
look, matching it with some red components may work out for you. All one
of you. Who's ever going to do that, Mr. Downey Jr.? In summary, this video is
about the importance of paying attention to how all your components will work
together instead of just how many raw features each one of them has
individually. Thanks to standardization, your case will probably determine how
well your cable runs work more than your motherboard. Your cooler will probably
determine what fan header layout is best for you and your desired color scheme.
Also, the colors of the rest of your components in all likelihood will
probably determine what color you want your motherboard cooling heat sinks to
be. So, the moral of the story is to plan for what you will actually use and
not to overspend based on what you think you might possibly use in four to 5
years when you'll probably be replacing this board. Anyways, by the way, the
next video coming in this series will be the BIOS usability rundown of all these
boards, which will also be very important. So, stay tuned for that. All
right, guys. In the comments down below, let me know what you think is important
about motherboards. And in the finished system experience and BIOS usability
videos, let me know what you guys want to see. Again, comments down below or on
the forum. While you're commenting down below, or before you leave to the forum,
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