ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe Z77 Ivy Bridge Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
2,375 words · ~11 min read
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welcome to my unboxing and first look at the p8 z77 V deluxe from ASUS this
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supports the latest Intel processors that is to say second generation core I3
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Core i5 and core i7 processors on the LGA 1155 platform and also supports at
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the time of publishing this upcoming Intel processor so that is 22 nanometer
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code name ivybridge third generation core I3 Core i5 and core i7 CPUs it also
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has a bunch of other ASUS specific technology that we'll get more into as
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we go along but let's start with their dual intelligent processors 3 so that is
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a third generation of that particular initiative their epu and TPU which are
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dedicated processors allowing you to either take advantage of the best power
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efficiency or get the best performance out of your system as well as their
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eighth generation digital power design which is now across the board haha board
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get it across the board on their z77 chipset boards with this board is SLI
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ready supports AMD Crossfire X virtu MVP which gives you better performance less
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tearing in high frame rate scenarios as well as the flexibility to plug into
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whatever Port you want and still take advantage of Intel uh quick sync
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technology next we've got support for smart response technology as well as
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Intel's and ASUS SSD caching so more on
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that in a moment it is Windows 7 ready and it sure as well better be ultimate
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cool and quiet is uh supported with their fan expert too I mean okay they
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can call it ultimate cool and quiet all they want but what it is is actually cooler than that because you can set
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fully custom fan curves user user configurable fan curves according to how
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you want your system to sound or how you want your cooling performance
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to go Wi-Fi go is included so this in
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this particular board is a dual band solution allowing you to not only uh
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sorry not only use Wi-Fi but also Bluetooth it is a DLNA server which is
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really really cool so you can stream media to various devices around your
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house as long as they support DLNA and it is also dual band which means that
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it's going to give you the best performance I mean okay maybe not as
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good as like a you know dedicated card but as good as you could possibly expect
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from onboard Wi-Fi on a motherboard smart Digi plus okay OC performance
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boost okay we've got more about their precise power control so yes they're
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highend boards I mean these days there's not as much logic built onto a board
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anymore as there used to be because we've gotten to the point where the
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memory controller the PCI Express controller are both built on to the CPU
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itself so it's not really left in the chipset anymore so what it comes down to
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when you want the best possible overclocking and you want to choose the best possible motherboard now is pretty
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much the quality of the components that they're using so if you really want to
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go you know Balls to the walls as far as overclocking goes I'd still suggest you
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go with an ASUS tough series board or an Rog series board but if you want sort of
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all of those consumer friendly features as well then the p uh sorry the p8 z77 V
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Deluxe is not a bad choice either because you're going to get that
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balanced approach and you're not going to get that far out aesthetic if you
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don't care about the red color scheme or the like I mean here we have a
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saber-tooth board over here or like the thermal armor kind of there it is
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thermal armor kind of coolness going on then you can go with the more uh the
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more mainstream oriented boards let me just make sure I haven't missed any
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major features before we get too much further in so dual intelligent
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processors 3 got it okay smart digit plus technology yep got it uh actually
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one thing that's really cool about their new digital vrm as well not really new
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digital vrm but their new controls for their digital vrm is that you can
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actually set a power threshold for your
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system and then it will dynamically adjust the performance of your CPU
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according to whatever you set so if you're in something like an office environment and you're deploying a ton
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of systems you're probably not going to be using Deluxe level boards but the
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good news is that it's actually supported on the lower-end boards as well so you can control the power that
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your systems are consuming in your office very
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easily USB BIOS flashback this is a fantastic feature without a CPU or
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memory installed you can easily just throw a BIOS file on a USB drive press
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the button and restore there and recover
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your BIOS just like that uh as ASUS USB
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3 boost technology means that you can either use USB attached scuzi or uasp to
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dramatically improve the performance of supported usb3 devices so anything
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supports the USB attached scuzi protocol or sorry uh no not everything supports
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the USB attached scy protocol but everything supports their standard uh
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minimal boost one which just doesn't use the the uh the normal USB protocol ufi
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BIOS this is pretty much part for the course these days and network eye control so because ASUS is using Intel
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Lan across the board ha I did it again on their motherboards for this
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generation of
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products come on the eye control functionality works on all of them so
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that is that you can prioritize various packets or various programs according to
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how you uh how you want the performance of them to go so you can prioritize your
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games you can deprioritize things like Torrance or whatever else you might have
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running in the background that you don't want want to affect your gaming
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experience so let's do accessories really quick here and then we'll move on
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to the board itself so we've got a user guide other more different user guide so
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that's for Wi-Fi go that's for the board itself that is your drivers and
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utilities DVD download the latest from the ASUS website okay this board comes
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in ahci mode on the SATA ports that is a very good thing that means if you're
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running an SSD you will get the maximum performance out of the box without
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tuning anything here we go dual band
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wireless antennas or du dual band wireless network adapters require two
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antennas so there is our Wi-Fi go adapter so remember this guy is good for
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Bluetooth as well as 802.11
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abgn and you got your two spots there to plug in those antennas we have an IO
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Shield front panel connector assisting Q
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connectors so this allows you to more easily plug in your front power switch
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and Etc as well as one of your front USB tws we have an included SLI Bridge
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remember your Crossfire bridge should come with your graphics card and then
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three packages of SATA cables so four SATA 3 6
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gbit per second cables those are all straight to right angle and two SATA 2 3
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gbit per second cables and those are all straight to right angle as well I'm
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actually just going to shift around a little bit
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here and here we go so you can see all
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the various phases of digital power delivery surrounding the LGA 1155 socket
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so that as I mentioned before supports pretty much any LGA 1155 CPU that you
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would would deem it fitting to put in
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it up here we find our eight pin power connector in its ideal location up at
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the top left we find ASUS's new vrm cooling design which looks pretty slick
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it looks kind of like like a you know uh a cityscape or something along those
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lines we've also got a heat pipe running all the way through this one down to uh
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down to one of the chipset coolers as well as we've got our other chipset cooler which is using a matching sort of
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aesthetic these boards look really really good and if you're like me then
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yes it matters sorry guys I know I'm shallow we've got four us uh four usb3
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four DDR3 slots supporting dual Channel operation as well as a memo button that
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using that button basically means that even if you have high-spec memory that
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doesn't necessarily post correctly in any board this should set you to a safe
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default that will get it booted up so that you can tweak it and get it to the
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right settings there's our TPU button for One Touch overclocking although I
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would definitely recommend if you want an easy overclocking experience use the
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one in AI Suite because it will correctly tune for your individual
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processor rather than unnecessarily turning up the voltage too high to get a
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lower clock speed or not getting the most clock speed possible out of the CPU
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that you happen to have our 24 pin power connector is in its ideal location along
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the right hand Edge and we have a front USB 3.0 header right about here that one
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is going to be running off of the Intel USB 3 chipset remember that four of the
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usb3 ports on this board are using an Intel chipset and four of them are using
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the as media chips set that supports uasp the Intel one does not at this
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time all right moving down here we've got four sata2 3 gbit per second ports R
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running off Intel the Intel chipset two SATA 3 6 gbit per second ports running
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off the Intel chipset and finally the SSD caching Port so these are running
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off of a Marvel chipset so a suggested usage scenario for something like this
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is you have an SSD for your boot drive you run that off the Intel chipset for
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the best single drive performance and then if you have like a uh a steam
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driver or like a games Drive something along those lines instead of plugging
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that into a SATA 2 Port you can plug it into one of these ports and then use uh
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a small SSD to Cache your favorite games so that they load a little bit more
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quickly moving on down we have our front panel connectors our TPU chip yes it is
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an an actual processor on the board unlike many competing Solutions we've
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also got a post debugging LED two USB 2
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front panel headers a clear seos button I still like to have dedicated button
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for this rather than shorting out two pins so that's nice to see a Thunderbolt
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header so yes you can buy a uh an addin
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piece that goes right in here and plugs into there and you can add Thunderbolt
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to any ASUS z77 board except the Ws one
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there here's our epu button for better power efficiency as well as our front
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panel audio header this right here is very expensive that is a PCI 3.0 plx PCI
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Express switching chip so that is one of the unique things about the Box level
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board is that it is able to dynamically allocate the available PCI E Lanes cuz
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remember those are limited due to the PCI Express controller being on the CPU
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itself in order to give you the best possible performance of all the various
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features on the board no matter what you have installed that's one of the reasons
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we're able to have so many PCIe slots on this board four PCI e1x 3 PCIe 16x
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although this is only really a this is only really a two-way SLI or Crossfire
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board so you're only going to really want to use these for that because these are the ones that are going to be
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running directly off the CPU this one is going to be a little bit slower as it
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has to there's there's more overhead involved in this slot remember guys
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though even if you're running adx adx mode with two high-end cards this is
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pcie3 so as long as you're running pcie3 cards that is 797s 79 50s GTX 680s uh
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then you will still be getting the same bandwidth as PCIe 2.0 16x moving along
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to the back of the board we have four USB 2.0 ports six USB 3.0 ports two EA
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ports optical audio out HDMI and display
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port out uh dual Lan one of them being Intel gigabit L USB BIOS flashback
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button so that's the button that you press when you have a USB device plugged
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in in order to flashback the BIOS as well as 7.1 audio out on the back of the
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board we've got a couple of little heat sinks here and let me just see if
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there's anything crazy that I might have
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missed before I get any further Lucid
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MVP talked about that DDR 3600 mahz J
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deck ah the fan control curves slick says I didn't talk about that I think I
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did though it's okay it doesn't matter you can you can set dynamically you can
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dynamically adjust the fan Curves in order to okay I don't know what he's
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talking about something about the oh yeah right
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fan fan headers sorry guys so one two
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pwm 4 pin fan headers three four five
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and six so you can plug in pretty pretty much as many pwm fans as your heart
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desires and don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for more unboxings reviews
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and other computer videos