ASUS Maximus V Formula ThunderFX Gaming RoG Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
4,721 words · ~23 min read
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welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Seuss Rog series Maximus 5 formula
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this is the thunder FX version and there'll be more on what makes it thunder FX but there is a plain formula
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version as well it includes a Diablo 3 mouse pad that's kind of cool support
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for Intel core I3 i5 and i7 processors from their third generation line of CPUs
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Intel z77 chipset means you get all those usual features including uh SRT
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for SSD caching as well as virtue MVP for accelerating your GPU experience and
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allowing you to use your integrated graphics for video transcoding in your dedicated graphics for gaming supports
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two-way SLI or quad SLI with two dual GPU cards and up to three-way Crossfire
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X or quad Crossfire x with two dual GPU
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cards here are some highlight features including Fusion thermal completely
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redesigned thermal design uh thermal dissipation design for the vrm Supreme
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FX4 which has some really cool new Innovations we'll talk more about those later
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Thunder FX is included on this version and we'll definitely uh talk about that
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more later and Diablo 3 mouse pad also included let's go ahead and get this bad
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boy opened up so some more features we'll talk about those as we get it
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opened up comes with the Diablo 3 mouse pad which is here and you can get
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the know how to get that out oh here at the top there's an envelope Sticky Thing
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all right this is the thunder FX so the Thunder
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FX this yeah this is the kind of thing
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that is a tremendous value ad for a board like this so yes you're spending a
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bunch of money on a board but if you're a frequent upgrader sometimes you can
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get well I hate to say burned a little bit but you can get burned a little bit
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on spending a ton of money on these premium boards only to find out that
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there's nothing you can really carry forward with you in the future well the
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Thunder FX is something that you will be able to so this is okay what do they
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have to say for themselves versatile gaming audio for PC and consoles right
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is compatible with any device tablet phone PC console doesn't matter it it is
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capable of driving up to 300 ohm
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resistance uh headphones and uses premium capacitors for Pure powerful
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audio Supreme sound accessory that your console landan or entertainment
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enjoyment requires so let's have a look at what they've got in terms of spec
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they're using a cdia 6631 audio processor they're using as I recall I
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have notes on this so why don't we get more into it later actually let's just
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put this aside for now so let's check out the board first we've got our
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Thunder FX audio solution so we'll take
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a closer look at that there's the USB interface and then you can also just use
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a standard stereo input which will allow it to amplify the
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signal and output to wherever you need
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it to go so there's your headphones as well as your microphone in Xbox 360
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voice in is also included that's pretty cool this is awesome check this out so
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this microphone Port right here is actually for active noise cancelling so
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if you paired this let's say for example
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ASUS's uh where did they go there they
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are Vulcan noise cancelling headphones
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you would have multiple rounds of noise cancelling going on so you would have
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the closedness of the headphones you would have the noise cancelling built
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into the headphones and then you'd have a microphone actively listening to what
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is the ambient noise around you and then canceling that out at the sound card
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level which is very very cool so what else we got here you can switch between
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PC Xbox 360 and PS3 mode you can also
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switch you oh yeah you've just got a volume knob and then that's pretty much
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it for the physical attributes of the unit so this probably reminds you guys a
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little bit of the essence one that we took a look at a while ago so it's more
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like uh it's a it's well it's not quite an Essence one which is like a $600 USB
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Dack and amplifier itself I mean this one's bundled with a motherboard but
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it's a on the same lines in terms of trying to deliver the best possible
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quality audio so there are advantages actually this is in line with their with
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their Red Line concept so you see the red line that actually separates all of
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the audio components on the PCB from the rest of the PCB this is to reduce
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interference there's also Shields here to again reduce stray interference and
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uh there is an advantage to keeping it separated from the PCB that way you then
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get a further Advantage going with something like a high-end Zone R sound
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card and putting that in a PC PCI slot or PCI Express slot because then you're
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further removing yourself from all the hoo-ha that's going on inside your PC
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case by removing it even further and plugging into via USB you can almost
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completely eliminate it so that's one of the reasons that people do like using
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these external USB sound cards so let's
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start with just an overall look at the layout of the board so one thing that
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you guys are probably going to be wandering about right right off the bat
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is the Republic of Gamers logo in the middle they have brought back back the
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breathing eye so it is no longer just illuminated it is not not illuminated it
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has a breathing pulsating effect going on right under your CPU socket so that
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should look really really cool once we've got it powered on um oh I jump
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straight to the board I didn't do accessories just a sec all right coming
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back to the board we'll do accessories later I guess so couple things I want to
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mention is it comes with a full one-ear copy of kasperski and comes with a full
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copy of demon tools which is kind of neat uh one thing to note though guys
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about formula boards versus extreme boards because in theory like you know
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an extreme level board should have everything a formula level board so why
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is it that you can get this thunder FX one with a formula board not with an
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extreme board and why does the formula board have this super high-end onboard
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audio which we'll get more into later and not an extreme board the reason for
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that is that ASUS is trying to appease the different market segments so an
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extreme buyer user is not necessarily
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even going to want to use onboard audio no matter how good it is they're probably going to want to buy like aad
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dedicated couple hundred own our sound card to throw on it so there's no point
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providing them with that high-end onboard audio anyway although it'll still be pretty decent so
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um networking here we go so they're using Intel networking again however
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they have completely redesigned the Intel game first uh technology that
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allows you to prioritize gaming or prioritize other applications depending
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on what you need and you can not only use it on the Intel gigabit Ethernet but
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you can also use it on the included Wi-Fi network module and even if you add
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a third party Nick like say even a multi-port Nick you can still use the
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ASUS software that's built into AI Suite 2 in order to prioritize different
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applications in and get the best possible experience so if even if you
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load something in here you can still use game first 2 which has been completely
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Rewritten from game first one in order to provide better compatibility and a
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more seamless overall experience the reason I went with Intel versus killer
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for this particular application cuz if you guys have seen some highend
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motherboards are using killer networking is that they wanted that flexibility to
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allow you to use it not only on this one network connection here but also on
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everything else as well so I want to talk about the PCI Express slot layout
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you it's going to run in 16x 8X 8X or it
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will run in 8X 4X 4X now these are all
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running directly off of the CPU and they are all PCI p e 3.0 enabled slots which
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means that even if you're running 844
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that's equivalent to PCIe 2 1688 which
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is plenty of bandwidth assuming you're using newer Generation video cards that
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use PCI E3 for three-way Crossfire configuration however NVIDIA doesn't
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allow 4X slots for SLI so you'll be limited to 2way SLI but one cool thing
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that you should notice guys is that as you may have seen ASUS is doing a lot of
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triple slot graphics cards with their direct U2 cooler and there's a lot of
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boards that aren't really compatible with multi-GPU configurations with these
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cards well they thought of that and they went okay well let's leave huge spacing
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in between the slots so that you can even use two triple slot um PCI Express
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cards and still you're left with a PCIe 4X slot for expansion whether you want
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to throw a raid card in there a network card in there or whatever else you have
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a desire for so moving on to the vrm you
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can't really see it very well well but something to note is that ASUS hasn't
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gone overboard in terms of how many phases that they've built into the
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voltage regulation modules or into well into the power delivery system on this
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board instead of going with huge like multi a huge multiphase design they've
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gone with a lower phase design that uses higher end components in order to make
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sure that the tolerances are as low as
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possible and speaking of low tolerances they've also gone with a slightly
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different overall take on the component sourcing than some of their competitors
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have as well so while okay while it's
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interesting to see what a capacitor is rated for in terms of current delivery
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at 105 degrees because that seems to a normal user you'd go okay yeah that's a
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highly stressful environment so that probably represents a worst case
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scenario there are power delivery designs that will perform extremely well
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at 105 degrees Celsius but then will actually suffer in terms of their
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efficiency at a more realistic temperature like maybe 70° which is what
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you might encounter in a typical gamer system so ASUS wanted whether you're
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using extreme cooling all over your system you're going to be water cooling your vrm and you know you're going to be
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going all out on that or whether you're going to be going for like a silent
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system and it's going to be running completely passive with very little air flow around it they want it to perform
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well no matter what scenario that you're going to use it in so they're using
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Nikon GT caps and uh this is the same
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design they were using on their x79 boards and if it can handle x79 then d77
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shouldn't be a problem also something
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that isus specifically asked me to point this out is that they adhere fully to
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Intel spec in terms of the build quality
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of the socket itself the uh components
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that go around the socket itself and it's not just the marketing spec of what
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they've built over here but they can actually deliver the quality of power
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that they're generating to to the CPU itself and not all solutions are built
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equal in this manner it's also worth
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remembering that it comes with all the usual ASUS features so there's actually
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eight 4pin pwm fan connectors scattered
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all over the board love seeing stuff like that there's two in here and you
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can use fan expert 2 in order to control them some boards have fan control
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options but not all of the ports are supported that's not the way that it
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works with the ASUS one and you can even use external temperature probes in order
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to control those fans so it has up to three probes and I can't remember where
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all the slots are there's one uh so you just hook up these probes and you can
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run them wherever you want them to go I think there's one sort of over here
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somewhere anyway there's three run them wherever you want them to go whether it's a hard drive and then you have your
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chassis fan plugged in in the front you make sure your hard drive stays cool if
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it's getting too warm uh or wherever you want to put them you can adjust your fan
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Curves in order to make sure that everything stays appropriately cooled
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you've also got all your usual stuff including USB boost which gives you
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better performance out of your usb3 ports you've also got AI charger which
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supports not only Apple devices but also Android devices for Accelerated charging
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over your USB ports uh there's the Thunderbolt header which is present on
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almost all of the ASUS z77 boards which where is it it's around here
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somewhere Thunderbolt header right there so there's the Thunderbolt header which
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is allows you to add Thunderbolt retroactively to this board even though
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it doesn't include it it supports USB BIOS flashback um which basically
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doesn't really need anything actually hold on let us let us let me find that
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no button required folks you just rename the BIOS file to this file name right
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here you put it in the Rog connect port and then you restart the system and
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there's some flashing lights that indicate when the BIOS is flashed
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remember you can use USB BIOS flashback without even a CPU or memory installed
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in the board all right moving right along then
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Fusion Thermo this is cool so there's a heat pipe in here
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right there and then there is also a water channel so you can either use air
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cooling or liquid cooling and while it'll perform perfectly well with their
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Cooling and they've designed it they've they're actually using these uh the
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special coating that enables better heat conduction all that good stuff the heat
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pipeing there blah blah blah all this it's a great air cooler however you can
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get phenomenal performance with it by using a water cooling setup so these are
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38 barbs and there's a little they're a little bit narrower on the board than I
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would have liked to see however the restriction shouldn't be too bad because
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I saw a cutaway diagram of how the uh how the routing of the tube is done
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inside and they're using very smooth uh curves rather than using sharp 90° like
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you often see um you know nonwater cooling oriented companies do so I would
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expect this to not really slow down your flow rate that much and I'm very excited
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to see that ASUS has made some significant improvements to the quality
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of their water cooling versus what they were doing back in 2007 so it uses all
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nickel and copper which means you're not going to run into any corrosion issues
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if anyone had a foxcon Black Ops board and actually tried to water cool that
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you know what I'm talking about those things corroded like crazy and just fell
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apart so ASUS has figured all of that out and they want you to be running this
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board two three four five years down the line without uh without well yes falling
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apart so moving on to the Supreme FX4 audio this is discret class audio and
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you look at how big the actual PCB that
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is laid aside for your onboard audio is
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and it's almost a sound card worth of space so it shouldn't be that surprising
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that they're able to build in a fair amount of quality there so the red line
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shielding actually is a physical separation of the PCB which is very very
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cool and then uh they're using Ela
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premium audio caps so those are all here and then this guy right here is kind of
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special this is a 1500 microfarad massive cap it's what ASUS is calling it
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a massive cap so what does this allow you to do it allows you to store power
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in reserve for when you need it so let's say you know you're creeping down a
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hallway and everything's really quiet and then boom there's an explosion that
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requires additional power draw that can't necessarily be delivered on the
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Fly by the normal Power delivery system that would go to something like an
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onboard sound card so this capacitor right here is holding power in reserve
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so it can deliver that responsiveness and that punchiness as soon as you need
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the additional power to go to your sound card so that's a really neat design
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choice that they've made they also went with audio grade caps which are
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different so there are higher okay higher quality capacitors than what
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they're using on here in terms of the current they can deliver however audio
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caps use completely different electrolytic content and completely
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different foil to give a certain tonality to the noise versus just
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managing power which is what regular caps are more about so there's some
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differences in how they respond to the requests and now isus believes that the
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experience that they have in design audio products now I mean they've been doing Zonar for a while including some
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very high-end stuff has given them some big advantages over what their
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competitors are doing in terms of discret grade onboard audio and uh I'm
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really excited to try this one out because between the 300 ohm headphone
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amp which is here and the uh the shielded chip as well as the audio grade
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caps and the super cap is is it super
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cap massive cap sorry my bad and the massive cap I'm expecting this to
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deliver a very good audio experience which start of
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begs the question why would they include this with it and I guess it's so that
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you have like like the the best and then like the even like Bist uh included with
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the same with the same board and you have the flexibility of using that on
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something else even when you're no longer using this motherboard which is kind of neat now let's go back to my
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regular programming so there's your lg1155 socket lots of space around it
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for aftermarket coolers you got your vrm cooling here which I think we've talked
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about plenty already your 8 Pin plus 4 pin power connectors are in their ideal
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location at the the top left of the board and then moving along the top of
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the board you got some more CPU headers you got some ah there's a debug LED so
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if you don't want to use this though remember guys you always have the option
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of using R connect so there's the button to turn it on there's the port for it
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and that's where you plug in a separate computer in order to you can monitor
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things like temperatures you can change overclocking settings you can uh see ah
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yes if you're booting up and for whatever reason you don't want to look inside your case lean over and look at
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the debug LED it'll give you a plain text version of any kind of error so if
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you accidentally turn on the computer without RAM in it plug this in it'll
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just say there like there's no RAM so you better put some RAM in is kind of
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neat okay slow mode don't worry about that unless you're going below 10° C so
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or below -1° C so leave it off for for
17:16
now um you've got onboard switches start and reset you've got your Go Button
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which works as a memo Button as well so if for whatever reason you're not
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posting that'll set it to very very safe settings and get you going you've got
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all your onboard here you want to get a close look at that all your onboard
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voltage readouts so you don't have to trust the BIOS you can actually get ones
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with you can get readouts with a multimeter you've also got ah these are
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neat so these are little boot up LEDs that tell you the status of things as
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you're booting up you've also got your ln2 mode jumper so don't worry about
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that unless you're using liquid nitrogen 24 pin connectors in its ideal location
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along the right hand Edge your front usb3 connectors in its ideal location
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along the right hand Edge and they've also changed the configuration of the
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SATA ports a little bit here too so there's only four SATA ports here that
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are running off the Intel chipset two SATA 2 ports uh running at 3 gbit per
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second two SATA 3 6 gbit per second ports and all four of these are running
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off of as media chipsets so while you don't have the caching feature that you
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get on the third party Marvel controllers you do have better
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performance with these as media ones so that's why Seuss opted for that so you
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have a total of six SATA 3 6 GB per second ports and uh two SATA 2 3 GB per
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second ports remember you can still run caching off of the Intel ports should
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you so desire all your front panel connectors are here TPM your Thunderbolt
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headers down here talked about that already two front USB 2.0 connectors
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auxiliary power in case you are running multiple gpus although if you're running
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only two you should be fine your front panel audio connector on the other side
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of the Thin Red Line and uh ah slot
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layout so we've talked about this a little bit already but three PCI e1x
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slots three PCI e6x slots and PCI 4X
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slot make up all of that so the pulsating eye just so you guys know you
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can if you for whatever reason don't like it you can unplug it and tuck it in
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there without damaging the board in the
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slightest ah up here this is cool so this is an mpcie combo and what we're
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going to do is we're actually going to show you guys what goes on on this guy
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so this is just a little check this out so you can use uh there's
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mpcie and then there's also a an M SATA
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slot and it supports both of them and then you plug the whole thing into this
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module right here that sits up at the top of the board like this so you can
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see there's already a dualband Wi-Fi module plugged in here wherever the
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where are the antenna ports give me a sec so these two little nubbins have
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little adapters that uh plug into them and then you plug the full size antennas
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into them and run them out of the back of the case so that's the mini PCI E card that they include did I already say
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it was Dual Band Wi-Fi as well as Bluetooth 4.0 okay cool and then there's
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your m SATA slot so you can plug in an additional SSD should you so desire and
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put the whole thing on here like this haha okay so we're not going to put
20:07
whoops we're not going to put that on for now but uh let's have a look at some
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more accessories so there's your antennas that go with that you got some
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included SATA cables four SATA 3 6 GB per second cables two SATA 2 3 GB per
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second cables we've got an included Rog
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flexy black SLI connector the very best
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kind uh these are all related to thunder effect so we're going to hold off on
20:29
those for now IO Shield helpfully
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labeled ah these are great so you can label all your hard drive cables so you
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make sure you have boot discs make sure you don't accidentally unplug the wrong
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thing at any given time there's your user guide which is extremely thick and
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extremely thorough I think this is the thickest user manual I've seen from an
20:48
ASUS motherboard yet and we've used it a couple times throughout this unboxing to
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clarify things and it's very helpful driver dis don't use that though
20:56
download the latest I'm gaming do not disturb door hanger very
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cool Rog sticker with instructions for
21:07
application Rog connect cable as well as
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Q connectors for the front making it easier to plug in your front USB and
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front power in one Fell Swoop so let's
21:17
finish up with the rear IO uh clear seos Rog connect 3 USB 2.0
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ports four USB 3.0 ports eeta display
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port and H HMI out optical audio in and
21:31
out gigabit Ethernet and 7.1 audio with
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like the beastliest onboard audio
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powering it very good stuff so now let's
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move along to the Thunder FX so this
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should not be confused with Thunderbolt which is totally different although the
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board does support a a Thunderbolt add-on card this is thunder FX this is
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all about sound so we've looked at it physically now let's talk about what
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makes it special so accessory wise it comes with a USB cable which has two
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USBS on one end and one on the other end that's so that it can get enough power
22:07
okay you've got an Xbox adapter as well as other more different Xbox adapter for
22:11
your microphone in good stuff and that's
22:14
pretty much it in terms of included accessory cables so just wanted to
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clarify something that I nubbed out on before so this is noise cancelling for
22:23
your microphone not for your headphones
22:27
themselves so you will need noise cancelling headphones which do their own noise cancelling for what you hear but
22:32
what this guy does is it listens to the
22:35
ambient noise and where' the microphone
22:38
for this go oh I must have left it at home okay well if the microphone was
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plugged in I would be talking into my microphone and this would be isolating
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the random ambient noise from the sound coming in through my microphone in order
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to make sure that whoever I'm talking to hears me clearly even if I'm at a
22:54
crowded land Center so I think that pretty much wraps this up than thank you
22:58
for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Maximus 5 formula from ASUS
23:02
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