ASUS P8Z77-V Premium Thunderbolt 4-way SLI Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
4,257 words · ~21 min read
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welcome to my unboxing of the ASUS p8
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z77v premium now of note is the fact that
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ASUS actually doesn't even always release a premium grade motherboard they
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always have a pro they always have a vanilla you know sometimes they'll have
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you know leds or lx or whatever else mixed in uh they always have a deluxe
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but they don't always have a premium because ASUS only releases a premium
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board when they feel that there is some kind of a feature set mix that they can
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bring to the table that justifies the premium moniker so in this case uh
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before we get any further into it what makes this one super special and super
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premium above all else is full native support for Thunderbolt so
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Thunderbolt is built right into the boards Thunderbolt gives you up to 10
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gigabit per second which is fully capable of running external storage as
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well as displays even daisy chained together at the same time moving along
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we've got an msata 32gb SSD built in so
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that's as a caching solution for whatever hard drive you might actually
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connect to it we've also got full support for their wi-fi go technology
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including bluetooth as well as the ability to use your board as a wi-fi
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access point fan expert 2 is included this is actually a fantastic little
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piece of software within the ai suite that lets you manage your fan speeds and
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temperatures along custom curves should you see fit to give you guys some idea
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how important of a feature i think that is i bought an over a hundred dollar
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piece of hardware called an m cube t balancer to use in my system just to
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give me that functionality it comes built into your board here smart digi
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plus so for better overclocking yes this is definitely an overclocking optimized
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board you they've also got their epu and tpu so epu is a one button way to
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undervolt and save power with your system whereas tpu has a couple of
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different options you can either do it with the one button option or you can
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have it tune itself to overclock your system and get better performance we
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have full support for NVIDIA sli AMD crossfire x virtue mvp which improves
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your performance as well as offers GPU virtualization which allows you to use
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uh Intel quick sync which is a quick way of transcoding video even
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though you have a dedicated graphics card installed dts dts connect
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Intel z77 chipset supports Intel core processors are better
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22 and 32 nanometer CPU support so that's second and third generation
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Intel core series processors and
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here we go we find a whole lot of pretty much the same basic stuff
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inside here it does talk a little bit more about fan expert too including uh
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your abilities to take advanced control with detailed information about each fan
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you can listen and locate the fans you can get blah blah okay this is all good
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stuff this is what i'm all about oh no not this one not the RPM fixed mode
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that's cool so you can take all of your fans and fix them at a given RPM which
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is kind of neat this is the one that i'm all about the one where you can create
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whatever curves you want and according to temperatures of various parts you
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lock in each fan to whatever you want it to adjust based on you can get your
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system to keep itself at exactly the cooling and noise level that you're
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comfortable with ah SSD caching too so this is cool so
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SSD caching 2 now has a multiple caching option so you have four
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four SSD caching capable ports which means you can do all kinds of cool stuff
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including having two separate cached volumes so two ssds and two hard drives
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and you can tune exactly the way you want to do it you can have one SSD
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that's caching like a um
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a volume of the other three drives so that gives you more flexibility because
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in the past we've only really seen caching solutions that work uh or
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third-party caching solutions that work with only two ports okay virtue mvp
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we've talked about usb 3 boost this is important so uasp as well as their turbo
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mode turbo mood turbo mood that's like when you're like
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depressed but like really really really fast
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um anyway turbo mode sorry guys um
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turbo mode and uasp give you options to accelerate your usb 3 performance we
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have a full ncix tech tips coming out about this soon network eye control uses
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the Intel mix built into this board it actually has
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dual built-in Intel network cards um to
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manage things like qos um
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for more optimized network performance
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Thunderbolt okay up to daisy chain up to six Thunderbolt devices ASUS also put a
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lot of engineering into making sure that it would be hot pluggable because by
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nature uh pci express is not a hot pluggable interface so they had to do
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some special tuning to the BIOS as well as the driver in order to make this
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possible on the pc
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okay yes we've covered that already we've covered that already so easy
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installation for Intel smart response and rapid start technology very very
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cool wi-fi go is another really neat feature that we've sort of already
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talked about okay so that's good oh yeah of note to do with wi-fi go is
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that it is dlna compatible so you can use dlna devices to uh
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access stuff that you have on your computer from your compatible media
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player such as one from you know pivx or patriot or another uh or ASUS with their
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own oh play players as well so uh that'll so that'll be over
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the network so inside the accessory package we find a whole lot of really
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good stuff i'm just going to take all these out and then we'll have a look at
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them outside of the box this has a really big box you can tell that it's a
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higher end board because the box is substantially larger than their pro
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series board here i'm gonna go get the pro series board box so that you guys
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can see the physical comparison so
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that's how you know you're getting like more and more like different and more
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better stuff so you check this out premium box compared to pro box
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see look at that thickness yeah that's a premium board so why did
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they need all of that space well because there's tons of cool stuff in here
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here's the wi-fi go module with wi-fi n and bluetooth here are the antennas
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these are magnetic antennas which are super handy it means you can stick them
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to the outside of your case so those are for the wi-fi go module
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here are the exclusive features user guide
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walkthroughs okay we also have the wi-fi go card specific user guide for that guy
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right there we've got the p877v premium
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user guide including the installation dvd which you should ignore and download
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latest off the ASUS website check this out this is all english so this is a
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thick thick user manual for your motherboard which is great because
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detail is better than not having detail we have two-way three-way and
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four-way republic of gamers check that out you even get like a republic of
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gamers uh sli bridge to go with your not republic of gamers
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board but i mean with these kinds of features it almost is pretty close to
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that level we've also got four SATA three six gigabit per second cables two
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SATA two three gigabit per second cables a an i o shield with a few interesting
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color codes so they've got the usb BIOS flashback port color coded and then the
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button color coded for you as well as your usb 3 ports that are compatible
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with uasp so they've gone ahead and labeled that for you can configure them
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in the ai suite whether you want to use uasp or whether you want to use bot or
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standard mode but the fact that they color code them for you means you can more easily figure out which ones are
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going where because these ones that aren't uasp ready you can also use turbo
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mode on those so i also like the positioning of these up
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at the top because if you do have to reach around the back or if you do have
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a case that has a pass-through having it at the top is usually the closest and
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most convenient place ASUS q connectors are right here for more convenient
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plugging in a front panel of whatnots and hoo-has
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and last but not least we've got an ASUS usb 3 front panel three and a half inch
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bay since nobody has a floppy drive anymore this is a far more useful thing
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to put in your three and a half inch bay than whatever else you were planning to put in your three and a half inch base
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so thanks to ASUS for including that and it uses an internal header not an
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external passthrough which is definitely ideal
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all right moving along to the board itself this is
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yeah i mean i was gonna say it's a premium board but if you haven't figured
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that out based on the name of the board already then you're probably pretty newb
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so uh we're just gonna leave it at that i mean even the fact that i felt the need to
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say it's a premium board is pretty noob right there by the way a lot of people
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complain about how i touch pcbs let me show you how i'm actually removing the
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motherboard so this is the grip i have on it which might look pretty bad on the
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surface but let me show you what i'm doing one thumb is on plastic components
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here my fingers on the back are actually on the metal spikes coming out of the
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RAM slots on the other side of the board i'm not touching the pcv
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touching the edge of a pcb once again is fine so if you watch when i hold a board
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like this i'm positioning my hand like this so once again i have my fingers on
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those metal spikes i'm not touching the pcb the oil from your fingers can damage
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pcbs and is not very good for them so
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yes i'm aware of that no i don't have my greasy fingers all over the pcb i like
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to maneuver boards by slots heat sinks and parts where i don't actually have to
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touch it i also avoid touching things like this because your fingerprints will
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get on them and they'll look ugly and greasy because they're made of aluminum
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and aluminum tends to stain when you get fingerprint oil on aluminum
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yes not good i hate fingerprints so that is what i am doing i'm not just
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really nearly touching the board all over the place so let's have a look at
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the general layout of the board uh right up here in the top left corner i'm going
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to start there for a change because uh it's a bit of an exceptional feature
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of this board that is where the wi-fi go module plugs in you just put that in
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there there's a space for it in the back of the i o shield right there that's
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where you plug in your antennas so that's pretty straightforward there's a
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screw that is pre-plugged into the wi-fi go card so it doesn't get lost just go
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ahead screw that in no big deal the socket so this has an lga 1155
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socket which means you can't use 1156 processors it's fully compatible with
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sandy bridge and iv bridge so you can use whatever CPU you want and overclock
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the snot out of it with the huge multi-phase digital vrm that this
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premium level board has going on over here it also has fairly
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beefy cooling with your chipset cooled by just a little guy here we got a heat
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pipe connecting it to a much larger heat sink that is responsible for cooling
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part of the ddrm with another large heatsink cooling the rest of it honestly
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these ivy bridge cpus with their 77 watt tdps don't really start to suck back
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power and produce a lot of heat until you overclock them so that's how you can
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tell when a board is designed with overclocking in mind because it'll have
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all that space and all that cooling going on for overclocking so we've got a
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lot of logos on the board oh you know what let's here i'll do my usual routine and then we'll go into some of the other
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more detailed stuff so right here is our eight pin power connector in its ideal
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location at the top left of the board here are our dual channel ddr3 slots so
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all ivy bridge and sandy bridge cpus support only four slots that's why you
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don't see any 1155 boards that support more than four slots of memory although
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technically all ivy bridge and sandy bridge cpus only support up to
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2 by 8x configurations for the PCIe
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slots but ASUS has clearly cheated on that a little bit so we'll talk more
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about that later moving along here's your tpm plug here's
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your 24 pin power connector and it's ideal location along the right hand edge
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one front usb 3 connector is located here this is going to be running off of
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the Intel chipset so that is according to Intel spec you must have at least two
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available front panel Intel usb 3
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headers or usb 3 connectors okay here's
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a set of three um okay say the 3g
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port for whatever reason i'm guessing that's probably the same one that's the same
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controller that's wired into something on the back panel or something i don't know why that oh i know why that's there
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okay give me a sec guys all right not so complicated as all of
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that guys this is a seda this is just a regular run-of-the-mill Intel two three
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gigabit per second port these are your Intel SATA three six gigabit per second
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ports this is another couple Intel SATA two three gigabit per second ports and
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this one is running off your fourth SATA two three gigabit per second port on the
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Intel controller so that's an msata configuration right there so it is power
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and data to an msa to drive which by the way you can swap for something bigger
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should you so desire however srt technology only supports up to 64 gigs
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on a single drive anyway or is it 60 gigs or something in that neighborhood
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so 32 gigs is plenty for some storage drive that you plug in in order to make
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sure that whatever games you play most frequently or whatever else is going to
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be cached and ready to rock whenever you
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want so these guys are special though so i okay
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i was a little bit i was a little bit unclear before but i've done i've read
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my notes on this board so it's mostly optimized for using
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two caching ssds and two storage drives now while the controller itself may be
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capable in the future of something like a raid 5 with an SSD cache or something
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like that raid 5 on consumer level
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integrated chipsets is not really the most ideal thing in the world because it
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doesn't give you the option to recover it in the event of a hardware failure or
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anything like that unless you happen to have an identical board or identical
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chipset handy so it's not really ideal but using them as a cache is definitely
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like recommended thumbs up kind of configuration so these are marvel
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controllers these are Intel controllers
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all right moving right along front panel connectors usb 2.0 front panel headers
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there's your clear cmos button is there another one on the back of the board no
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no clear cmos on the back of the board that's kind of interesting but there's one here so it's not the end oh i forgot
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the mok button so if you're using high speed memory which is far more of a
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factor now on iv bridge platforms where we're seeing up to three gigahertz
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memory kits being released you want to make sure if you plug those
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in you can use the if it doesn't post you can use the memo k button to run it
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out to to force the board and the memory at a super safe setting so that you can
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post configure all your voltages and settings correctly and then reboot
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okay here's your post uh diagnostic led readout which by the way
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not all boards have this but ASUS has taken the liberty
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of including a comprehensive list
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um oh yeah this is another thing they do on their higher end boards you see a
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much more comprehensive validated memory
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section um okay comprehensive list of aha all of
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the error codes that you might see off that so how many times have you guys had
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a board that has one of these error readouts and then actually doesn't sorry
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guys the battery died but i what i was i don't want to harp on it for too long
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but how many times have you guys had a board that has one of these but you
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google around into no avail can you even find out what the stupid postcode on it
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even means so there you go they tell you what it means thank you ASUS it's basic
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stuff like that that really sets apart the products that are good from the ones
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that sort of are trying to be good tpu and epu buttons are right here hardware
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uh built in power and reset switches are here there's your front panel audio as
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well as your spit if out and that pretty much covers it for the layout of the
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board however we got to talk a little bit about these PCIe slots first though
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let's have a look at the fan headers so what good is a bunch of really cool
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software features to do with your fan configuration if you don't have lots of pwm fan headers one two three four five
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and i believe i saw sixth six pwm fan
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headers are built into this board and they're all 100 configuration
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this is cool stuff this is the bee's knees because this is compatibility with up to
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and these are PCIe gen 3 those leds show
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you which ones are active in gen 3 mode and that is a very expensive chip right
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there so this board supports up to 8x 8x
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8x 8x pci e3
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now even in the event of because remember these two these cpus only
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technically support 8x8x but that plx switching chip allows it to achieve
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better balance basically it's a it's a switch so it manages where the data
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needs to go to to give you effectively more bandwidth for running more graphics
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cards not only that but unlike the last generation less expensive PCIe 2.0 plx
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chip this will run even in a worst case scenario like if you were going to go oh
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well you know blah blah i'm a naysayer of plx chips and i think that if you've
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only got 16x PCIe 3 effective bandwidth here then you can only have 4x 4x4 x4 x
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even if you only had PCIe 3 4x 4x4 x 4x
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that would still be equivalent to PCIe 2.0 8x8x8x8x
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which is more than enough for four of any high-end graphics card today so even
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worse case scenario this thing is going to be fully unleashed fully functional
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for four-way sli and four-way crossfire with four high-end graphics cards which
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is very cool they also throw in a couple PCIe 1x slots just in case you need them
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and remember guys if you want to run at a two card configuration you're gonna
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go here and here they're conveniently color-coded four-way configurations will
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go here here here and here and three-way will be one two three uh don't forget
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guys you can also plug in uh PCIe 1x
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cards into 16x slots or 2x or 4x or 8x
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into a 16x slot no problem other than it'll have less bandwidth available
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which won't matter unless you're running like really high end raid cars or anything like that
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okay moving right along aha okay so
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back port two esata ports
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one two three four usb 3.0 ports optical
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audio out uh okay two usb 2.0 ports presumably
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under this sticker which i think was actually supposed to be up here but uh
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whatever there's two usb 2.0 ports under there trust me there
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ha i can reapply stickers ASUS can hire me
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to work as applying a sticker applier okay usb 2. two Intel gigabit Ethernet
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ports can't emphasize that enough dual Intel gigabit lan
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uh 7.1 audio we've got HDMI and
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displayport out for the onboard video built into your ivy bridge or sandy
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bridge processor and right there last but not least
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Thunderbolt so besides all the BIOS tuning and
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software hooha that ASUS has to go through to get a solution like this
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working they also had a very special
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approach that they took to the traces as well as the location of the Thunderbolt
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chip on the board itself so you see those curved traces as opposed to here
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let's find a more traditional trace ha over here i hope you guys can see this
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in the lighting but can you see how these traces go at 45 degree angles
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right here and they're kind of sharp angles these ones use a curved shape that ASUS
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found was better for the transmission of data at very very high speeds and the
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physical proximity of the Thunderbolt chip to the Thunderbolt port is also
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conducive to allowing it to have better
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well data integrity between these two points here not only that but ASUS also
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hasn't taken any of these traces and routed them through the different layers
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of the boards this also once again reduces interference and increases data
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integrity so as far as solutions go for modern generation products this is as
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good as it gets guys where they've taken everything that they know about
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designing motherboards and they're ASUS
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just saying and put it here to make this Thunderbolt solution as
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fast and reliable and pain-free as
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possible so guys we're gonna have lots of Thunderbolt stuff coming on ncix tech
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tips over the next little bit we've got cool stuff like this which is
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Thunderbolt ready we've got cool stuff like thank you slick this which is also
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Thunderbolt ready and don't forget guys Thunderbolt looks the same as the mini
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displayport but it's not it is capable of carrying mini displayport or carrying
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displayport signals but you need a specific Thunderbolt cable in order to
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run Thunderbolt because it actually has processors at either end of the cable in
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addition to the processors on the devices in order to make the 10 gigabit
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per second throughput a possibility remember guys Thunderbolt will also
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continue to scale so we are going to take these storage devices and this
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monitor and we're going to show you guys what Thunderbolt is all about in terms
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of cabling convenience and uh no fuss no
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mass it's great on the desktop great for notebooks and i think that pretty much
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covers ah usb BIOS flashback don't forget about that great feature you
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don't even have to have CPU or memory installed you just throw a usb stick
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into this port right here press the button and it'll flash that BIOS to the
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board making it so that even if new cpus come out or whatever else your BIOS
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isn't compatible no big deal you can get that taken care of no problem
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and don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for unboxings reviews and
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other computer videos oh yeah and the sexy matte black pcb oh
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so nice