Yar

So I have a build with an ASUS x299 Prime Deluxe, and I am generally very happy with it. However, the Thunderbolt 3 connnectivity is provided through an add-in card that connects to a board header. My motherboard regularly "loses track" of it, and I have to go through a rigamarole of disconnecting and reconnecting, disabling in BIOS and re-enabling, and generally a lot of fiddly nonsense to get it to wake up to the presence of the TB3 card again. So when I saw that the new version of the same motherboard, the ASUS Prime X299-Deluxe II has built-in support for TWO TB3 connections, I got interested. However, I am getting whiffs of issues with how it is implemented, and if it really is full support. On the ASUS site itself, their marketing copy says, "Prime X299-Deluxe II integrates Thunderbolt 3 with up to 40Gbps of aggregate interface bandwidth". Aggregate? Does that mean it's actually 20Gbps per connection, instead of 40 through each? Can anyone give me any insight into whether this is a good implementation or not?

Well, kind of. that's certainly the keyboard, but someone has moved some keys around. Here is an image of an un-jumbled version, although it is for a black keyboard (mine is beige/white like the image above). And for some reason the black version has slightly different-looking PrtScn, Scroll Lock and Pause keys. Default behavior for F13-24 is as a horizontal F1-F12, but they can be reprogrammed, as the whole board can, as well up to 20-stroke macros and typematic rate adjustment. And someone has replaced the ESC key in that image with another Windows key, moved the CAPS LOCK, the CTRL and ALT keys, as well as the tilde key. The feel of the keyboard is pure delight, but the noise is astonishing. Mind you, I love it. But it is NOT a work keyboard in this day and age.

Dark Side of the Moon remains the gold standard, IMHO.

Stellar Avant for life!

Right, but that doesn't really seem to get into it. In this article by ASUS, it says that the DIMM.2 "DDR4" slot is wired directly into the PCH, not the CPU. It then goes on to explain that it being in a DIMM riser card makes it easy to mount a memory cooler over it. Then in this thread, Glenwing says: So it kind of seems like despite Kris Huang's rhetoric on the convention floor, these are just typical PCH M.2 slots off to one side to save space with a riser board, and situated to take advantage of a memory cooler if present. Am I misreading this?

I am probably low in the 20th percentile of people reading these forums. But I'm trying to understand what Asus is doing with this supposed Dimm.2 M.2 thingie. Am I missing something? Because it seems like the only thing it's good for is taking advantage of whatever memory cooling solution you are using to cool the riser card as well. Is it faster? Is it accessing these SSDs any faster than a "normal" PCI-E M.2 SSD solution? Is it using fewer lanes, or anything notable? What is the advantage? I'm completely willing to be informed as to why this is a stupid question, but I still would like to know.

Looks like a Lian Li PC-OSX.