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Asus Z170 motherboards (update: round up)

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With DDR4 ram on the new socket, memory is going to cost quite a bit more than the motherboard for budget builds... lol

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Posted

Why? Do you just use the world's biggest air cooler for your CPU? The way to fit the most cards in SLI/XFire is to put the 16X slots as 1/3/5/7.

 

Not that 4-way SLI (or even Crossfire) should really be a thing on the Z170 platform. Sure, PLX bridge chips can be used, but it just doesn't make much sense.

 

 

With DDR4 ram on the new socket, memory is going to cost quite a bit more than the motherboard for budget builds... lol

 

1. DDR4 is getting cheaper.

 

2. You can use DDR3 with Skylake.

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Posted

Damn that's a lot of Z170 boards. Actually a lot more boards in general. Keen to see the H170 Pro Gaming

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Posted

not bad for a MS mainboard.

But honnestly the Asrock Z170 Extreme series boards look better imo :).

Quick look over the Asus boards makes me think, that Asrock and Asus using allot of the same components.

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Nice looking mobo. The VRM design and heat sinks are all massive from the Z101 mobos I've seen so far. Did they move voltage regulation off of the chip and back to the mobo? If so, could be some incredible overclocking potential like with Sandy/Ivy.

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Nice looking mobo. The VRM design and heat sinks are all massive from the Z101 mobos I've seen so far. Did they move voltage regulation off of the chip and back to the mobo? If so, could be some incredible overclocking potential like with Sandy/Ivy.

I heard they have move it back to the board.

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Yes that might be the case.

intel has stated that they are going to take off the VR from the chip again, just like Sandy and ivybridge.

This will be good news, because more expensive boards with decent Vreg designs are going to make sense again.

As far as i have seen, both Asrock and Asus Z170 boards come with a massive Vreg design for their upper level boards.

 

The IVR did cause allot of heat issues with the Hasswell chips, i assume thats why intel might decide to leave it out of Skylake.

The IVR was basicly the biggest fail of Haswell

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Why? Do you just use the world's biggest air cooler for your CPU? The way to fit the most cards in SLI/XFire is to put the 16X slots as 1/3/5/7.

Which is totally irrelevant on a platform that hasn't got the PCI-E lanes to actually do 4-way SLI or Crossfire. That's what X99 is for.

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Posted

Which is totally irrelevant on a platform that hasn't got the PCI-E lanes to actually do 4-way SLI or Crossfire.

That's not true. Some boards come with those additional chips on the PCIe bus that allow you to do 3 and 4-way SLI/XFire, in which case, yes, the top slot should be 16x.

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Those heatsinks are pretty...

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I just came.

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Seriously??? Nobody else is pissed that there's not going to be a WS board??

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Seriously??? Nobody else is pissed that there's not going to be a WS board??

 

Workstation -> LGA 2011-3.

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I spot that Crystal Sound 2 chip shielded from the rest of the board there. Wonder if the audio solution on this is actually any good.

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Wow that board looks sexy! I might have to upgrade to there mATX version if it looks anything like this.

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Workstation -> LGA 2011-3.

 

What's the point of this "comment"?

 

Z68:

asus_p8z68vpro_5.jpg

Z77:

alNoHrvbBxHZvRB3_500.jpg

Z87:

ASUS-Z87-WS-hardocp-2.jpg

Z97:

6284_02_asus_z97_ws_workstation_motherbo

 

There's always been ZXX workstation boards from ASUS, making them "HERPA DERP BUY ENTHUSIAST PLATFORM THEN" only sets an idiotic and elitist precedent.

 

They've been the go-to boards for top notch reliability and PLX PEX chips (additional PCIe lanes) since the morning of time, and without them the market is going to be a whole lot shittier.

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What's the point of this "comment"?

 

There's always been ZXX workstation boards from ASUS, making them "HERPA DERP BUY ENTHUSIAST PLATFORM THEN" only sets an idiotic and elitist precedent.

 

They've been the go-to boards for top notch reliability and PLX PEX chips (additional PCIe lanes) since the morning of time, and without them the market is going to be a whole lot shittier.

 

The point is wasting money on PLX chips is silly, you get the same functionality and more from investing in the enthusiast platform.

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The point is wasting money on PLX chips is silly, you get the same functionality and more from investing in the enthusiast platform.

 

By spending a lot more. That's the point. The PLX PEX chip is ESPECIALLY needed this generation, because of all the M.2 slots on motherboards. The AsRock Z170 has 3 of them, so that's 12 lanes taken up with M.2 drives which means you can only use 1 GPU if you use all of them.

 

And AFAIK there aren't even any X99 boards with more than two M.2 slots. Not that overspending on the X99 platform is interesting anyway unless you actually need to. Which I don't.

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By spending a lot more. That's the point. The PLX PEX chip is ESPECIALLY needed this generation, because of all the M.2 slots on motherboards. The AsRock Z170 has 3 of them, so that's 12 lanes taken up with M.2 drives which means you can only use 1 GPU if you use all of them.

 

And AFAIK there aren't even any X99 boards with more than two M.2 slots. Not that overspending on the X99 platform is interesting anyway unless you actually need to. Which I don't.

 

Not spending a lot more. PLX chips are expensive.

 

As for M.2 slots, LGA 1150 motherboards don't come with more than one of them. For LGA 1151, the chipset PCIe lane count has gone up from 8 to 20, so you don't need PLX chips or a WS board to get multiple M.2 slots. Given the 20 PCIe lanes from the chipset, you could in theory run 5 M.2 slots with 4 lanes each, or 10 M.2 slots with 2 lanes each (that's the normal setup) while maintaining the ability to run SLI/Crossfire.

 

Not that you could even fit that many M.2 slots on the board anyway.

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Not spending a lot more. PLX chips are expensive.

 

Yes you are because the CPU is at least twice as expensive. And so is making the switch to DDR4 when you already amassed a lot of DDR3.

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Yes you are because the CPU is at least twice as expensive. And so is making the switch to DDR4 when you already amassed a lot of DDR3.

 

Core i7-4790K is $325, Core i7-5820K is $370, that's less than a 14% difference. A Z170 WS board probably wouldn't have had DDR3 slots anyway.

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Updated first post

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Hate the PCIe layout. Though, at least they got the top slot right, a full 16x should never be at the top. Other manufacturers need to learn to put the first 16x second from the top as well.

 

But the spacing between the two topmost 16x slots is one too far apart for me. I didn't install a brutal 180mm air penetrator fan in the bottom of my case blowing directly onto the GPU area so I could have a hideous gap in between GPUs.

 

Is it DDR4, DDR3 or both? If it's DDR3 I'll let my brother know, he might be interested.

DDR4 only on that mobo

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Isn't the (relatively) low demand for DDR4 that's making it more expansive? I think prices will drop once more and more platforms adopt DDR4

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Workstation -> LGA 2011-3.

 

The workstation I am on right now is 1155.

 

Consumer socket workstations are far more common in an industrial environment than enthusiast socket workstations.

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