Asus Z170 motherboards (update: round up)

[Misanthrope]

Odd than the mere "ranger" boards look much better than the "It-would-be-much-nicer-if-you-could-remove-all-this-shit" hero version

[arniks8]

Previous generations looked better.

[Notional]

Very pretty boards. Love the Gene and hope vendors would make more mATX, as most people don't need anymore anyways. Also the 110mm M.2 is very nice. Let's see some NVME M.2 110mm SSD's soon.

[patrickjp93]

No watercooling for the VRMs? Fail. MSI has buried them this time around in board designs.

[Zeruel]

No watercooling for the VRMs? Fail. MSI has buried them this time around in board designs.

 

 

That would be the Maximus Formula. They don't get released till a month or two after.

[Nowak]

Sauce please?

[SirSquid]

What the hell, no Pcie covers and only one M.2?

[patrickjp93]

What the hell, no Pcie covers and only one M.2?

You mean no gimmicks and only one port for a niche product that very few people will use, even among buyers of the board?

[patrickjp93]

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.

PLX chips.

[patrickjp93]

Lol I am an engineer, and pretty much everyone uses consumer socket workstations. Then for computation heavy tasks, like CFD or FEA we offload that job to a server. In my companies case we have one server with a pair of Teslas. 

 

It is much cheaper for a company to buy many mid grade workstations and a very powerful server based machine or two, than it is to buy all of engineering high end enthusiast socket workstations. Yes, large companies use workstation boards on the consumer socket, small companies use workstation boards on the enthusiast socket because they don't want to invest in a powerful computational machine. 

The cheapest solution (since you're always hosting the server anyway) is actually to host everyone on a VM on that server machine and connect to it with a $200 Dell Optiplex or something similar.

[Sauron]

Nice, I like the new colour scheme!

[NumLock21]

What the hell, no Pcie covers and only one M.2?

Your avatar, makes it look like the shark said that. lol

[Fetzie]

PLX chips.

PLX chips are fucking expensive and introduce latency. By the time you've spent an extra 100-150 dollars on a motherboard with a PLX chip you might as well have gone X99 in the first place.

[Real_PhillBert]

The cheapest solution (since you're always hosting the server anyway) is actually to host everyone on a VM on that server machine and connect to it with a $200 Dell Optiplex or something similar.

 

I have never seen any company do that for their engineering department. 

[patrickjp93]

PLX chips are fucking expensive and introduce latency. By the time you've spent an extra 100-150 dollars on a motherboard with a PLX chip you might as well have gone X99 in the first place.

Just having 1 extra PLX chip gives you 3-way SLI even with 4 PCIe lanes to spare. And that's only $35 (50 if the mobo maker is shaking you down).

[patrickjp93]

I have never seen any company do that for their engineering department. 

IBM and Nielsen Group both do this. That's how I'm currently working (for IBM as an intern).

[Real_PhillBert]

IBM and Nielsen Group both do this. That's how I'm currently working (for IBM as an intern).

 

Interesting. Everywhere I have ever worked as an engineer or intern has used a medium powered workstation for engineers. 

[patrickjp93]

Interesting. Everywhere I have ever worked as an engineer or intern has used a medium powered workstation for engineers.

If the company didn't have the networking infrastructure or the software stack to let the client(engineer) side do the graphics while the big iron handles the calculations and file system, then you won't see it, but once you have that sort of infrastructure, it's uber cheap to run that way. I work off an I3 4130T for instance. Plenty of graphics power for what I need (basically run Emacs in Tramp Mode and render performance graphs from IBM's profilers).

[Real_PhillBert]

If the company didn't have the networking infrastructure or the software stack to let the client(engineer) side do the graphics while the big iron handles the calculations and file system, then you won't see it, but once you have that sort of infrastructure, it's uber cheap to run that way. I work off an I3 4130T for instance. Plenty of graphics power for what I need (basically run Emacs in Tramp Mode and render performance graphs from IBM's profilers).

 

Everywhere I have been has run a midrange quadro and an i5, plus a compute server for larger simulations. I see how it would be cheaper, but I have worked for Case Newholland ($40 Billion co) and even they ran the same type of workstaions. *Shrugs*

[LuckyCharm]

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.

You want the cards to be spaced closer, so there is less airflow between them, so you have to put a loud fan in to cool them of?

[TroubleKlef]

z170 pro looks nice.

[NumLock21]

z170 pro looks nice.

Sadly it's been cancelled

[TroubleKlef]

Sadly it's been cancelled

 

Really? That's lame. 

[NumLock21]

Really? That's lame. 

Sadly yes.

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/378703-asus-z170-motherboards-update-special-socket-and-cancel-of-pro/?p=5117408

[DildorTheDecent]

I gotta know on the Zeus board?

http://i59.tinypic.com/6nq9z6.jpg

 

Where the HELL is the PCI Express ?!!?!?!?!?!

There's two Radeon 7970s under that massive heatsink.