I suspect we're only a short distance from every single motherboard being labelled "gaming", at which point it doesn't mean anything anymore. Truthfully, I don't think it means anything now.
That's pretty much what I expect now (with the possible exception of buying a "non gaming" board for roughly the same price without the LEDs and fancy colors, presumably mostly sold by OEMs to business.
I think his point is that there is prime real estate being taken up by two PS/2 ports which are about 10 years past their usefulness, especially in the day and age that we have PS/2 to USB connectors which cost next to nothing and/or are included now with any device that happens to still use the 20 year old port. Four additional USB ports could have been placed in the space used by those two PS/2.
You old people and your lack of keeping up with new technology. USB does support N-Key rollover. Bought my Cherry MX Board 6.0 in 2015 with full N-Key rollover.
Correct although technically PS/2 could have lower latency in some situations. PS/2 keyboards and mice work based on interrupts while USB works by polling. In otherwards, when you press a key/click your mouse on a PS/2 device your request is immediately processed. USB on the otherhand waits until the device is next polled.
TBH I've never seen a PS/2 vs USB latency test and I've personally never noticed a difference. Then again I haven't tested them strictly against each other on a high refresh rate monitor either.
Those active PS/2 to USB adapters never worked very well. Lots of missed inputs or stuck keys. The passive adapters require that the peripheral device switch into a PS/2 mode, supported by some mice, but not all PS/2 in general. Also some KVMs work only with PS/2 if that is your thing.
10 USB Ports in way more than I can remember on motherboards. My Supermicro Xeon didn't have that many ports on it.
But one thing I see missing in motherboards today is Thunderbolt 3 - maybe it is notebook thing - and future generation will have it. What is really nice is you can hook up dual Display Ports on it - not sure how that works with graphics cards today.
I think I've seen 1 or 2 boards with 12 out the back. 8/10 is around the normal upper limit though, partly for space reasons and partly due to chipset limits. For the last decade or so Intel's offered 14 USB ports on its high end southbridges with a gradually increasing number of the total supporting USB3; since most mobos have 2 or 3 on board headers for front panel ports or various misc internal uses (eg a few PSUs that connect to an internal 2.0 header to report stats) that leaves 8 or 10 total ports free for the back panel. Mobo vendors can get around this a bit by using onboard hubs or controllers (until recently this was the only way to get 10Gb ports), but to a large extent that's faking it until they can't make it. With a hub because you end up needing to know exactly what's going on inside the board if you need to connect multiple high speed devices at once to keep them from bottlenecking each other. PCIe controllers either end up with the same bottleneck problem, or if they have enough lanes to avoid it end up eating the equivalent number of SB ports instead.
I've seen a few rumors that Intel's planning to integrate TB3 directly into the platform without needing a separate controller in the future. OTOH unless they add extra PCIe lanes to the CPU it's still probably going to be rare on desktop boards. TB3 is PCIe3 x4 equivalent, so a single connection on the southbridge could eat all of its bandwidth to the CPU. On most laptops to avoid that (and presumably to simplify the GPU out signalling) they use lanes from the CPU instead. On enthusiast desktops those 16 lanes are normally all used for the GPU though, and since PLXes PCIe switches are stupidly expensive now ($80 for a x16 to two x16 model) the only way to do that would be to limit the GPU to x8 instead of x16. In the real world that wouldn't matter much; but marketing is aimed at the clueless and a lot of them would freak.
The Asus Crosshair VI Hero has the most USB ports of any boards I'm aware of. 2x USB 3.1, 8x USB 3.0, and 4x USB 2.0 on the back panel for a total of 14, though to be fair it only has a single LAN port and no display out. Somewhat ironically for the new Crosshair VII, they dropped two of the USB 2.0 ports for a PS/2 combo port.
AMD's got a slightly higher max USB port count than Intel, 2 3.1g2 ports, 10 3.1g1 (4CPU, 6 chipset), and 6 2.0 ports; but even there that board is using at least one 3rd party controller for the front panel 3.1g2 header (or they could be routing the chipset ports to that header and using the 3rd party controller on the back).
swapping 2 of the 2.0 ports for a PS/2 seems reasonable to me; some people want them (ie those whose high end keyboard is more than a few years old and doesn't support N-key rollover via an extension to the original ~20 year old spec/driver); and the list of devices that have interference problems one 3.0 ports is very short so not many people need more than 1 or 2).
OTOH other than cost reasons or wanting to keep space for their logo I don't see any reason they couldn't've added both; there seems to be enough back panel space for another stack of ports.
1. the PS2 ports run off a PS2 to USB adapter on the board anyway, so they really aren't proper PS2 ports. The X390 chipset doesn't support any path for PS2 ports. So, there really is no advantage on that.
2. Those PS2 ports could easily be replaced with 4 USB ports, and they could be run with 2X 2.0 and 2X 3.0. There are enough USB 3.0 ports available from the chipset to do that. USB keyboards run better directly off the root hub anyway. The problems most people have with them having lost input usually comes because the keyboard is being run off a hub. On top of that, I know from direct experience, most USB hubs have major reliability and operational problems. I do my best to avoid running anything through a hub these days because of the repeated and consistent problems I have had with them. I seem to find a good hub once in a while, only to have it die a couple months later. We NEED those ports on the back of those boards, and then some dumb engineer comes up with the idea to use 2 of those ports to make one USB-C header for some front panel port that is supported by only 1 case. My Maximus X Hero Wifi has only 8 ports, so I'm stuck with running my UPS, Nostromo, and mouse off a hub, which is not what I like.
3. There are a LOT of people who go for such advantages in hardware who are just fantasizing over it making them a better player, when it simply won't help. So, stop with the idea that any more than a very bare few actually need PS2 ports.
This is a Z370 board, and Z370 still has an LPC bus (a quasi-serial version of the ancient ISA bus) which has been the traditional location to mount the control chip for PS2 and other ultra-legacy IO ports. Without scouring the board images itself to figure out what controller is being used, I can't answer how it's being connected but the chipset does have the IO needed to support a non-USB PS2 port.
And while the chipset does have theoretical additional USB3 lanes available, it doesn't have free HSIO ports to run them on without going into configuration hell where using feature X disables feature Y, Z370 has a total of 30 of them to split among USB3, SATA, and PCIe lanes from the chipset. The board breaks down as:
1 Intel network 1-4 AQC108 5GBe (maybe only 1-2, the Aquitania page doesn't differentiate between requirements for their 5 and 10Gb controllers) 1 Realtek audio 4+1+1=6 PCIe lanes 4 Sata 4+4=8 M.2 slots 6+2 USB3.0 (back panel and front panel header) 2 ASM USB3.1g2 controller
That adds up to 31-34 already so at least one item is already being switched on/off depending on what else is in use.
That's a limitation of the chipset. If you want more USB ports on a consumer motherboard you have to get a Ryzen motherboard. The X370 Hero has 14 USB ports on it. Ryzen and the X370 chipset simply support more USB ports.
> Regular ATX board that they decided to have random cutouts and extensions on the PCB that now requires an E-ATX compatible chassis > 10 fan/pump headers and water flow and temperature headers > 4 full-length PCIe slots and an included SLI-HB bridge > 5 Gigabit ethernet > Only 2 RAM slots??? > $400???
I understand the appeal of the overclocking features and why people would look to buy this board if they wanted to push their overclocks another 100MHz but why is there such an absolutely absurd mishmash of features included like 4x PCIe lanes (without a PLX chip) and 5GbE? I feel like they took their original design for what should be the Maximus X Extreme and just started haphazardly trimming features like RAM slots and PLX support until they hit the $400 price point and said "ship it".
Really interested in the opinion of anyone who be looking to buy this board.
I don't disagree with your overall point, but limiting the board to a pair of DIMM slots makes sense for a board that purports to be focused on overclocking. I don't recall any motherboard that can overclock with 4 DIMM slots populated as well as it can with only 2 slots populated.
"It doesn't affect performance" Patently false, since reviews of M.2 drives by many sites - including this very one - have demonstrated that the highest-end models throttle during sustained workloads.
Regardless of performance, DIMM.2 is a feature unique to this motherboard, and as such it should be covered by any review.
The test is relatively simple: temperatures/sustained transfer rates of a drive when using DIMM.2, vs those of the same drive mounted directly against the motherboard, vs that drive mounted against the motherboard but with the motherboards's supplied M.2 heatsink applied. For example, this board vs the recently-reviewed X299 XPower Gaming AC's M.2 cooling solution.
It should be something relatively simple to do and would make a great stand-alone article to answer the question that many people have, namely whether these fancy cooling solutions do have an effect on their M.2 drives' temperatures.
IMO they really should have similar spec non LED/RGB bs motherboards for AMD as well as Intel because there are many (such as myself) that have ZERO need or want for RGB anything taking up the BOM for things that are far more useful.
such as put the $ towards giving the best most stable VRM or ensuring the m.2 slots have the best cooling possible without having to resort to liquid (would not hurt them to move them away from right underneath the hottest parts in most computers such as graphics cards/cpu)
why can they not maybe figure out a way to place them right behind the sata/motherboard mains power where there tends to be a nice "hole" that is very rarely occupied with anything)
X shaped LMAO, I was expecting a significant X, but it barely cut the motherboard to give a very slight impression of this (and only if you look really closely)
I very much feel the same though, when you call everything X this or X that, Gaming this or Gaming that, Ultra this or Ultra that, the words lose all meaning, because "everyone is doing it"
ROG is a fine branding, and Hero or Formula or Maximus is also fine, they really do not need to add an even longer name on top of this to try to draw extra attention to it IMO ^.^
Years ago, the ASUS Sriker II Extreme turned heads, as did the Maximus IV Extreme, and definitely the Rampage IV Extreme. These days, the whole notion of such boards has been rather diluted. Fun stuff like PLX chips has largely gone, while the oc headroom of the latest mainstream Intel chip is garbage (why anyone cares about a 6% bump over the official max turbo is beyond me; at least with SB one could easily reach a 28% bump over the official max turbo, and without the need for Iceland airflow to keep it cool). Oc'ing back in the days of S775, X58, P55 and SB was fun, one could relaly push the hw and see some great gains (sooo many delighted 2500K users out there), but now it's just a giant yawn fest. The CPUs are doing a lot of the oc work automatically, and they're getting good at it.
I meant to add, even outside the ROG line ASUS was doing funky things, eg. the P7P55 WS Supercomputer, x8/x8/x8/x8 on a P55 board! :D I hold most of the P55 3DMark records by plonking three 980s on that whacko board. The P9X79-E WS was similarly and usefully OTT, great for compute yet it has most of the same oc potential of the equiavent ROG board (R4E). Modern mbds have gone RGB bling mad because that's all they have left to tout.
I agree with the VRM and m.2 slots. I would really like to know why m.2 slots are in such a hot location. I'd also like to know why Intel won't increase the lanes needed for more bandwidth to devices.
Interesting, I don't know why this high density RAM was not more of a thing back in the DDR3 days, although I could understand the desire to Overclock and those 16GB DIMMs don't allow that in DDR3 (not to mention that most were also ECC applications).
I hope the prices go down, because a 16GB DIMM although not a hard thing to find now, it is still very expensive.
Seems a bit odd to go with a 5Gbps port on an expensive motherboard when ASRock is offering a 10Gbps port on their higher-end board (Z370 Professional Gaming i7). Heck, ASUS even releases stand-alone cards with the same chip that ASRock uses, which is the same company that makes the chip for this board.
ASUS be like: A: Guys, slapping on RGB just isn't cutting it anymore, we need something new to stand out. B: *looks up from his fruit X phone* Notches are all the rage these days, what if we added a NOTCH to our board? A: I think you're on to something! Hey, why not go one step further, let's do FOUR notches!!! I'll bet it'll sell 4 times as fast! B: Yes! And add "X" to the name for good measure. A: BRILLIANT
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Flunk - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
I suspect we're only a short distance from every single motherboard being labelled "gaming", at which point it doesn't mean anything anymore. Truthfully, I don't think it means anything now.tech6 - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
...and most will have cheap voltage regulators and capacitors but pretty LEDs and a neat colored PCB.wumpus - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
That's pretty much what I expect now (with the possible exception of buying a "non gaming" board for roughly the same price without the LEDs and fancy colors, presumably mostly sold by OEMs to business.Who else buys motherboards?
dgingeri - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
...and yet another Asus board with far too few USB ports. Why are they going so cheap with the USB ports these days?DanNeely - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
It's maxed out on back panel IO. What do you want them to drop to add another pair of ports?Also, although there's no block diagram provided, I suspect the board is maxed out on HSIO ports from the chipset, and could only offer 2.0 ports.
Fallen Kell - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
I think his point is that there is prime real estate being taken up by two PS/2 ports which are about 10 years past their usefulness, especially in the day and age that we have PS/2 to USB connectors which cost next to nothing and/or are included now with any device that happens to still use the 20 year old port. Four additional USB ports could have been placed in the space used by those two PS/2.hosps - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
You kids and your USB keyboards and mice. PS/2 is where it's at if you need an N-Key rollover capability that USB doesn't support.WannaBeOCer - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
You old people and your lack of keeping up with new technology. USB does support N-Key rollover. Bought my Cherry MX Board 6.0 in 2015 with full N-Key rollover.Holliday75 - Saturday, May 12, 2018 - link
I'm still pissed serial ports are no longer included.ctbaars - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Where do I plug in my parallel port dongle? I'll pass ...evernessince - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Correct although technically PS/2 could have lower latency in some situations. PS/2 keyboards and mice work based on interrupts while USB works by polling. In otherwards, when you press a key/click your mouse on a PS/2 device your request is immediately processed. USB on the otherhand waits until the device is next polled.TBH I've never seen a PS/2 vs USB latency test and I've personally never noticed a difference. Then again I haven't tested them strictly against each other on a high refresh rate monitor either.
voicequal - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
Those active PS/2 to USB adapters never worked very well. Lots of missed inputs or stuck keys. The passive adapters require that the peripheral device switch into a PS/2 mode, supported by some mice, but not all PS/2 in general. Also some KVMs work only with PS/2 if that is your thing.HStewart - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
10 USB Ports in way more than I can remember on motherboards. My Supermicro Xeon didn't have that many ports on it.But one thing I see missing in motherboards today is Thunderbolt 3 - maybe it is notebook thing - and future generation will have it. What is really nice is you can hook up dual Display Ports on it - not sure how that works with graphics cards today.
DanNeely - Saturday, May 12, 2018 - link
I think I've seen 1 or 2 boards with 12 out the back. 8/10 is around the normal upper limit though, partly for space reasons and partly due to chipset limits. For the last decade or so Intel's offered 14 USB ports on its high end southbridges with a gradually increasing number of the total supporting USB3; since most mobos have 2 or 3 on board headers for front panel ports or various misc internal uses (eg a few PSUs that connect to an internal 2.0 header to report stats) that leaves 8 or 10 total ports free for the back panel. Mobo vendors can get around this a bit by using onboard hubs or controllers (until recently this was the only way to get 10Gb ports), but to a large extent that's faking it until they can't make it. With a hub because you end up needing to know exactly what's going on inside the board if you need to connect multiple high speed devices at once to keep them from bottlenecking each other. PCIe controllers either end up with the same bottleneck problem, or if they have enough lanes to avoid it end up eating the equivalent number of SB ports instead.I've seen a few rumors that Intel's planning to integrate TB3 directly into the platform without needing a separate controller in the future. OTOH unless they add extra PCIe lanes to the CPU it's still probably going to be rare on desktop boards. TB3 is PCIe3 x4 equivalent, so a single connection on the southbridge could eat all of its bandwidth to the CPU. On most laptops to avoid that (and presumably to simplify the GPU out signalling) they use lanes from the CPU instead. On enthusiast desktops those 16 lanes are normally all used for the GPU though, and since PLXes PCIe switches are stupidly expensive now ($80 for a x16 to two x16 model) the only way to do that would be to limit the GPU to x8 instead of x16. In the real world that wouldn't matter much; but marketing is aimed at the clueless and a lot of them would freak.
Destoya - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
The Asus Crosshair VI Hero has the most USB ports of any boards I'm aware of. 2x USB 3.1, 8x USB 3.0, and 4x USB 2.0 on the back panel for a total of 14, though to be fair it only has a single LAN port and no display out. Somewhat ironically for the new Crosshair VII, they dropped two of the USB 2.0 ports for a PS/2 combo port.DanNeely - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
AMD's got a slightly higher max USB port count than Intel, 2 3.1g2 ports, 10 3.1g1 (4CPU, 6 chipset), and 6 2.0 ports; but even there that board is using at least one 3rd party controller for the front panel 3.1g2 header (or they could be routing the chipset ports to that header and using the 3rd party controller on the back).swapping 2 of the 2.0 ports for a PS/2 seems reasonable to me; some people want them (ie those whose high end keyboard is more than a few years old and doesn't support N-key rollover via an extension to the original ~20 year old spec/driver); and the list of devices that have interference problems one 3.0 ports is very short so not many people need more than 1 or 2).
OTOH other than cost reasons or wanting to keep space for their logo I don't see any reason they couldn't've added both; there seems to be enough back panel space for another stack of ports.
StevoLincolnite - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
You could add another 5+ USB ports on the back I reckon.I can't be the only one with half a dozen external HDD's?
sibuna - Saturday, June 2, 2018 - link
if you are seriously using 1/2 a dozen external USB HDDs just build a NAS, it will serve you betterdgingeri - Saturday, May 12, 2018 - link
1. the PS2 ports run off a PS2 to USB adapter on the board anyway, so they really aren't proper PS2 ports. The X390 chipset doesn't support any path for PS2 ports. So, there really is no advantage on that.2. Those PS2 ports could easily be replaced with 4 USB ports, and they could be run with 2X 2.0 and 2X 3.0. There are enough USB 3.0 ports available from the chipset to do that. USB keyboards run better directly off the root hub anyway. The problems most people have with them having lost input usually comes because the keyboard is being run off a hub. On top of that, I know from direct experience, most USB hubs have major reliability and operational problems. I do my best to avoid running anything through a hub these days because of the repeated and consistent problems I have had with them. I seem to find a good hub once in a while, only to have it die a couple months later. We NEED those ports on the back of those boards, and then some dumb engineer comes up with the idea to use 2 of those ports to make one USB-C header for some front panel port that is supported by only 1 case. My Maximus X Hero Wifi has only 8 ports, so I'm stuck with running my UPS, Nostromo, and mouse off a hub, which is not what I like.
3. There are a LOT of people who go for such advantages in hardware who are just fantasizing over it making them a better player, when it simply won't help. So, stop with the idea that any more than a very bare few actually need PS2 ports.
DanNeely - Sunday, May 13, 2018 - link
This is a Z370 board, and Z370 still has an LPC bus (a quasi-serial version of the ancient ISA bus) which has been the traditional location to mount the control chip for PS2 and other ultra-legacy IO ports. Without scouring the board images itself to figure out what controller is being used, I can't answer how it's being connected but the chipset does have the IO needed to support a non-USB PS2 port.And while the chipset does have theoretical additional USB3 lanes available, it doesn't have free HSIO ports to run them on without going into configuration hell where using feature X disables feature Y, Z370 has a total of 30 of them to split among USB3, SATA, and PCIe lanes from the chipset. The board breaks down as:
1 Intel network
1-4 AQC108 5GBe (maybe only 1-2, the Aquitania page doesn't differentiate between requirements for their 5 and 10Gb controllers)
1 Realtek audio
4+1+1=6 PCIe lanes
4 Sata
4+4=8 M.2 slots
6+2 USB3.0 (back panel and front panel header)
2 ASM USB3.1g2 controller
That adds up to 31-34 already so at least one item is already being switched on/off depending on what else is in use.
https://content.hwigroup.net/images/editorial/1920...
evernessince - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
That's a limitation of the chipset. If you want more USB ports on a consumer motherboard you have to get a Ryzen motherboard. The X370 Hero has 14 USB ports on it. Ryzen and the X370 chipset simply support more USB ports.WithoutWeakness - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
> Regular ATX board that they decided to have random cutouts and extensions on the PCB that now requires an E-ATX compatible chassis> 10 fan/pump headers and water flow and temperature headers
> 4 full-length PCIe slots and an included SLI-HB bridge
> 5 Gigabit ethernet
> Only 2 RAM slots???
> $400???
I understand the appeal of the overclocking features and why people would look to buy this board if they wanted to push their overclocks another 100MHz but why is there such an absolutely absurd mishmash of features included like 4x PCIe lanes (without a PLX chip) and 5GbE? I feel like they took their original design for what should be the Maximus X Extreme and just started haphazardly trimming features like RAM slots and PLX support until they hit the $400 price point and said "ship it".
Really interested in the opinion of anyone who be looking to buy this board.
ggathagan - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
I don't disagree with your overall point, but limiting the board to a pair of DIMM slots makes sense for a board that purports to be focused on overclocking.I don't recall any motherboard that can overclock with 4 DIMM slots populated as well as it can with only 2 slots populated.
mapesdhs - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
Rampage IV Extreme might come close.The_Assimilator - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
> talks about DIMM.2 slot> doesn't show any pictures of it with M.2 drives installed
> doesn't do any M.2 tests at all in fact
Billy Tallis - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
What kind of tests do you want? It's a passive PCIe riser. It doesn't affect performance, it just relocates the M.2 slots away from your GPU(s).The_Assimilator - Saturday, May 12, 2018 - link
"It doesn't affect performance" Patently false, since reviews of M.2 drives by many sites - including this very one - have demonstrated that the highest-end models throttle during sustained workloads.Regardless of performance, DIMM.2 is a feature unique to this motherboard, and as such it should be covered by any review.
The test is relatively simple: temperatures/sustained transfer rates of a drive when using DIMM.2, vs those of the same drive mounted directly against the motherboard, vs that drive mounted against the motherboard but with the motherboards's supplied M.2 heatsink applied. For example, this board vs the recently-reviewed X299 XPower Gaming AC's M.2 cooling solution.
It should be something relatively simple to do and would make a great stand-alone article to answer the question that many people have, namely whether these fancy cooling solutions do have an effect on their M.2 drives' temperatures.
SlyNine - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
Glad to see some more AMD *squints eyes* Intel boardsCityZ - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
You see that connector between the SATA ports and the molex? Guess what it is.boozed - Friday, May 11, 2018 - link
The opening sentence gave me cancer.PhrogChief - Saturday, May 12, 2018 - link
LOL...Dragonstongue - Saturday, May 12, 2018 - link
IMO they really should have similar spec non LED/RGB bs motherboards for AMD as well as Intel because there are many (such as myself) that have ZERO need or want for RGB anything taking up the BOM for things that are far more useful.such as put the $ towards giving the best most stable VRM or ensuring the m.2 slots have the best cooling possible without having to resort to liquid (would not hurt them to move them away from right underneath the hottest parts in most computers such as graphics cards/cpu)
why can they not maybe figure out a way to place them right behind the sata/motherboard mains power where there tends to be a nice "hole" that is very rarely occupied with anything)
X shaped LMAO, I was expecting a significant X, but it barely cut the motherboard to give a very slight impression of this (and only if you look really closely)
I very much feel the same though, when you call everything X this or X that, Gaming this or Gaming that, Ultra this or Ultra that, the words lose all meaning, because "everyone is doing it"
ROG is a fine branding, and Hero or Formula or Maximus is also fine, they really do not need to add an even longer name on top of this to try to draw extra attention to it IMO ^.^
mapesdhs - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
Years ago, the ASUS Sriker II Extreme turned heads, as did the Maximus IV Extreme, and definitely the Rampage IV Extreme. These days, the whole notion of such boards has been rather diluted. Fun stuff like PLX chips has largely gone, while the oc headroom of the latest mainstream Intel chip is garbage (why anyone cares about a 6% bump over the official max turbo is beyond me; at least with SB one could easily reach a 28% bump over the official max turbo, and without the need for Iceland airflow to keep it cool). Oc'ing back in the days of S775, X58, P55 and SB was fun, one could relaly push the hw and see some great gains (sooo many delighted 2500K users out there), but now it's just a giant yawn fest. The CPUs are doing a lot of the oc work automatically, and they're getting good at it.mapesdhs - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
I meant to add, even outside the ROG line ASUS was doing funky things, eg. the P7P55 WS Supercomputer, x8/x8/x8/x8 on a P55 board! :D I hold most of the P55 3DMark records by plonking three 980s on that whacko board. The P9X79-E WS was similarly and usefully OTT, great for compute yet it has most of the same oc potential of the equiavent ROG board (R4E). Modern mbds have gone RGB bling mad because that's all they have left to tout.Dug - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
I agree with the VRM and m.2 slots.I would really like to know why m.2 slots are in such a hot location.
I'd also like to know why Intel won't increase the lanes needed for more bandwidth to devices.
PhrogChief - Saturday, May 12, 2018 - link
COMING SOON: Asus Republic of Maximus GamerX Type R Ultra Rev 2.0 Extreme X599 MASTER EDITION w-Aura Link LightFlow by Strixm16 - Sunday, May 13, 2018 - link
Interesting, I don't know why this high density RAM was not more of a thing back in the DDR3 days, although I could understand the desire to Overclock and those 16GB DIMMs don't allow that in DDR3 (not to mention that most were also ECC applications).I hope the prices go down, because a 16GB DIMM although not a hard thing to find now, it is still very expensive.
Otherwise, this is an amazing board indeed.
Aikouka - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
Seems a bit odd to go with a 5Gbps port on an expensive motherboard when ASRock is offering a 10Gbps port on their higher-end board (Z370 Professional Gaming i7). Heck, ASUS even releases stand-alone cards with the same chip that ASRock uses, which is the same company that makes the chip for this board.nimi - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
ASUS be like:A: Guys, slapping on RGB just isn't cutting it anymore, we need something new to stand out.
B: *looks up from his fruit X phone* Notches are all the rage these days, what if we added a NOTCH to our board?
A: I think you're on to something! Hey, why not go one step further, let's do FOUR notches!!! I'll bet it'll sell 4 times as fast!
B: Yes! And add "X" to the name for good measure.
A: BRILLIANT