Alaric
New Member
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2011
- Location
- Satan's Colon, US
I changed the title a little due to a great suggestion by ED. And thanks to ED for the review of this board that got me interested in it. 
I went outside my comfort zone with the mobo, CPU, and a real case (Phanteks Enthoo Luxe) for what is now my current rig. The case is phenomenal. It isn't just the room (there's lots), or the cable management (it's excellent), the RGB lighting (looks great), or the airflow (again, lots). The access to everything is what I love most. When my new graphics card shows up tomorrow it should take about 60 seconds to install because there is nothing in the way. And more HDD cages than I'll ever need. I could (almost) build a server farm for youtube ads.
Finally, realizing taste is subjective, it's a good looking case. Definitely a for Phanteks.
I've always used Asus mobos, and after some iffy reports about some Giga AMD boards a couple years ago, I stayed away from them. Live and learn-I love this board so far. It looks good, has RGB lighting options for the board, back I/O panel (I can actually see where I'm plugging stuff in without dragging the whole case out), and the audio section. Speaking of audio, that was always a sore spot for me on motherboards. The Realtek chips common on Asus boards sound like crap. This board doesn't make me want to clean my ears with an icepick. After installing the sound utility from the driver disc and turning off all the "enhancements" I ended up with clear, detailed sound, without being thin or dry sounding. Very musical. My only nitpick with the board so far is the RAM slots. They could be a little farther apart. The TridentZ sticks are packed against each other due to the thick heat spreaders. Since they're on the QVL it would have been nice to account for their size. And the RAM defaulted to 2133 MHz, but it was easy to go with the XMP profile in the BIOS so no points off for that. All in all a great board with what appears to be everything needed for some OC. Running at 4400 MHz now. Oops, one more small gripe. No PCI slots. My TV tuner card won't go in the mobo, so I'll be waiting for the new tuner at the end of the month. All things considered though, another
I expected a big performance jump going from the Vishera to the Skylake but for the little stuff I mostly do it hasn't been that dramatic. I expect gaming will improve and as I do more I'll see more of a difference. The SSD isn't too shabby, either. Opening the Event Viewer was instant. That's my big test so far, but going from 15-20 seconds to no wait at all was huge. I was unimpressed with the boot time at first, but of the 40 seconds it took, 30 of those seconds were the mobo splash screen. So about 10 seconds to the desktop with a 7 character password. Nice. And again, a
Overall I'm very happy with the build. Web pages render much faster, and it isn't just W 10. Across three browsers (including Firefox) long/difficult pages load immediately. That's using my old graphics card for now so the speed is coming from the new rig. I thought a lot of my online slows were the crappy internet connection. Not so much.
I can definitely recommend this motherboard, especially if you're considering another board and a sound card. It sounds good enough for me to put off an outboard DAC for a while. It looks great, has plenty of features, and wasn't too expensive. I can recommend the 6700k too, but everybody knows about them.
I went outside my comfort zone with the mobo, CPU, and a real case (Phanteks Enthoo Luxe) for what is now my current rig. The case is phenomenal. It isn't just the room (there's lots), or the cable management (it's excellent), the RGB lighting (looks great), or the airflow (again, lots). The access to everything is what I love most. When my new graphics card shows up tomorrow it should take about 60 seconds to install because there is nothing in the way. And more HDD cages than I'll ever need. I could (almost) build a server farm for youtube ads.
Finally, realizing taste is subjective, it's a good looking case. Definitely a for Phanteks.I've always used Asus mobos, and after some iffy reports about some Giga AMD boards a couple years ago, I stayed away from them. Live and learn-I love this board so far. It looks good, has RGB lighting options for the board, back I/O panel (I can actually see where I'm plugging stuff in without dragging the whole case out), and the audio section. Speaking of audio, that was always a sore spot for me on motherboards. The Realtek chips common on Asus boards sound like crap. This board doesn't make me want to clean my ears with an icepick. After installing the sound utility from the driver disc and turning off all the "enhancements" I ended up with clear, detailed sound, without being thin or dry sounding. Very musical. My only nitpick with the board so far is the RAM slots. They could be a little farther apart. The TridentZ sticks are packed against each other due to the thick heat spreaders. Since they're on the QVL it would have been nice to account for their size. And the RAM defaulted to 2133 MHz, but it was easy to go with the XMP profile in the BIOS so no points off for that. All in all a great board with what appears to be everything needed for some OC. Running at 4400 MHz now. Oops, one more small gripe. No PCI slots. My TV tuner card won't go in the mobo, so I'll be waiting for the new tuner at the end of the month. All things considered though, another
I expected a big performance jump going from the Vishera to the Skylake but for the little stuff I mostly do it hasn't been that dramatic. I expect gaming will improve and as I do more I'll see more of a difference. The SSD isn't too shabby, either. Opening the Event Viewer was instant. That's my big test so far, but going from 15-20 seconds to no wait at all was huge. I was unimpressed with the boot time at first, but of the 40 seconds it took, 30 of those seconds were the mobo splash screen. So about 10 seconds to the desktop with a 7 character password. Nice. And again, a
Overall I'm very happy with the build. Web pages render much faster, and it isn't just W 10. Across three browsers (including Firefox) long/difficult pages load immediately. That's using my old graphics card for now so the speed is coming from the new rig. I thought a lot of my online slows were the crappy internet connection. Not so much.
I can definitely recommend this motherboard, especially if you're considering another board and a sound card. It sounds good enough for me to put off an outboard DAC for a while. It looks great, has plenty of features, and wasn't too expensive. I can recommend the 6700k too, but everybody knows about them.
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I'll get that fixed. Should have posted after the early AM coffee.
Extra points for knowing what movie that's from. LOL
