This is our quick unboxing and overview of the ASRock Z170 Extreme 7+
This motherboard is designed for the Intel "Skylake" Family of CPUS -- socket 1151 i3/i5/i7 e.g. the i7 6700k, which will be featured in an upcoming video.
Awesome review Wendell thanks. Finaly see some of the Z170 boards in the wild, was looking forward to this.
Asrock realy has impressed me with the quality of their motherboards. They have realy stepped up to the game. The Z170 Extreme 7 and the Z170 Fatal1ty Gaming K6 both are very decent boards. They realy use great quality components in their vreg designs, which is realy a good thing. 60A chokes, dual stack mosfets, nichicon 12K caps all sollid stuff. 12 powerphases all very nice stuff.
Gigabytes G1 Gaming Z170-X board also comes with one of those 5.25 bays also with only one USB 3 and 3.1 ports. I guess this is just the thing this gen. It looks very similar only that the Gigabyte one is fully metal shrouded. I don't like them at all, most case companies are getting rid of ODD bays and these Mobo companies seem not to have got the message. I would have preferred a back panel PCI card.
So basically it's a 50% Chance to hit the 4.5 Ghz which I run super easily with my i5 2500K Sandy Bridge for years and just on a good Aircooler?!
Wendell could you make some sort of Video about why there isnt a great jump in Performance in the latest years. What new technology it would need which isnt there today and maybe a little guess when we will see another leap in CPU Powers.
well for pure gaming performance, there wont be a huge diffrence between your overclocked 2500k and the 6600k. The raw cpu performance has not increased that much, However certain new instruction sets that comes with the newer chips, makes them significantly better for certain tasks.
Most people don't realize, but you know the CPU is wired directly into the memory
There's a memory arbiter between the CPU and memory, whose purpose is to serialize access to a memory chip. So maybe not that directly, but pretty close!
@wendell The Intel graphics bug on Linux, what OS/DE did you use? Theres a bug on the newer Intel drivers causing on anything using OpenGL. The temporary fix is switching back to UXA acceleration. This maybe isnt the same thing, but its what poped into my head when you mentioned the graphics problems.
I should do a rig setup guide/thingie. One machine is rocking out with the 4k, the ultra wide, and a small project monitor. I'm using the MX Master (which can be paired to more than one computer) to be paired to linux +windows VM and hitting a button on the mouse in Linux causes the keyboard to be remapped to windows. I can toggle the mouse over to windows and use normally, then toggle back to linux to hit the button and seize control of the keyboard from windows.
I could actually compute conveniently like this while still passing through a graphics adapter to windows.
throw in a raspberry pi for out-of-band management, access to a serial console from the host machine, and having it wired into power and reset on the motherboard and holy crap we've really got something.
the real thing to tie it all off would be RGB LED strip control + small permanent LCD mounted to the case somewhere.