I had no idea this was even in planning but saw it on reddit and no one posted a topic about them here.
They look really clean. I hope they do AMD boards too.
Apparently they come in at $299 which is insane if true. Very nice but pretty much justba show build thing rather than an actual daily use machine.
The edits they are coming hard and fast: There is a Gamers Nexus video about these. They are pretty sure this is an ECS board. Never dealt with them but the Internet’s echo chamber is telling me they are pretty budget boards. For 300 that is not cool. What also is not cool? Z370 with no USB C ports. Yup. Okay looking less and less attractive by the second.
Agreed, it seems like NZXT’s minimalist design is the main selling point here - should be interesting to see some NZXT themed builds but honestly I wouldn’t be surprised if they died out after they have made their rounds around the YouTube tech personalities. But hey , I guess that’s just 1st generation products for you.
Yeah I like their cases, I have a h440, and the design they follow. These do at least match that but comments are not so friendly to them. Expensive, under featured, unconfirmed quality and capability and the plates that make it look so nice would hurt the cooling.
It is out.of the blue to me and you are probably right with them being a one time deal. They do seem like show boards and not much else.
If they end up making ECS more money, who knows, maybe they’ll start adding more features
definitely not going to pick up one now, but I’m a fan of the design and I’ll see what they’re doing in a few years, hopefully with something on an AMD platform
definitely not going to buy into them now, but you could say it's a "final piece of the puzzle" for me
idk, i feel like this is taking the clean design too far. I like seeing everything on the motherboard. If you’re going to cover it up, why don’t you just buy a case without a glass window?
I get that, but hey, some people might like to still show off their coolers and fans without having all the little details of the circuits and capacitors and whatever else
I’m all for more options, at least people who are really into looks won’t have to resort to painting their motherboards anymore
Ah I see, so that counts for some of the cost and development to implement them in to the motherboard.
@Atatax I can see the view too but I like it more for the modding potential. I painted my H440 yellow and plan to repaint it at some undefined stage yellow again but with grey white and black accents. The White motherboard plates could also be customised to match the case.
I will cop to being way out of the loop on this and while I knew about the GN video, I have not watched it and did not know about the Hardware Canucks video.
I like this covered style a lot. I’ve seen it before on a few motherboards. But I’m not going to be their guinea pig, that’s for sure. They’ll need to prove their quality and reliability first. Also, they’re full ATX boards but with only 4 SATA ports? That’s so strange.
Depends how you handle your storage. Personally I never needed more then 2 SATA ports in my PCs. 1 for system drive/SSD, one for data drive/HDD for games etc. Everything else is offloaded to the NAS and/or external storage.
And now with system drives moving more towards M.2 anyway I’d need even less. But that’s personal preference I guess.
For the boards themselves idk… Not sure where or how a case manufacturer picked up the know-how to suddenly release a motherboard, has anybody heard of this before? I mean there weren’t even rumors. Surprised there’s not more coverage over this already, I mean it’s not every day a new competitor enters the market.
I had though about this, 4 is reasonable if M.2 is also available. For me right now I have 4 drives connected and a 5th idle that I am still meaning to connect up as an OS Backup drive. So I would max the Sata connections straight out of the box. 1 OS, 1 General Data, 1 Steam Drive and 1 General game drive that are not steam games.
Though In the future after I do my next large upgrade I will be turning the old PC into a NAS/router for backups and internet tinkering.
For the boards themselves. All signs are pointing to ECS as the board maker, they also apparently do ASUS motherboards since 2013 or so from what I have read. So take that how you will. It seem a bit of a sparse board feature wise especially for the price. What remains to be seen is the software side. What will be BIOS be like, how will the Hue+ and Grid+ be integrated and so on. Overclocking is unknown right now and people are all ready speculating that temps on this board will not be super wonderful with the plates not allowing airflow over the underlying parts.
Yeah I thought it would be outsourced in some way, would make sense. If they had hired a large team of specialists this would have surfaced a while ago.
I’m guessing next NZXT will be selling pre-built systems consisting of their own branded where ever possible.
A QUIETER SYSTEM
Our unique Adaptive Noise Reduction uses an on-board noise sensor to measure and learn the specifics of your system to find the ideal balance between fan speed and cooling. With up to a 40% reduction in fan noise level, you won’t need to waste time designing custom fan curves. Leveraging machine learning to improve its results, this will ensure your fan settings are always optimal, even if you change hardware.
That sounds like something they wouldn’t have been able to achieve without going for their own custom mobo design far as i can tell.
As for ECS being the OEM, ECS hasn’t been known for being the best board manufacturer out there, but they’ve also haven’t been known to use good core components either, e.g. capacitors, MOSFETs, and chokes. So if NZXT has specified quality components and ECS follows through then it would probably be fine. Alternatively, NZXT could have an ODM and a separate OEM, so who knows what the quality is going to be like.
I will dive a little bit deeper into those boards wenn i have time.
But if those are ECS boards it really depends on which devision those boards come from.
I have worked with ECS consumer grade boards in the past,
and those were all crap pretty much.
However ECS as a oem manufacturer did also made some reasonable server / enterprise boards.
But i have to say that its a pretty long time ago that i have seen a consumer grade ECS board on the market that were not oems.
