2017 Hardware Thread

solarstarshines said:

I am by no means an engineer but seriously Steve the Z270 platform could of been built around coffee lake and future core refreshes

AMD and Intel have both done this in the past so it's only natural to ask the question why do we need to keep changing platforms when they have had the roadmap for years

I also understand with power consumption and how it is transferred from board to chip etc yes they would have to design it to be compatible to new architecture but at the same time if they figured out how to do it with X299 they should of somehow figured this in between Kabylake and Coffee lake

How hard would it actually be to have made Z170 Skylake/Kabylake Z270 Kabylake compatible /Coffee lake future refresh that would be more appealing but you have had three different platforms come out for the same socket makes no sense but again i am no Engineer

Probably economy, each step has to pay for itself and for path to next step.

solarstarshines said:

I would believe that if they weren't so big of a entity but they have their hands in a lot of new Technology the focus isn't consumer quality more like banking on the fan base to keep it going

Yep, it's just business. They keep doing whatever works. If it does not, then they change strategy and yet again they have their users trapped for a few more years. :)

ThrashZone said:

Hi,
Sweet @worf105 Not sure about the vengeance line but the dominator line the C15 is better than the C16 but heck you know more about ram than I :)
@essenbe yes that darn original x99 ddr4 was freaking expensive :)

Was only looking at the LED but have since decided to for go that idea lol. Will more than likely but my usual favourites, Corsair LPX 16GB (2 x 8Gb) 3200 14-16-16-36 @ 1.35v Black for this system.

essenbe said:

I'm a big fan of Asus boards.

Me too (Now) My next will be ASUS and it will be one of the Prime board.

Tommy, when they change the architecture, the TDP of the CPU and the internal mechanism, they have to have chipsets that support it. The Z170 boards, at least many of them, could run Kaby Lake CPUs, but the came out with a chipset built for the 7700K. If you had a Z170 board, you didn't have to buy a new board. X299 is the same architecture no matter how many cores it has. All the boards can run on the same chipset. We have known ever since Sandy Bridge that the i7s and i5s were the same CPU. The only difference was that hyperthreading was turned off.

Coffee Lake is a very different circumstance. They added 2 more cores and a higher TDP, so power delivery had to change. If power delivery changes, how does that affect the VRM of the board? I don't know, but I believe an educated guess is it would have to be different. The Coffee Lake CPUs have the same number of pins, they are just mapped to do different things that Kaby lakes pinout did. They altered the way the CPU internals work. I can see why a new chipset was needed with this CPU.

Now, was it necessary for them to come out with a Z270 board when a Z170 would run the new CPU? My guess is probably not. You and I have X99 boards, Yours is just a newer version than mine. With a bios update my board will run your CPU just fine I hear. So, did they need to come out with a V2 X99 chipset? Probably not.

I can fault Intel for a lot of the things they have done and maybe some they are doing now. But, I can't fault them for this new chipset. You probably can fault them for coming out with 3 chipsets in less than a year, and probably for coming out with some of the CPUs they have come out with. I do and can find a lot of other stuff tha is greed. We have always known that with a new CPU, Intel is going to come out with a new chipset or new boards for it. Many time it was not necessary at all. I just think this time it was justified. What d8bauer said was the because of the extra cores and increased TDP, more pins were needed for power delivery and regulation. They just remapped some of the pins from Kaby Lake to Coffee Lake. The socket still has the same number of pins, just those pins do different things now. You can put a 7700K in a Z370 board. It just won't run.

specialkone said:

Maybe I'm wrong, but when I look for motherboards, I only look at Asus boards.

essenbe said:

Maybe I'm wrong, but when I look for motherboards, I only look at Asus boards.

I bought mine only because of You Steve, and now its the only board I will buy, when and if I upgrade. Love my Asus board. :)