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I have been conspicuously silent about Intel's new high-end desktop x299 platform and the CPUs that they just announced to go with it and This was on purpose, but probably not for the reasons that you think I've spent the last few days walking the show floor chatting with industry folks and Generally trying to wrap my head around what the actual hell it is that Intel's trying to do with this launch Before we get into that though a primer on x299 So socket 2011 v3 is old news socket 2066 is the hot new girl in class With the new chipset comes support for up to 7 series Skylake based Intel core i9 processors We get up to quad channel DDR4 memory running at up to DDR4 2666 megahertz we get up to 44 PCI Express lanes for massive expansion up to greatly expanded NVMe and Optane storage capabilities and up to two preferred Turbomax cores that run at higher boost frequencies Well, what's with all this up to? I'll get to that first. Let's take a look at the boards So Intel's partners have been out in full force with support for this new tech Asus was showing about half a dozen boards based on the same basic DNA each with some standout features The rampage 6 extreme includes dual water flow sensors to go with the pump headers that are standard on this generation Their deluxe board includes 802.1 180 multi gigabit wireless and an OLED post and system monitoring display and the Toughmark one comes with the usual extra thermal sensors tough armor and a freaking graphics card sag holder Gigabytes digital RGB header allows lighting effects with individually addressable LED strips They are smart fan 5 software now allows fans to be turned off outright If system temperatures allow it a huge boon to silence freaks like me They've gone ham on USB 3.1 10 gigabit ports including like the others support for the new type-c front panel spec and they were showing off four PCIe NVMe SSDs running in a single SSDs running in raid which in and of itself isn't exactly groundbreaking But the fact that they were running off of the CPU and they were bootable is MSI on the subject of NVMe has boards with native support for up to five M.2 SSDs and is putting a really strong emphasis on cooling for them Like everyone else they've given a lot of thought to the aesthetics of their boards you can even 3d print accessories from templates and swap cooler covers in some cases and Unlike everybody else. This is interesting. They've got a white or red LED That tells you what kind of CPU you've got installed and in turn then how many of the features that you're looking at on the board are Actually going to be enabled Which I guess brings us to a fairly natural conclusion to the nicely scripted part of this video Because I've got some rough notes for some other stuff that I've got to get off my back But to do that, I think it's probably better if we go for a little walk Going back to my earlier question What what is this platform? Quite honestly what it looks like to me is that Intel themselves can't really decide It's like they've changed their mind multiple times and the whole thing Just seems like this this knee-jerk reaction to AMD's announcement of their up to 16 core 32 thread threadripper platform and then I mean some of the things they're doing look just kind of like a half desperate attempt to appease enthusiasts and gamers who if they feel anything like me where You know the mainstream has been stuck with quad core processors for the last 10 years and even on the enthusiast level We're lucky to get another two cores and last time around we even had to pay another $700 just for the privilege of going from 8 to 10 cores with the new Broadwell e-generation I mean to be clear for me personally a lot of this stuff can only be good. I mean high core count overclockable water-cooled servers, that's that's right in my wheelhouse. That's perfect and when you're someone who doesn't pay for hardware then It's expensive no problem. I mean not to mention that as a hardware enthusiast I'm not going to be struggling to pair the correct board and the correct memory and the correct CPU together To make sure that I'm getting the most out of the entire platform Because honestly, that's one of the biggest problems with the platform right now. It's really confusing Kaby Lake X muddies the waters in a way that just makes Absolutely no sense for Intel to do I mean I've spoken to system integrators here at the show I'm not going to name them by name or anything, but they flat-out said we're not going to support this This aspect of the platform is a mess because what is Kaby Lake X like on the surface? It sounds like they've gone ahead and they've added the latest architecture To this platform in some you know Amazing wow we engineered a new generation overnight kind of way But what actually happened was they took the existing Kaby Lake processors on the mainstream platform and just like Stapled them on to socket 2066 the only difference between the 7740 and the 7640 Compared to the socket 1151 versions is that they're rated at 20 watt higher TDPs they're clocked 100 megahertz higher and Intel is promising better overclocking on them But at the end of the day am I going to spend another hundred dollars on a board just for that? And why on earth would Intel? Nuter all the features on the motherboard just for the sake of me being able to run a chip at like a little bit higher frequency They don't have more PCI Express lanes They've still only got 16 and making matters even more confusing they only run dual channel memory still So when you go and you buy an x2 99 motherboard it can have anywhere from 4 To 8 memory slots on it which might support two sets of dual channel memory a single set of quad channel memory Or two sets of quad channel memory so you might actually have dim slots that don't work if you install a Kaby Lake XCPU Oh, and I mean right. This is crazy, too I even forgot the part how x2 99 boards aren't going to have all the connectors for onboard graphics So the onboard graphics are fused off which wouldn't inherently be a huge problem I expect someone spending you know 300 to 600 dollars on a motherboard to buy a dedicated graphics card But the issue is that then you can't even use features that you would be able to on the mainstream platform Like quick sync for example that rely on the integrated GPU in order to function Kaby Lake just makes no sense at all Okay, so now let's talk about those reactionary high core count CPUs again I'm not complaining an 18 core extreme edition that's overclockable sounds great to me But everyone and their dog knows that Intel was only planning to use the low core count version of their Xeon processors To create their high-end desktop platform so that was going to be up to 12 cores and Surprise surprise here at the show the only chips they're showing are based on that one So what Intel did is they saw oh no AMD has threadripper They're they're making us look bad by announcing this stuff that people really want Quick announce something even though you know we don't know how much power it's going to consume We don't know what clock speeds it's going to run at we don't know how much we're going to charge for it We just we need to make sure we're announcing something so that when AMD launches threadripper We're not caught completely with our pants down and no way to react to it But here's the problem they're taking this wait and see approach for a reason that I personally Don't really like they want to see what threadripper turns into before they commit to what they're going to deliver to the consumer And that's exactly the problem that they're running up against in the first place here Here's some corporate strategy advice free of charge Intel build the best thing you can For the best price that you can deliver it and you're not going to get blindsided by a competitor That walks in and delivers something way better for a lower price So we've got this really confusing platform. We've got these these mid-core count Harvested Xeons on the high-end desktop platform that are going to be differentiated by having lots of PCI express lanes Which I think is what gives them the core i9 designation We're going to have the normal chips some of which still have lots of PCI express lanes and go up to 12 cores All of the ones I've mentioned so far support quad channel memory and anywhere from 28 to 44 PCI express lanes Then we're going to have Kabylake X which only supports 16 PCI express lanes and get this The motherboard manufacturers have to support any chip that you could put in the socket on every single board How do you build a board around 16 to 44 PCI express lanes dual to quad channel memory and Anywhere from 4 to 18 cores The whole launch is so rushed that Gigabyte flat out isn't supporting Thunderbolt 3 on any of their X299 boards Because they didn't have time to go through the certification process And the whole thing is confusing as hell to not just the general consumer but even enthusiasts And I mean there's other stuff here that just makes no sense to me as well V-Rock okay so I talked about how you can have you know up to you know better support for NVMe storage than ever before So this is a really cool feature you can actually run bootable RAID through the CPU Rather than letting it get bottlenecked by the chipset now with NVMe devices But out of the box Intel is only supporting RAID 0 and if you want to run RAID 1 or RAID 10 You need to buy a $99 physical key and plug it into the board And if you want to support RAID 5 on top of all that other stuff you're going to pay another $300 Like I get that they're worried about cannibalizing their Xeon sales and their server and high-end Workstation sales with this platform but this seems like such a step backwards On a consumer product going back to buying like RAID keys and sticking them onto a motherboard And as if that wasn't anti-consumer enough the word on the street now And I really hope they reverse this decision if it is one Is that this bootable RAID this vrock feature is only going to work with Intel branded NVMe SSDs They don't make the best NVMe SSDs at least not till Optane lands So they're basically going yeah here's the highest end you know enthusiast thing Oh by the way put some you know SSDs in here for your wicked RAID array that aren't even the best on the market So I'm sorry if this video was a little more rambly than what I usually do and Maybe a little longer than what I do these days but I guess it just felt appropriate given the frustration that I've had I mean you know I've been asking for higher core counts and I've been you know asking for really a lot of the things that they're doing right now Which like it's funny because here I am complaining about it but what's frustrating is not that they're doing it What's frustrating is my perception of the reasons that they're doing it so I guess that's pretty much it Like leave a comment letting me know your guys' thoughts am I being nitpicky or are the criticisms fair? Leave a comment below and let's at least talk about it if Intel is going to come across this video I'd love for them to get some real feedback not just from me but also from you guys So thanks for watching this video here from Computex 2017 in beautiful Taiwan A huge shout out to Corsair for allowing us to be here Corsair is the first company to launch their 12-liter Powerhouse of a Gaming Machine That's available with up to a GTX 1080 graphics card with a 1080 Ti version coming soon And a huge shout out to Synergy for offering 25% off their mouse and keyboard sharing software to all of our viewers Thanks for watching and I'll see you guys next time