 The Corsair carbide air 540 high airflow cube case is great for air cooling or liquid cooling. Check the link in the video description to learn more. Now we were inspired by TinyTomLogan so you can check out his YouTube channel, Time to Live Customs, TinyTomLogan's review of the Maximus 6 Extreme from ASUS. And the reason we were inspired by it was because he had the hushpa, or whatever the word is for it, to basically come out and say, yes, this is a fully featured board and it has all the bells and whistles, but who gives two shakes of a lamb's tail because it doesn't actually affect performance in a way that reflects the extra money you spent on it. So we actually were inundated with requests to take TinyTomLogan's conclusion that something like an extreme grade board is not necessarily a great value for the money and put it into practical terms where we actually test it. So we took the Maximus 6 Extreme, which is a Z87 motherboard designed for hardcore tuning and tweaking, liquid nitrogen overclocking. It comes with the OC panel, which allows you to make hardware adjustments to pretty much anything you want without even going into the BIOS. Very, very high grade board. And we took the least expensive Z87 mini ITX motherboard that we could find, which was the Gigabyte Z87N Wi-Fi, and we put them head to head. We were able to achieve the same overclock on both of them because neither Slick nor I are really extreme overclockers to the point where we're playing around with tertiary memory sub-timings, nothing like that. That's where you're going to squeeze a little bit of extra performance out of an extreme grade board. So we got the same overclock of 4.7 GHz on both of these platforms. Actually, I'm going to take you right over here for a minute. We're going to have a look at the test platform. So you can see that we were running our Vertex, these are Vertex 4s, right? Yep, we were running our Vertex 4 test drives. We were running a 4770K, a GTX 780, as well as, of course, our H100 cooler, of course, our AX850 power supply, and that is pretty much it. We only ran a couple games, and we're looking at this from a gaming perspective, although it should be noted that slight differences in gaming performance will also reflect slight differences in other performance because the only variable we changed was the motherboard. That was it. So performance-wise, I'm going to chuck a couple of graphs up here so you guys can have a look at these, and that should give you some idea of about what you can expect. So it's anywhere from around 2 to 5% from going from sort of the most bare-bones board that we could all the way to the most extreme board that we could. And the thing about this is that I don't want this to be sort of discouraging. If you really want a high-end board, there are still benefits. So, for example, high-end boards such as the Maximus 6 Formula in particular, I think is a great example of a high-end board that delivers compelling value. It has much better onboard audio than most of the other boards out there on the market. It has a better LAN solution than a non-gaming-oriented board. Something like Color Scheme is very important to many gamers, many tweakers, many system builders who are really into the looks of their machines, and you do get all of those things with a high-grade board that you don't get with an entry-level board. I don't know where this board is. I think Slick told me it was here somewhere, but I don't know where it disappeared to. However, don't expect to get some kind of crazy performance benefit from going with a higher-end motherboard. Another example of where you'll get a benefit with the Maximus 6 Extreme is obviously expansion. So this particular board only has about four SATA ports. It's got a single PCI Express 16x slot with the Maximus 6 Form- Extreme. I think I said formula before, whatever. The Extreme, you get four-way crosswire... Crosswire. My wires got crossed. Four-way crossfire, four-way SLI. You get all of that stuff that most people will probably never do, but if you're one of those people who really feels like they need the option for that stuff, I personally don't because I will never go four-way crossfire or four-way SLI. In fact, I don't recommend it at all. So if you're one of those people who feels like they need that, then you have the option as well. Thank you, Slick, for fixing my upside-down Nyan Cat, which was hopefully serving to spice things up in the background a little bit if you weren't fascinated by the content. So in conclusion, guys, does buying a gaming motherboard actually yield higher FPS? In many cases, no. You have to look at it in terms of, does the value proposition of that higher-end board make sense for you, or is it something you don't really care about? Thank you for checking out this, whatever this was, online as Tech Tips. Click like on the video if you liked it, click dislike if you disliked it, click comment if you feel the need to express some other kind of sentiment about the video. So, for example, if you are completely disappointed that this Nyan Cat does not, in fact, have a rainbow tail, which I was disappointed to discover when it arrived, then let us know that too.