 Welcome to my unboxing and first look at the Asus ROG series Maximus V formula. This is the Thunder FX version and there will be more on what makes it Thunder FX, but there is a plain formula version as well. It includes a Diablo III mousepad, that's kind of cool, support for Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 processors from their third generation line of CPUs. Intel Z77 chipset means you get all those usual features including SRT for SSD caching as well as Virtuum VP for accelerating your GPU experience and allowing you to use your integrated graphics for video transcoding and your dedicated graphics for gaming. Supports 2-way SLI or quad SLI with 2 dual GPU cards and up to 3-way Crossfire X or quad Crossfire X with 2 dual GPU cards. Here are some highlight features including Fusion Thermal, completely redesigned thermal dissipation design for the VRM, Supreme FX 4 which has some really cool new innovations, we'll talk more about those later. Thunder FX is included on this version and we'll definitely talk about that more later and Diablo III mousepad also included. Let's go ahead and get this bad boy opened up. So some more features, we'll talk about those as we get it opened up. It comes with a Diablo III mousepad which is here and you can get the... I don't know how to get that out. Oh here at the top there's an envelope, sticky thing. Alright this is the Thunder FX. So the Thunder FX, yeah this is the kind of thing that is a tremendous value add for a board like this. So yes you're spending a bunch of money on a board but if you're a frequent upgrader sometimes you can get, well I hate to say burned a little bit, but you can get burned a little bit on spending a ton of money on these premium boards only to find out that there's nothing you can really carry forward with you in the future. Well the Thunder FX is something that you will be able to. So this is, okay what do they have to say for themselves? Versatile gaming audio for PC and consoles, right it is compatible with any device, tablet, phone, PC, console, doesn't matter. It is capable of driving up to 300 ohm resistance headphones and uses premium capacitors for pure powerful audio. Supreme sound accessory that your console, LAN or entertainment enjoyment requires. So let's have a look at what they've got in terms of spec. They're using a Cmedia 6631 audio processor. They're using, as I recall, I have notes on this so why don't we get more into it later actually. Let's just put this aside for now. So let's check out the board. First we've got our Thunder FX audio solution. So we'll take a closer look at that. There's the USB interface and then you can also just use a standard stereo input which will allow it to amplify the signal and output to wherever you need it to go. So there's your headphones as well as your microphone in. Xbox 360 voice in is also included. That's pretty cool. This is awesome. Check this out. So this microphone port right here is actually for active noise canceling. So if you paired this with say for example, ASUS' uh, where did they go? Vulcan noise canceling headphones, you would have multiple rounds of noise canceling going on. So you would have the closeness of the headphones. You would have the noise canceling built into the headphones and then you'd have a microphone actively listening to what is the ambient noise around you and then canceling that out at the sound card level which is very, very cool. So what else we got here? You can switch between PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 mode. You can also switch, oh yeah, you just got a volume knob and then that's pretty much it for the physical attributes of the unit. So this probably reminds you guys a little bit of the Essence One that we took a look at a while ago. So it's more like, it's well, it's not quite an Essence One which is like a $600 USB DAC and amplifier itself. I mean this one's bundled with a motherboard but it's along the same lines in terms of trying to deliver the best possible quality audio. So there are advantages. Actually this is in line with their red line concept. So you see the red line that actually separates all of the audio components on the PCB from the rest of the PCB. This is to reduce interference. There's also shields here to again reduce stray interference and there is an advantage to keeping it separated from the PCB that way. You then get a further advantage going with something like a high end Zonar sound card and putting that in a PCI slot or PCI Express slot because then you're further removing yourself from all the hoo-ha that's going on inside your PC case. By removing it even further and plugging in via USB you can almost completely eliminate it. So that's one of the reasons that people do like using these external USB sound cards. So let's start with just an overall look at the layout of the board. So one thing that you guys are probably going to be wondering about right off the bat is the Republic of Gamers logo in the middle. They have brought back the breathing eye so it is no longer just illuminated. It is not not illuminated. It has a breathing pulsating effect going on right under your CPU socket. So that should look really really cool once we've got it powered on. Oh I jumped straight to the board. I didn't do accessories. Just a sec. Alright coming back to the board. We'll do accessories later I guess. So a couple things I want to mention is it comes with a full one year copy of Kaspersky and comes with a full copy of Demon Tools which is kind of neat. One thing to note though guys about formula boards versus extreme boards because in theory like you know an extreme level board should have everything a formula level board. So why is it that you can get this Thunder FX one with a formula board and not with an extreme board and why does the formula board have this super high end onboard audio which we'll get more into later and not an extreme board. The reason for that is that Asus is trying to appease the different market segments. So an extreme buyer user is not necessarily even going to want to use onboard audio no matter how good it is. They're probably going to want to buy like a dedicated couple hundred dollars on our sound card to throw on it. So there's no point providing them with that high end onboard audio anyway although it'll still be pretty decent. So networking. Here we go. So they're using Intel networking again however they have completely redesigned the Intel Game First technology that allows you to prioritize gaming or prioritize other applications depending on what you need and you can not only use it on the Intel Gigabit Ethernet but you can also use it on the included Wi-Fi network module and even if you add a third party NIC like say even a multi-port NIC you can still use the Asus software that's built into AI Suite 2 in order to prioritize different applications and get the best possible experience. So even if you load something in here you can still use Game First 2 which has been completely rewritten from Game First 1 in order to provide better compatibility and a more seamless overall experience. The reason Asus went with Intel versus Killer for this particular application because if you guys have seen some high end motherboards are using Killer networking is that they wanted that flexibility to allow you to use it not only on this one network connection here but also on everything else as well. So I want to talk about the PCI Express slot layout. It's going to run in 16x, 8x, 8x or it will run in 8x, 4x, 4x. Now these are all running directly off of the CPU and they are all PCIe 3.0 enabled slots which means that even if you're running 8, 4, 4 that's equivalent to PCIe 2, 16, 8, 8 which is plenty of bandwidth assuming you're using newer generation video cards that use PCIe 3 for three-way crossfire configuration. However Nvidia doesn't allow 4x slots for SLI so you'll be limited to two-way SLI but one cool thing that you should notice guys is that as you may have seen Asus is doing a lot of triple slot graphics cards with their DirectCU2 cooler and there's a lot of boards that aren't really compatible with multi GPU configurations with these cards. Well they thought of that and they went okay well let's leave huge spacing in between the slots so that you can even use two triple slot PCI Express cards and still you're left with a PCIe 4x slot for expansion whether you want to throw a RAID card in there, a network card in there or whatever else you have a desire for. So moving on to the VRM. You can't really see it very well but something to note is that Asus hasn't gone overboard in terms of how many phases that they've built into the voltage regulation modules or into the power delivery system on this board. Instead of going with a huge multi-phase design they've gone with a lower phase design that uses higher end components in order to make sure that the tolerances are as low as possible. And speaking of low tolerances they've also gone with a slightly different overall take on the component sourcing than some of their competitors have as well. So while it's interesting to see what a capacitor is rated for in terms of current delivery at 105 degrees because that seems to a normal user you'd go okay yeah that's a highly stressful environment so that probably represents a worst case scenario. There are power delivery designs that will perform extremely well at 105 degrees Celsius but then will actually suffer in terms of their efficiency at a more realistic temperature like maybe 70 degrees which is what you might encounter in a typical gamer system. So Asus wanted whether you're using extreme cooling all over your system, you're going to be water cooling your VRM and you know you're going to be going all out on that or whether you're going to be going for like a silent system and it's going to be running completely passive with very little airflow around it they want it to perform well no matter what scenario that you're going to use it in. So they're using Nikkecon GT caps and this is the same design they were using on their x79 boards and if it can handle x79 then d77 shouldn't be a problem. Also something that Asus specifically asked me to point this out is that they adhere fully to Intel's spec in terms of the build quality of the socket itself, the components that go around the socket itself and it's not just the marketing spec of what they've built over here but they can actually deliver the quality of power that they're generating to the CPU itself and not all solutions are built equal in this manner. It's also worth remembering that it comes with all the usual Asus features so there's actually eight four pin PWM fan connectors scattered all over the board. Love seeing stuff like that, there's two in here and you can use fan expert two in order to control them. Some boards have fan control options but not all of the ports are supported, that's not the way that it works with the Asus one and you can even use external temperature probes in order to control those fans so it has up to three probes and I can't remember where all the slots are. There's one so you just hook up these probes and you can run them wherever you want them to go, I think there's one sort of over here somewhere, anyway there's three, run them wherever you want them to go whether it's a hard drive and then you have your chassis fan plugged in in the front, you make sure your hard drive stays cool if it's getting too warm or wherever you want to put them you can adjust your fan curves in order to make sure that everything stays appropriately cooled. You've also got all your usual stuff including USB boost which gives you better performance out of your USB 3 ports, you've also got AI charger which supports not only Apple devices but also Android devices for accelerated charging over your USB ports. There's the Thunderbolt header which is present on almost all of the Asus Z77 boards which, where is it, it's right here somewhere, Thunderbolt header right there. So there's the Thunderbolt header which allows you to add Thunderbolt retroactively to this board even though it doesn't include it. It supports USB BIOS flashback which basically doesn't really need anything, actually hold on let me find that. No button required folks, you just rename the BIOS file to this file name right here, you put it in the ROG connect port and then you restart the system and there's some flashing lights that indicate when the BIOS is flashed. Remember you can use USB BIOS flashback without even a CPU or memory installed in the board. Alright moving right along then, Fusion Thermo, this is cool. So there's a heat pipe in here, right there and then there's also a water channel. So you can either use air cooling or liquid cooling and while it will perform perfectly well with air cooling and they've designed it, they're actually using the special coating that enables better heat conduction and all that good stuff, the heat pipe in there, blah blah blah, it's a great air cooler however you can get phenomenal performance with it by using a water cooling setup. So these are 3 8's barbs and they're a little bit narrower on the board than I would have liked to see however the restriction shouldn't be too bad because I saw a cutaway diagram of how the routing of the tube is done inside and they're using very smooth curves rather than using sharp 90 degrees like you often see non water cooling oriented companies do. So I would expect this to not really slow down your flow rate that much and I'm very excited to see that Asus has made some significant improvements to the quality of their water cooling versus what they were doing back in 2007. So it uses all nickel and copper which means you're not going to run into any corrosion issues. If anyone had a Foxconn Black Ops board and actually tried to water cool that, you know what I'm talking about, those things corroded like crazy and just fell apart. So Asus has figured all of that out and they want you to be running this board 2, 3, 4, or 5 years down the line without falling apart. So moving on to the Supreme FX4 audio, this is discrete class audio and you look at how big the actual PCB that is laid aside for your onboard audio is and it's almost a sound card worth of space. So it shouldn't be that surprising that they're able to build in a fair amount of quality there. So the red line shielding actually is a physical separation of the PCB which is very very cool and then they're using Elna premium audio caps, so those are all here, and then this guy right here is kind of special. This is a 1500 microfarad massive cap. That's what Asus is calling it, a massive cap. So what does this allow you to do? It allows you to store power in reserve for when you need it. So let's say you're creeping down the hallway and everything's really quiet and then BOOM there's an explosion. That requires additional power draw that can't necessarily be delivered on the fly by the normal power delivery system that would go to something like an onboard sound card. So this capacitor right here is holding power in reserve so it can deliver that responsiveness and that punchiness as soon as you need the additional power to go to your sound card. So that's a really neat design choice that they've made. They also went with audio grade caps which are different. So there are higher quality capacitors than what they're using on here in terms of the current they can deliver. However, audio caps use completely different electrolytic content and completely different foil to give a certain tonality to the noise versus just managing power which is what regular caps are more about. So there's some differences in how they respond to the requests and Asus believes that the experience that they have in designing audio products now, I mean they've been doing Zonar for a while including some very high end stuff, has given them some big advantages over what their competitors are doing in terms of discrete grade onboard audio. And I'm really excited to try this one out because between the 300 ohm headphone amp, which is here, and the shielded chip as well as the audio grade caps and the super cap, massive cap, sorry my bad, and the massive cap I'm expecting this to deliver a very good audio experience which sort of begs the question why would they include this with it. And I guess it's so that you have like the best and then like the even like bestorist included with the same board. And you have the flexibility of using that on something else even when you're no longer using this motherboard which is kind of neat. Now let's go back to my regular programming. So there's your LG 1155 socket, lots of space around it for aftermarket coolers. You've got your VRM cooling here which I think we've talked about plenty already. Your 8 pin plus 4 pin power connectors are in their ideal location at the top left of the board and then moving along the top of the board you've got some more CPU headers, you've got some, ah there's a debug LED. So if you don't want to use this though remember guys you always have the option of using ROG Connect. So there's the button to turn it on, there's the port for it and that's where you plug in a separate computer in order to, you can monitor things like temperatures, you can change overclocking settings, you can see, ah yes, if you're booting up and for whatever reason you don't want to look inside your case, lean over and look at the debug LED, it'll give you a plain text version of any kind of error so if you accidentally turn on the computer without RAM in it, plug this in, it'll just say, oh there's no RAM, so you better put some RAM in. Which is kind of neat. Okay, slow mode, don't worry about that unless you're going below 10 degrees Celsius, so or below negative 10 degrees Celsius. So leave it off for now. You've got onboard switches, start and reset, you've got your go button which works as a memo K button as well so if for whatever reason you're not posting that'll set it to very very safe settings and get you going. You've got all your onboard, here do you want to get a close look at that, all your onboard voltage readouts so you don't have to trust the BIOS, you can actually get ones with, you can get readouts with a multimeter. You've also got, ah these are neat, so these are little boot up LEDs that tell you the status of things as you're booting up. You've also got your LN2 mode jumper, so don't worry about that unless you're using liquid nitrogen. 24 pin connectors in its ideal location along the right hand edge, your front USB 3 connector in its ideal location along the right hand edge. And they've also changed the configuration of the SATA ports a little bit here too. So there's only four SATA ports here that are running off the Intel chipset. Two SATA 2 ports running at 3 gigabit per second, two SATA 3 6 gigabit per second ports and all four of these are running off of ASMedia chipsets. So while you don't have the caching feature that you get on the third party Marvell controllers, you do have better performance with these ASMedia ones so that's why ASUS opted for that so you have a total of six SATA 3 6 gigabit per second ports and two SATA 2 3 gigabit per second ports. Remember you can still run caching off of the Intel ports should you so desire. All your front panel connectors are here, TPM, your thunderbolt header is down here, talked about that already, two front USB 2.0 connectors, auxiliary power in case you are running multiple GPUs, although if you're running only two it should be fine, your front panel audio connector on the other side of the thin red line and ahhh slot layout. So we've talked about this a little bit already but three PCIe 1x slots, three PCIe 16x slots and a PCIe 4x slot make up all of that. So the pulsating eye just so you guys know, you can if you for whatever reason don't like it you can unplug it and tuck it in there without damaging the board in the slightest. Up here, this is cool. So this is an MPCIe combo and what we're going to do is we're actually going to show you guys what goes on on this guy. So this is just a little, check this out, so you can use, there's MPCIe and then there's also an M SATA slot and it supports both of them and then you plug the whole thing into this module right here that sits up at the top of the board like this. So you can see there's already a dual band WiFi module plugged in here, wherever the antenna ports, give me a sec. So these two little nubbins have little adapters that plug into them and then you plug the full size antennas into them and run them out of the back of the case so that's the mini PCIe card that they include. Did I already say it was dual band WiFi as well as Bluetooth 4.0? Okay cool. And then there's your M SATA slot so you can plug in an additional SSD should you so desire. And put the whole thing on here like this. Ha ha. Okay so we're not going to put, whoops, we're not going to put that on for now but let's have a look at some more accessories. So there's your antennas that go with that. You've got some included SATA cables, four SATA 3, 6 gigabit per second cables, two SATA 2, 3 gigabit per second cables. You've got an included ROG Flexi Black SLI connector, the very best kind. These are all related to Thunder FX so we're going to hold off on those for now. I.O. Shield, helpfully labeled. These are great so you can label all your hard drive cables so you make sure you have boot disks, make sure you don't accidentally unplug the wrong thing at any given time. There's your user guide which is extremely thick and extremely thorough. I think this is the thickest user manual I've seen from an Asus motherboard yet and we've used it a couple times throughout this unboxing to clarify things and it's very helpful. Driver disk, don't use that though, download the latest. On gaming do not disturb door hanger, very cool. ROG sticker with instructions for application, ROG Connect cable as well as Q connectors for the front making it easier to plug in your front USB and front power in one fell swoop. So let's finish up with the rear I.O. Clear CMOS, ROG Connect, three USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, eSATA, DisplayPort and HDMI out, optical audio in and out, gigabit ethernet and 7.1 audio with like the beastliest onboard audio powering it. Very good stuff. So now let's move along to the Thunder FX. So this should not be confused with Thunderbolt which is totally different although the board does support a Thunderbolt add-on card. This is Thunder FX, this is all about sound. So we've looked at it physically now, let's talk about what makes it special. So accessory wise, it comes with a USB cable which has two USBs on one end and one on the other end, that's so that it can get enough power. Okay, we've got an Xbox adapter as well as other more different Xbox adapter for your microphone in. Good stuff. And that's pretty much it in terms of included accessory cables. So just wanted to clarify something that I nubbed out on before. So this is noise cancelling for your microphone, not for your headphones themselves. So you will need noise cancelling headphones which do their own noise cancelling for what you hear. But what this guy does is it listens to the ambient noise and... Where'd the microphone for this go? Oh, I must have left it at home. Okay, well if the microphone was plugged in, I would be talking into my microphone and this would be isolating the random ambient noise from the sound coming in through my microphone in order to make sure that whoever I'm talking to hears me clearly even if I'm at a crowded LAN center. So I think that pretty much wraps this up. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the Maximus V formula from Asus. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.