It's a fair point, probably don't use them that often, but as with the SATA ports, nice to have them and not need them then the opposite.
Fair enough
The layout thing is largely around having the switches and button located under the bottom PCI-e slot on the MSI. Meaning that IF you did put a dual slot card in there then you'd cover up all the buttons that are apparently so useful. The other bit being the mSATA connector. It's shares the port with the SATA6 connector so it's not like an extra, plus with a big air cooler attached it seems like it'd be much harder to remove than a normal SSD would be. On top of which they're more expensive than normal SSDs. I'm just not sure what it adds to a gaming board except cost. I could understand it on a ITX or possibly even mATX where you might be building in a small case without much room so it'd be great not needing to find a home for a full size SSD (as massive as they are).
The card would go in the middle of the 3 longest slots, and therefore cover the very short (1x) slot under that. The buttons are still accesable, although I agree that they are not in an ideal location.
mSata is mainly used for caching SSDs. In short terms; Your computer will learn what applications you use most and use the SSD for those, without you having to buy a large SSD to actually store everything on, but you're also not limited to the speed of your HDD. For some people this is a simpler solution, but I personally think that hybrid drives and such are a bit of a waste and I'd rather spend money on a proper SSD.
Yeah, but I'm a bit CDO (it's like OCD but the letters are in alphabetical order, like they should be) with things like this. Never been a fan of velcro-ing or sticking SSDs anywhere. They should go in drive bays, SSD 'bays' if possible or HDD bays with adapters.
:lol:
Well, some mountings people have come up with are really cool, like Tom did in his Orca build. If you want, you can usually hide them behind the motherboard tray pretty easily.
I can almost guarantee I'll get a 4.2-er. That is partly down to my luck and partly down to my inexperience with overclocking.
I know the feeling
Asus do make the HERO and GENE board though and both are in the price range of the MSI and Gigabyte boards. I was considering them too at one point. I imagine it'll be hard to justify the £300 and £400+ price tags on the top of the range MSI and Gigabyte boards too, but they don't define the whole range. If Tom had reviewed the above boards or the Sabertooth instead of the Extreme (not sure whose choice that was) then maybe there wouldn't be the same level of bad feeling toward Asus' z87 boards?
Not a bad feeling towards Asus at all. The reason that it got a pretty bad review started with the price point which was way too high for most gamers. Instead, despite carrying the RoG branding, it focussed on overclocking and it wasn't even impressive at *that*. That left you with a choice between a 150 or a 300 quid board that basically did the same thing.
Asus has admitted that it was their mistake though and apparently the Bios(es) that they sent Tom were shit. He's retesting it again some time in the future and then we'll know.
The thing about creating a different branding for it was aimed purely at the boards like the MVIE, not all RoG boards. Maybe just an overclockers range like Gigabyte with their Overclock boards or like MSI with the MPower range.
I don't think they're failing, I think they're just ****. It's a pointless technology as far as I'm concerned, that can only go wrong (a biut like Lucid-Virtu or whatever it is). It's probably the single biggest thing stopping me getting the MSI board atm.
I thought you meant that the chip/ports had died on people or something
For you maybe it may seem like a bit of a gimmick, but as long as it works that's okay, right? It's probably better in some way than an Intel NIC, otherwise they wouldn't advertise for it! "Buy our board, it has a Killer NIC which is worse than an Intel NIC"! :lol:
Truth is that if no one buys new tech, it won't be developped any further. Why would they? No-one is interested. I guess Lucid Virtu was a bit of a hit and miss. The idea was nice, but it just didn't work the way it should've on first release.
I know it must seem like I'm just fault finding with the MSI board, but I'm just making sure I'm happy with my decision before I spend £160 on a motherboard. In the past I've heard so much about how great Gigabyte motherboards and graphics cards are and how good their CS and RMA is. So I knew I'd be seriously considering a Gigabyte for my next board. Then this board comes up from MSI (who I've not had a great experience with) that is getting great reviews. Thrown a spanner in the works that has. Why couldn't Tom (and others) have loved the M VI E and hated the GD65. Then it would've been an easy choice as I'm not paying £300.
I know mate, we've all been there
£160 is a lot of money and I can imagine that you want the absolute best that you can get for your money. Truth is; there is probably not going to be ONE motherboard on the market that fits your EXACT needs.
Gigabyte do offer a very, very solid range with their z87 boards. Like MSI did with the z77 line-up. Thing is, the Gigabyte board that's the same price as the MSI (the UD4H) offers less of the features that *you* want for a board.
A board that you could consider, and costs pretty much the same, is the Gigabyte G1 Sniper M5, however that is an m-ATX board. It does feature the audio solution and all, but you can't run more than 2 graphics cards and tbh... It's going to look funny inside the Air 540 case :s
