**The Evolution of PC Hardware: A Look at the X Series**

As we continue to push the boundaries of what is possible with personal computers, it's essential to take a step back and appreciate the evolution of hardware. In this article, we'll delve into the world of PC hardware, specifically focusing on the X series, which has undergone significant transformations over the years.

**The Golden Age of PC Hardware**

In recent years, enthusiasts have been treated to some incredible advancements in PC hardware. The latest generation of processors, such as those found in the Intel Core i9-11900K and AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, offer unprecedented levels of performance and efficiency. These chips boast multiple cores, Hyper-Threading, and other features that enable users to tackle even the most demanding tasks with ease.

**The X58 Era: A Transitional Period**

For those who may be new to the world of PC hardware, the X58 era represents a transitional period in the evolution of processors. This generation marked a significant shift towards more efficient and powerful chips, but it also laid the groundwork for future innovations. The X58 platform offered users a glimpse into what was to come, with features like the Nehalem microarchitecture and the introduction of DDR3 memory.

**The X79 Era: A Significant Leap Forward**

As we move on from the X58 era, we find ourselves in the midst of the X79 generation. This platform marked a significant leap forward in terms of performance and efficiency, thanks to the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture and the introduction of DDR3L memory. The X79 chipset also offered users improved features like USB 3.0, SATA 6Gb/s, and high-quality audio.

**The X99 Era: A New Frontier**

And then, there's the X99 era, which represents a new frontier in PC hardware. This generation boasts some of the most powerful processors available today, with chips like the Intel Core i9-7970X and AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX offering unparalleled performance and efficiency. The X99 platform also features improved memory speeds, storage options, and a range of other enhancements that make it an ideal choice for enthusiasts and content creators.

**The Importance of Platform Choice**

When it comes to choosing the right PC hardware, it's essential to consider your specific needs and usage scenarios. Are you looking for raw performance? Or perhaps you're more concerned with features like USB 3.0 or high-quality audio? The platform you choose can make a significant difference in your overall experience.

**The Value of Long-Term Upgrades**

Another crucial aspect to consider is the value of long-term upgrades. Instead of jumping on the latest and greatest hardware every year, it's often more cost-effective to focus on platforms that offer consistent performance and features over time. By choosing a platform that aligns with your needs and budget, you can enjoy years of reliable service without breaking the bank.

**The Role of Motherboard Vendors**

As motherboard vendors, we play a significant role in shaping the PC hardware landscape. Our goal is to provide users with a range of options that cater to their specific needs, from performance-oriented platforms to more feature-rich designs. By offering a balance of performance, features, and price, we can help enthusiasts make informed decisions about their hardware choices.

**The Importance of Realistic Usage Scenarios**

Finally, it's essential to consider your realistic usage scenarios when choosing PC hardware. What do you plan to use your system for? Will it be gaming, content creation, or general office work? By understanding your needs and expectations, you can make more informed decisions about the platform and components that will best suit your requirements.

**The Future of PC Hardware**

As we look to the future, there's no doubt that PC hardware will continue to evolve at a rapid pace. With advancements in technology like AI, machine learning, and cloud computing, we can expect to see even more powerful and efficient processors on the horizon. Whether you're an enthusiast or just starting out, it's essential to stay informed about the latest developments and trends in PC hardware.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, the evolution of PC hardware has been a remarkable journey, with each generation offering significant improvements over its predecessors. From the X58 era to the X99 era, we've seen some incredible advancements in performance, efficiency, and features. As we move forward into the future, it's essential to stay informed about the latest developments and trends in PC hardware, ensuring that you're equipped with the knowledge and expertise needed to make informed decisions about your system choices.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: engo there at all but that's right we're rolling we're speeding on both uh by the way for editing J later this is uh this is the video with JJ and this is your intro and nice clap all right we ready oh I'm sorry where do you want me to look I that's going to be ignore this camera this will be roll camera okay that's for our our nice little depth of immersion my eyes are all burning now what the hell see see what you did and both of you try to up straight and JJ you don't have posture yeah smooth your shirt out smile me it's easier for for a guy like Paul to say set up straight he's not carrying the frame that we I'm carrying a big frame right now this whole camera set up it's your workout oh man this is hey what's up guys js2 sense here and if you can't tell I have a very awesome guest today JJ from Asus Asus you know it's one of those things everyone says how do you say ASUS ASUS well I say awesome guys don't go anywhere today talk about x99 and Intel's new Haswell e refresh actually it's not refresh brand new platform don't go away all right JJ first of all thank you for making the trip down here to talk about Intel's brand new platform Haswell e and of course x99 the much anticipated platform all of us enthusiasts have been waiting for uh I know some about it but you know a whole lot more than me so my first question to you is going to be what are the three SKS that are coming out for Haswell e and how do they kind of compare to x79 um well for one you know like you said this is actually an entirely new chipset uh it's an entirely new CPU architecture um so we're pretty much moving over with into the Haswell architecture but we're moving it to a higher core higher cache higher PCI Express enabled part and uh what we're going to have in terms of the CPUs that are going to be available at the launch are going to be the 5960x so the extreme edition part uh we're then going to have the eight core 16 threads that's correct eight core 16 thread 20 Megs of cash on that CPU is an absolute Beast of a processor I tingle when you say that yeah if for anybody that's looking to be able to throw uh a Content creation application in there or U you know very high-end GPU based configuration platform this thing is just going to just chew these things out it's just it's a it's truly a BC processor and BC platform um when you talk about the secondary CPU still extremely highend it's going to be the k part um actually all three parts this generation are all unlocked so they're all overclockable um and they're all featuring that Haswell ebased architecture and that's an important point because just like the Haswell Incorporated the Fiverr or essentially that integrated voltage regulation technology built in the CPU we also now have that this for this generation which is different than the previous Sandy Bridge e or the ivy brid e processors uh so that's going to be another aspect in terms of the change and then you're going to have the entry level uh the 5820 uh K part so uh the main difference between the top two parts so the K and the extreme um to the entry level K part is going to be the number of PCI Express Lanes right as well as the cache so the two k parts will feature uh 15 megabytes of cach which is still a massive yeah I mean you're still almost looking almost double the cach of what a current high-end 4970k has with eight Megs right you're going over 15 and then the extreme having 20 Megs right um but the other big differential will be in the PCI Express Lanes uh the PCI Express Lanes on the entry level part will be 28 Lanes uh versus the two higher end SKS will have 40 lanes let me stop right there kind of Explain real quick what those Lanes mean in terms of Haswell E versus kind of the Z series so how does it compare to say a 497 or 479k so that's actually it's a great question to ask because traditionally when a lot of people kind of factor the platform they only look at it from the number of course right but actually one of the biggest advantages that the higher end platforms offer is more PCI Express Lanes how that ultimately translates to you is when you look at traditionally a motherboard and you look at all the slots that are on the motherboard as well as the number of connections right so the number of SATA ports the number of USB ports even add-on ports such as Wireless or secondary landan all those have to be hooked into a PCI Express Lane right and so they have to be fed ultimately by the lanes that are provided by the CPU now on z9 this where like plx and stuff comes in correct and when you look at something like a z97 based motherboard the CPU can only provide 16 Lanes right um so that works pretty good for most standard users and even to a degree most enthusiasts right but once you start to Trend into an area where you get to really high-end boards you're looking at maybe three-way four-way GPU configurations content creation configur configurations where maybe you're running like two gpus and maybe then like a raid card and then like two capture cards I mean all kinds of exactly you you run generally on on some form of z97 series board you'll eventually run into a point where certain things will have to be conditionally under operation so what I mean by that is maybe the secondary Port turns off if you're using like all the SATA ports right you get some type of permutation that depending on how you're configuring your system it changes what may be usable and what's not usable now there's this kind of area where some other boards as you noted will feature some form of what's called a multiplexing chip it's a plx um it's not true PCI Express Lanes it's pretty much kind of like expanding them out kind of like in the same way a hub does but there are some disadvantages to it in the long term in terms of what you have a little bit from latency uh as well as also just from that you can't actively still drive all those lanes and in unison um and that's really where this platform is going to give you just much more flexibility you've got so many more Lanes so much more cores you got so much more cash I love about this has e refresh uh or I keep call it refresh I want to say it's refresh it's a whole new platform but it's you know the X Series relaunch through x99 is the fact that the entry level CPU is still a hexcore yeah I mean the entry level series uh SKS on on both Sandy e and Ive were four cores correct where the really the benefit over the Z series came into it being a quad channel uh capable chip but now along with the PCI Express Lanes exactly and but now with it being a hex you're always buying into now going to be a platform that's going to offer you more cores and more cash so I think Intel paid attention to that this generation a lot of feedback they collected is they wanted to make sure that if you bought into this platform you felt that you were getting the kind of the most future proofing and you really had guaranteed level of improvement over the current platforms that were available in the marketplace so whether it's like you said cores whether it's cash whether it's PCI Express Lanes in all those ways you're going to get Improvement and then of course the other really big one that we haven't even talked about is the inclusion of ddr4 this is the first platform that's going to be offering ddr4 as compared to all the other current chipsets that are currently out in the marketplace only support DDR3 okay now before we start talking about ddr4 I know my audience has probably already asked themselves uh we've talked about it let's talk about overclockability of these chips sure because Haswell when Haswell first launched you know the overclocking on them there was a lot of issues with temperature there was a lot you know because it was a whole new architecture overclocking was kind of a challenge for many enthusiasts on on Haswell Z series um since it kind of incorporates a lot of that same structure tell me what it's been like working with Haswell e in the overclocking so overclocking is is actually quite solid on the platform so in terms of what you're going to be looking at in terms of what you can actually realistically achieve um you know the base parts are looking at about 3 GHz in terms of the operating frequency what you can get in the real world in terms of overclocking with uh you know reasonable air cooling solution so like a high performance you know closed loop water cooling solution like a you know like an h100 or something in that class which is what most people are using uh for especially I think for this type of platform but even if you were Dro down to like a you know uh like an h80 type kind of cooler you would still be looking at 4 gigahertz plus easily easily so clearly The Thermals are good you to be able to use an all-in-one cooler especially the h80 which is a single 140 mm uh push pool option um so in the past I know they had run fairly fairly warm to where a lot of people on The X Series the Enthusiast platform would also probably want to incorporate custom water cooling or full custom Loops but the fact that you're able to achieve these overclocks you're mentioning on an all-in-one cooling solution I think is fantastic yeah no it's it's extremely cool that you're going to be able to reach you know 4.2 to 4.6 GHz on you know realistic cooling solutions now that doesn't mean that you know there aren't certain factors to take in consideration just like in Haswell there is a wide variance in the CPU and the voltage that is required to get to that CPU so nominally most users will probably be somewhere within a target range of about probably 43 to maybe about 45 in terms of the frequency uh yes uh well actually uh that would be on the X part so that would probably be your worst case scenario because it has the most amount of course so it's the most complex and overclocking and that number surprised me because honestly thought with the 3.0 base clock on that that they were they were saying okay well due to the due to the infrastructure comp right maybe it just overclocking wasn't going to be a huge portion of it I know they advertised you know that the Haswell e was a it was towards enthusiasts and overclockers and I thought well because the base course or clock is so much lower than the other two SKS maybe it couldn't achieve those those you know four 4.0 Plus numbers but you're saying they they even in the worst case scenario they were reaching four G yeah even in a worst case scenario overall from what we're seeing from the current set of CPUs which are going to be indicative of retail mass production CPUs um pretty much everybody's going to be targeting somewhere between at a minimum 4 to 4.2 GHz the majority of samples probably closer to maybe 60 to 70% are going to be in that uh like I said 43 to about 45 could you imagine 4.5 GHz on 16 threads it's insane I can't get my mind that and it does it makes me smile because when you get to use that type of system and you get just to chew through something at that performance it's pretty monstrous well and it it's awesome for multi-threaded applications like editors and but also too live streamers yeah like it's huge because if you like to do gaming and rendering on the same machine like I do when I when I fire up my twitch stream because I don't like to do streaming boxes and stuff I just keep it simple y use something like xplit DX Tory you know you're you're pulling the direct X the fact that you basically essentially have two the performance of two eight core or eight thread processors like a z97 granted it doesn't just slice in half like that but just theoretically that those threads can be Diversified to where you're not going to get frame drops in your game nearly as much when you're doing live streaming yeah I think I I I'm going to tell you right now I'm I couldn't decide what core I wanted to go with and I I was pretty set on the fact that I was going to just go with the uh 5930k because well you know it'll probably overclock better but you you came in here today JJ and you flip my plans upside down and you're costing me more money well transition so continuing actually on that point um you know one of the great advantages too though uh if we talk about total frequency is that the K part versus the X part because it actually has less cores we'll get a little bit more overclocking so you're going to maybe look at additional you know 100 200 megahertz um so overall effectiv we look at the best CPUs both on K and on the X part you're going to probably be somewhere within the range of about 4.6 to 4 GHz um but overall as a whole you know that's going to be in a much lower subset in terms of achievable CPUs probably you know maybe 10% of CPUs are going to be in the you know 47 to 48 range and very low are going to be beyond that the best overall weight weighted high performance CPUs are going to be CPUs that can actually run 46 across all eight cores and across 16 threads I would much i' would personally much rather have a slower overclocking CPU though with those 16 threads yeah CU you're talking four extra threads over the hexacore and and 200 MHz is it's very it's very difficult to notice unless you're doing synthetic benchmarking and day-to-day use anyway on on a four core 83 once once you can get from that 3 GHz to you know let's say 4.2 4.4 right the difference between that 4.4 to 4.6 is far lower um but you know there's a lot of knobs and switches in this platform in general as well so when we talk about how you can kind of tune the platform for even better performance it's not just going to come from Pure frequency there's going to be the cache ratio exactly there's the ddr4 aspect of it uh there's also even going to be the per core overclocking you know a lot of users always just kind of treat the platform from a singular frequency perspective but a lot of what you have available to you here is how you can tune it you can tune maybe to have just four cores operate at 4.6 4.7 GHz and then maybe have all eight cores actually operate at let's say 4.3 4.2 um even giving yourself that much better performance so as you go from it let's say maybe playing a game to Premiere to handbrake to whatever differenter control than that exactly exactly and it gives you much more flexibility so all the around I think it's an exciting platform for enthusiasts for overclockers and there's a great level of performance and uh you know thermals are going to be something that you have to always still keep in mind depending on what your cooling solution is um the vid ranges play around a little bit with that they're quite variable you know like you said I think wrapping that up you know you're talking about probably vids from about 1.27 5 to a little bit beyond maybe uh you know 1.35 to 1.375 but even if you can thermally keep it in check one thing that you do want to keep in mind is going to be the current that's going to be coming through this system that is a big factor as well right and talking about all this 8 core 16 thread stuff is giving me an eye twitch cuz it's right there it's in reach and I can't have it okay so the other two aspects of this launch obviously ddr4 and x99 um so what kind of improvements have we really seen with ddr4 over DDR3 in terms of of performance well in terms of performance the great thing is that from a stock perspective ddr4 is already going to be providing you better performance at lower voltage so you're going to get better thermals and lower power 1.2 Vols you were saying correct 1.2 Vols is the default along with 2133 so when we compare that to pretty much what the equivalent or the standard is on the drr3 side DDR3 is looking at generally 1.5 at600 um so that's some dims is 1.65 yeah yeah that's correct so all all the way around that's a great Improvement but really where we get a lot more leg room is going to be in what the frequency can be afforded now some people are looking initially at dd4 and looking at taking a look at the timings and thinking wow the timing seem really high but you have to keep in mind that the frequency is high and the voltage is very low that it's achieving that at um and actually it scales actually exceedingly well so that if you go ahead and drive a little bit more voltage to it or you want to increase frequency it's got a leg room we're seeing 2133 modules 2400 modules reach 26 2800 frequency um you know with Corsair the system right here that we're running this are 2800 dims um and we're already doing that's a Vengeance that Vengeance Pro or uh these are the new Vengeance X LX they're actually really nice so the air coolers won't be an interference yeah know it's it's fantastic um so sorry all the all the way around though from a frequency perspective there's just a lot more leg room built into the platform I mean at launch you're going to be seeing kits pretty much from about 21 33 to about 3200 and you know even as a year year and a half go by that number is only going to continue to scale up significantly beyond that right now DDR3 we're about at the End Road we're we're hitting kind of a wall where 300 we excuse me 3,000 you know 30 31 3200 it's possible but it gets very very very complex on being able to achieve that consistently are you finding though that even while overclocking these CPUs you can still maintain those high frequencies of RAM for sure it is actually definitely possible on most of these actually CPUs are not going to have an issue running uh the memory dividers at 2400 2600 even 2800 but as always this is an extremely important point that you bring up as a platform as a whole everything affects everything right right so the higher you drive CPU frequency the the harder it will be also to drive high memory frequency only the best of the best of the CPUs can do everything well so what that means is some CPUs may do that's that silicon Lottery we talk about yeah some CPUs may do 46 at 2,800 and a high cach ratio of 4.6 other CPUs might only do let's say 4.6 but the memory divider maybe is not as strong and it can only do 2400 and the cache ratio is at 4 GHz so this is always a little bit of permutation and there's always like you said that Lottery effect um but the Great consistency as far as what we're seeing is that it's still extremely consistently High across all the CPUs um and if you're also not going to be overclocking although although Parts by default are overclockable so I would say overclock you should be overclock well at least shoot for you know the the 4 gz marker right um but sounds easy to achieve though Bas what you're saying yes very actually very easy um even at that marker though there shouldn't generally be any issues running fairly High aggressive ddr4 frequencies right and and XMP profile full full um compatibility you're not yeah there is a new XMP profile spec though um but of course we've worked with uh with all the memory partners and especially with corser to make sure that you got great interoperability and compatibility so you can drop it in there uh you can go ahead and enable the XMP and you can be Rock and rolling yeah but you have i' have to assume too that even the the worst performing by worst performing I mean the lower range of overclocking ability of of these chips is going to outperform the z97 series just hands down in every way possible yeah well I mean the great thing that you have overall if we just kind of recap on all these points is that one architecturally right we've gone ahead and Incorporated that latest latest generation of the core right and that's very important because those are instruction sets right that's the IPC performance historically you know the higher cores they usually use older generational uh IPC right so you get the cores and you get the cash but sometimes the the the newer generation processor features better efficiency and better architecture but this way around we pretty much get everything we could really want we get the cores we get the cash the express lanes the overclocking capability the tuning to it all and ddr4 it is truly the absolute best Enthusiast platform uh now it's not an entry-level platform this is not going to be something where you got to pay to play yeah this this is not for the users that are interested in building you know an $800 gaming rig right um this is really for users that are looking to build you know really Top Line high performance systems but also that are probably targeting a long-term value proposition right you build this type of system and you you're thinking I'm not going to upgrade from year to year or even in two years you're probably targeting you know 3 to 5 year Cycles I get a lot of people ask me questions you know they're still on x58 is it worth going to x79 I've I've always told them no hold off and even then uh unless you really have a need for all the added benefit and performance of x99 and and hasell E it still may not make sense to upgrade for you depending on what your usage cases are yeah because if your use cases you're just doing General browsing and gaming you may not see much of an improvement in terms of of daily driving the PC that's a great point and that actually probably is going to cover into some of the other uh content pieces that we talk about but from perspective also as a motherboard vendor we also try to look at the total experience so sometimes you don't always upgrade purely from performance you might upgrade for other aspects of functionality usability right so like on x58 maybe you're missing USB 3 maybe you don't have SATA 6G maybe the fan control functionality is limited and you wish your system was quieter right so you know um I think what a user should always do first and foremost and I think you've done a great job with the content that you've provided uh to your viewers is try to look at what's your realistic usage every day right what do you want out of your system and some of those things are definitely going to be performance oriented some of those things may be usability oriented and then figure out okay is that something that I need to transition over to a platform for and then also in that same vein um which platforms enable those experiences right it might not be that I have to jump all the way over to x99 to do it right I can jump over to you know uh z97 right you know it it just depends right you know balance those things out and this is where you know I'm sure we'll get some users that say well it doesn't make any sense I have z97 there's no point every user is always going to be in respective Camp to what makes sense to them and this is just kind of rounding out the entire portfolio right just like you've got three monitors most people would say there's no reason for a GTX 780 Ti part right right well if you're only running a 1080p panel then they're probably isn't right but if you're somebody that has this then of course it makes sense you need higher end components to be able to enable the experience you want there's a there's a there's a usage scaling that's involved with Hardware scaling I mean everyone's situation is different well there you have it guys x99 has well e there's a lot of information I know this video is a little longer than the norm but the information very very quality information Jerry that's going to have to go in an outro cut like a it's your name it's your name just just twice j j j Jerry too bad your name's not like John hold together J blueberri all right guys uh I know this video has been a little longer than the norm for my channel but there's a lot of amazing information here as brought To Us by JJ thank you very much for hopping on a plane coming all the way down here bringing your Hardware that I don't get to whatever so guys uh x99 amazing platform the8 cores bring in more than I thought was was going to be achievable on the table and uh I just can't you guys are going to see some x99 stuff on this channel in the future guaranteed so guys thanks for watching as always make sure you go and check out pcdiy as well they have a channel over there plug your channel real quick yeah uh you can go to pcdiy YouTube channel as well as our website pc. asus.com yep and it's all about PC Building and and well do it yourself which is what I'm a huge advocate of as always guys we will see you in the next onego there at all but that's right we're rolling we're speeding on both uh by the way for editing J later this is uh this is the video with JJ and this is your intro and nice clap all right we ready oh I'm sorry where do you want me to look I that's going to be ignore this camera this will be roll camera okay that's for our our nice little depth of immersion my eyes are all burning now what the hell see see what you did and both of you try to up straight and JJ you don't have posture yeah smooth your shirt out smile me it's easier for for a guy like Paul to say set up straight he's not carrying the frame that we I'm carrying a big frame right now this whole camera set up it's your workout oh man this is hey what's up guys js2 sense here and if you can't tell I have a very awesome guest today JJ from Asus Asus you know it's one of those things everyone says how do you say ASUS ASUS well I say awesome guys don't go anywhere today talk about x99 and Intel's new Haswell e refresh actually it's not refresh brand new platform don't go away all right JJ first of all thank you for making the trip down here to talk about Intel's brand new platform Haswell e and of course x99 the much anticipated platform all of us enthusiasts have been waiting for uh I know some about it but you know a whole lot more than me so my first question to you is going to be what are the three SKS that are coming out for Haswell e and how do they kind of compare to x79 um well for one you know like you said this is actually an entirely new chipset uh it's an entirely new CPU architecture um so we're pretty much moving over with into the Haswell architecture but we're moving it to a higher core higher cache higher PCI Express enabled part and uh what we're going to have in terms of the CPUs that are going to be available at the launch are going to be the 5960x so the extreme edition part uh we're then going to have the eight core 16 threads that's correct eight core 16 thread 20 Megs of cash on that CPU is an absolute Beast of a processor I tingle when you say that yeah if for anybody that's looking to be able to throw uh a Content creation application in there or U you know very high-end GPU based configuration platform this thing is just going to just chew these things out it's just it's a it's truly a BC processor and BC platform um when you talk about the secondary CPU still extremely highend it's going to be the k part um actually all three parts this generation are all unlocked so they're all overclockable um and they're all featuring that Haswell ebased architecture and that's an important point because just like the Haswell Incorporated the Fiverr or essentially that integrated voltage regulation technology built in the CPU we also now have that this for this generation which is different than the previous Sandy Bridge e or the ivy brid e processors uh so that's going to be another aspect in terms of the change and then you're going to have the entry level uh the 5820 uh K part so uh the main difference between the top two parts so the K and the extreme um to the entry level K part is going to be the number of PCI Express Lanes right as well as the cache so the two k parts will feature uh 15 megabytes of cach which is still a massive yeah I mean you're still almost looking almost double the cach of what a current high-end 4970k has with eight Megs right you're going over 15 and then the extreme having 20 Megs right um but the other big differential will be in the PCI Express Lanes uh the PCI Express Lanes on the entry level part will be 28 Lanes uh versus the two higher end SKS will have 40 lanes let me stop right there kind of Explain real quick what those Lanes mean in terms of Haswell E versus kind of the Z series so how does it compare to say a 497 or 479k so that's actually it's a great question to ask because traditionally when a lot of people kind of factor the platform they only look at it from the number of course right but actually one of the biggest advantages that the higher end platforms offer is more PCI Express Lanes how that ultimately translates to you is when you look at traditionally a motherboard and you look at all the slots that are on the motherboard as well as the number of connections right so the number of SATA ports the number of USB ports even add-on ports such as Wireless or secondary landan all those have to be hooked into a PCI Express Lane right and so they have to be fed ultimately by the lanes that are provided by the CPU now on z9 this where like plx and stuff comes in correct and when you look at something like a z97 based motherboard the CPU can only provide 16 Lanes right um so that works pretty good for most standard users and even to a degree most enthusiasts right but once you start to Trend into an area where you get to really high-end boards you're looking at maybe three-way four-way GPU configurations content creation configur configurations where maybe you're running like two gpus and maybe then like a raid card and then like two capture cards I mean all kinds of exactly you you run generally on on some form of z97 series board you'll eventually run into a point where certain things will have to be conditionally under operation so what I mean by that is maybe the secondary Port turns off if you're using like all the SATA ports right you get some type of permutation that depending on how you're configuring your system it changes what may be usable and what's not usable now there's this kind of area where some other boards as you noted will feature some form of what's called a multiplexing chip it's a plx um it's not true PCI Express Lanes it's pretty much kind of like expanding them out kind of like in the same way a hub does but there are some disadvantages to it in the long term in terms of what you have a little bit from latency uh as well as also just from that you can't actively still drive all those lanes and in unison um and that's really where this platform is going to give you just much more flexibility you've got so many more Lanes so much more cores you got so much more cash I love about this has e refresh uh or I keep call it refresh I want to say it's refresh it's a whole new platform but it's you know the X Series relaunch through x99 is the fact that the entry level CPU is still a hexcore yeah I mean the entry level series uh SKS on on both Sandy e and Ive were four cores correct where the really the benefit over the Z series came into it being a quad channel uh capable chip but now along with the PCI Express Lanes exactly and but now with it being a hex you're always buying into now going to be a platform that's going to offer you more cores and more cash so I think Intel paid attention to that this generation a lot of feedback they collected is they wanted to make sure that if you bought into this platform you felt that you were getting the kind of the most future proofing and you really had guaranteed level of improvement over the current platforms that were available in the marketplace so whether it's like you said cores whether it's cash whether it's PCI Express Lanes in all those ways you're going to get Improvement and then of course the other really big one that we haven't even talked about is the inclusion of ddr4 this is the first platform that's going to be offering ddr4 as compared to all the other current chipsets that are currently out in the marketplace only support DDR3 okay now before we start talking about ddr4 I know my audience has probably already asked themselves uh we've talked about it let's talk about overclockability of these chips sure because Haswell when Haswell first launched you know the overclocking on them there was a lot of issues with temperature there was a lot you know because it was a whole new architecture overclocking was kind of a challenge for many enthusiasts on on Haswell Z series um since it kind of incorporates a lot of that same structure tell me what it's been like working with Haswell e in the overclocking so overclocking is is actually quite solid on the platform so in terms of what you're going to be looking at in terms of what you can actually realistically achieve um you know the base parts are looking at about 3 GHz in terms of the operating frequency what you can get in the real world in terms of overclocking with uh you know reasonable air cooling solution so like a high performance you know closed loop water cooling solution like a you know like an h100 or something in that class which is what most people are using uh for especially I think for this type of platform but even if you were Dro down to like a you know uh like an h80 type kind of cooler you would still be looking at 4 gigahertz plus easily easily so clearly The Thermals are good you to be able to use an all-in-one cooler especially the h80 which is a single 140 mm uh push pool option um so in the past I know they had run fairly fairly warm to where a lot of people on The X Series the Enthusiast platform would also probably want to incorporate custom water cooling or full custom Loops but the fact that you're able to achieve these overclocks you're mentioning on an all-in-one cooling solution I think is fantastic yeah no it's it's extremely cool that you're going to be able to reach you know 4.2 to 4.6 GHz on you know realistic cooling solutions now that doesn't mean that you know there aren't certain factors to take in consideration just like in Haswell there is a wide variance in the CPU and the voltage that is required to get to that CPU so nominally most users will probably be somewhere within a target range of about probably 43 to maybe about 45 in terms of the frequency uh yes uh well actually uh that would be on the X part so that would probably be your worst case scenario because it has the most amount of course so it's the most complex and overclocking and that number surprised me because honestly thought with the 3.0 base clock on that that they were they were saying okay well due to the due to the infrastructure comp right maybe it just overclocking wasn't going to be a huge portion of it I know they advertised you know that the Haswell e was a it was towards enthusiasts and overclockers and I thought well because the base course or clock is so much lower than the other two SKS maybe it couldn't achieve those those you know four 4.0 Plus numbers but you're saying they they even in the worst case scenario they were reaching four G yeah even in a worst case scenario overall from what we're seeing from the current set of CPUs which are going to be indicative of retail mass production CPUs um pretty much everybody's going to be targeting somewhere between at a minimum 4 to 4.2 GHz the majority of samples probably closer to maybe 60 to 70% are going to be in that uh like I said 43 to about 45 could you imagine 4.5 GHz on 16 threads it's insane I can't get my mind that and it does it makes me smile because when you get to use that type of system and you get just to chew through something at that performance it's pretty monstrous well and it it's awesome for multi-threaded applications like editors and but also too live streamers yeah like it's huge because if you like to do gaming and rendering on the same machine like I do when I when I fire up my twitch stream because I don't like to do streaming boxes and stuff I just keep it simple y use something like xplit DX Tory you know you're you're pulling the direct X the fact that you basically essentially have two the performance of two eight core or eight thread processors like a z97 granted it doesn't just slice in half like that but just theoretically that those threads can be Diversified to where you're not going to get frame drops in your game nearly as much when you're doing live streaming yeah I think I I I'm going to tell you right now I'm I couldn't decide what core I wanted to go with and I I was pretty set on the fact that I was going to just go with the uh 5930k because well you know it'll probably overclock better but you you came in here today JJ and you flip my plans upside down and you're costing me more money well transition so continuing actually on that point um you know one of the great advantages too though uh if we talk about total frequency is that the K part versus the X part because it actually has less cores we'll get a little bit more overclocking so you're going to maybe look at additional you know 100 200 megahertz um so overall effectiv we look at the best CPUs both on K and on the X part you're going to probably be somewhere within the range of about 4.6 to 4 GHz um but overall as a whole you know that's going to be in a much lower subset in terms of achievable CPUs probably you know maybe 10% of CPUs are going to be in the you know 47 to 48 range and very low are going to be beyond that the best overall weight weighted high performance CPUs are going to be CPUs that can actually run 46 across all eight cores and across 16 threads I would much i' would personally much rather have a slower overclocking CPU though with those 16 threads yeah CU you're talking four extra threads over the hexacore and and 200 MHz is it's very it's very difficult to notice unless you're doing synthetic benchmarking and day-to-day use anyway on on a four core 83 once once you can get from that 3 GHz to you know let's say 4.2 4.4 right the difference between that 4.4 to 4.6 is far lower um but you know there's a lot of knobs and switches in this platform in general as well so when we talk about how you can kind of tune the platform for even better performance it's not just going to come from Pure frequency there's going to be the cache ratio exactly there's the ddr4 aspect of it uh there's also even going to be the per core overclocking you know a lot of users always just kind of treat the platform from a singular frequency perspective but a lot of what you have available to you here is how you can tune it you can tune maybe to have just four cores operate at 4.6 4.7 GHz and then maybe have all eight cores actually operate at let's say 4.3 4.2 um even giving yourself that much better performance so as you go from it let's say maybe playing a game to Premiere to handbrake to whatever differenter control than that exactly exactly and it gives you much more flexibility so all the around I think it's an exciting platform for enthusiasts for overclockers and there's a great level of performance and uh you know thermals are going to be something that you have to always still keep in mind depending on what your cooling solution is um the vid ranges play around a little bit with that they're quite variable you know like you said I think wrapping that up you know you're talking about probably vids from about 1.27 5 to a little bit beyond maybe uh you know 1.35 to 1.375 but even if you can thermally keep it in check one thing that you do want to keep in mind is going to be the current that's going to be coming through this system that is a big factor as well right and talking about all this 8 core 16 thread stuff is giving me an eye twitch cuz it's right there it's in reach and I can't have it okay so the other two aspects of this launch obviously ddr4 and x99 um so what kind of improvements have we really seen with ddr4 over DDR3 in terms of of performance well in terms of performance the great thing is that from a stock perspective ddr4 is already going to be providing you better performance at lower voltage so you're going to get better thermals and lower power 1.2 Vols you were saying correct 1.2 Vols is the default along with 2133 so when we compare that to pretty much what the equivalent or the standard is on the drr3 side DDR3 is looking at generally 1.5 at600 um so that's some dims is 1.65 yeah yeah that's correct so all all the way around that's a great Improvement but really where we get a lot more leg room is going to be in what the frequency can be afforded now some people are looking initially at dd4 and looking at taking a look at the timings and thinking wow the timing seem really high but you have to keep in mind that the frequency is high and the voltage is very low that it's achieving that at um and actually it scales actually exceedingly well so that if you go ahead and drive a little bit more voltage to it or you want to increase frequency it's got a leg room we're seeing 2133 modules 2400 modules reach 26 2800 frequency um you know with Corsair the system right here that we're running this are 2800 dims um and we're already doing that's a Vengeance that Vengeance Pro or uh these are the new Vengeance X LX they're actually really nice so the air coolers won't be an interference yeah know it's it's fantastic um so sorry all the all the way around though from a frequency perspective there's just a lot more leg room built into the platform I mean at launch you're going to be seeing kits pretty much from about 21 33 to about 3200 and you know even as a year year and a half go by that number is only going to continue to scale up significantly beyond that right now DDR3 we're about at the End Road we're we're hitting kind of a wall where 300 we excuse me 3,000 you know 30 31 3200 it's possible but it gets very very very complex on being able to achieve that consistently are you finding though that even while overclocking these CPUs you can still maintain those high frequencies of RAM for sure it is actually definitely possible on most of these actually CPUs are not going to have an issue running uh the memory dividers at 2400 2600 even 2800 but as always this is an extremely important point that you bring up as a platform as a whole everything affects everything right right so the higher you drive CPU frequency the the harder it will be also to drive high memory frequency only the best of the best of the CPUs can do everything well so what that means is some CPUs may do that's that silicon Lottery we talk about yeah some CPUs may do 46 at 2,800 and a high cach ratio of 4.6 other CPUs might only do let's say 4.6 but the memory divider maybe is not as strong and it can only do 2400 and the cache ratio is at 4 GHz so this is always a little bit of permutation and there's always like you said that Lottery effect um but the Great consistency as far as what we're seeing is that it's still extremely consistently High across all the CPUs um and if you're also not going to be overclocking although although Parts by default are overclockable so I would say overclock you should be overclock well at least shoot for you know the the 4 gz marker right um but sounds easy to achieve though Bas what you're saying yes very actually very easy um even at that marker though there shouldn't generally be any issues running fairly High aggressive ddr4 frequencies right and and XMP profile full full um compatibility you're not yeah there is a new XMP profile spec though um but of course we've worked with uh with all the memory partners and especially with corser to make sure that you got great interoperability and compatibility so you can drop it in there uh you can go ahead and enable the XMP and you can be Rock and rolling yeah but you have i' have to assume too that even the the worst performing by worst performing I mean the lower range of overclocking ability of of these chips is going to outperform the z97 series just hands down in every way possible yeah well I mean the great thing that you have overall if we just kind of recap on all these points is that one architecturally right we've gone ahead and Incorporated that latest latest generation of the core right and that's very important because those are instruction sets right that's the IPC performance historically you know the higher cores they usually use older generational uh IPC right so you get the cores and you get the cash but sometimes the the the newer generation processor features better efficiency and better architecture but this way around we pretty much get everything we could really want we get the cores we get the cash the express lanes the overclocking capability the tuning to it all and ddr4 it is truly the absolute best Enthusiast platform uh now it's not an entry-level platform this is not going to be something where you got to pay to play yeah this this is not for the users that are interested in building you know an $800 gaming rig right um this is really for users that are looking to build you know really Top Line high performance systems but also that are probably targeting a long-term value proposition right you build this type of system and you you're thinking I'm not going to upgrade from year to year or even in two years you're probably targeting you know 3 to 5 year Cycles I get a lot of people ask me questions you know they're still on x58 is it worth going to x79 I've I've always told them no hold off and even then uh unless you really have a need for all the added benefit and performance of x99 and and hasell E it still may not make sense to upgrade for you depending on what your usage cases are yeah because if your use cases you're just doing General browsing and gaming you may not see much of an improvement in terms of of daily driving the PC that's a great point and that actually probably is going to cover into some of the other uh content pieces that we talk about but from perspective also as a motherboard vendor we also try to look at the total experience so sometimes you don't always upgrade purely from performance you might upgrade for other aspects of functionality usability right so like on x58 maybe you're missing USB 3 maybe you don't have SATA 6G maybe the fan control functionality is limited and you wish your system was quieter right so you know um I think what a user should always do first and foremost and I think you've done a great job with the content that you've provided uh to your viewers is try to look at what's your realistic usage every day right what do you want out of your system and some of those things are definitely going to be performance oriented some of those things may be usability oriented and then figure out okay is that something that I need to transition over to a platform for and then also in that same vein um which platforms enable those experiences right it might not be that I have to jump all the way over to x99 to do it right I can jump over to you know uh z97 right you know it it just depends right you know balance those things out and this is where you know I'm sure we'll get some users that say well it doesn't make any sense I have z97 there's no point every user is always going to be in respective Camp to what makes sense to them and this is just kind of rounding out the entire portfolio right just like you've got three monitors most people would say there's no reason for a GTX 780 Ti part right right well if you're only running a 1080p panel then they're probably isn't right but if you're somebody that has this then of course it makes sense you need higher end components to be able to enable the experience you want there's a there's a there's a usage scaling that's involved with Hardware scaling I mean everyone's situation is different well there you have it guys x99 has well e there's a lot of information I know this video is a little longer than the norm but the information very very quality information Jerry that's going to have to go in an outro cut like a it's your name it's your name just just twice j j j Jerry too bad your name's not like John hold together J blueberri all right guys uh I know this video has been a little longer than the norm for my channel but there's a lot of amazing information here as brought To Us by JJ thank you very much for hopping on a plane coming all the way down here bringing your Hardware that I don't get to whatever so guys uh x99 amazing platform the8 cores bring in more than I thought was was going to be achievable on the table and uh I just can't you guys are going to see some x99 stuff on this channel in the future guaranteed so guys thanks for watching as always make sure you go and check out pcdiy as well they have a channel over there plug your channel real quick yeah uh you can go to pcdiy YouTube channel as well as our website pc. asus.com yep and it's all about PC Building and and well do it yourself which is what I'm a huge advocate of as always guys we will see you in the next one\n"