The Evolution of ITX Motherboards: A New Format to Consider

In recent years, the world of computer hardware has seen a shift towards more compact and space-efficient designs, particularly with the rise of small form-factor (SFF) PCs. One notable development in this space is the Mini-ITX (Mini-ITX) format, which promises to offer improved performance and efficiency while still maintaining a sleek and compact design. However, not all SFF cases are created equal, and some may require careful consideration when choosing a motherboard that fits within them.

One of the key challenges with SFF cases is their ability to accommodate larger components, such as graphics cards, without compromising on aesthetics or space efficiency. In an effort to overcome this limitation, manufacturers have started to get creative with their designs, using riser cards and other innovative solutions to maximize the amount of hardware that can fit within a given chassis. This approach has led to some truly remarkable systems, but it also raises questions about compatibility and practicality.

For example, consider the case of an ITX motherboard that uses a riser card to mount the graphics card on the backside of the board. In theory, this should provide ample space for both the CPU and GPU, but in practice, it can be a tricky balancing act. The board's designers may assume that the power supply will be sufficient to support even the most demanding components, only to find that the case's limited space constraints make it difficult to accommodate larger power supplies.

In this regard, there is a common thread among many of the SFF cases on the market: they often rely on riser cards or other workarounds to maximize their internal space. This can be both an advantage and a disadvantage, as it allows for more creative design possibilities while also limiting the potential for compatibility with certain motherboards.

One notable example is the Asus 210, which uses a full-sized ATX power supply despite its compact size. While this may seem like a contradictory approach, it actually highlights the challenges faced by SFF designers in terms of balancing performance and space efficiency. The board's designers likely opted for a larger power supply to ensure that the system can handle demanding workloads, while still maintaining a compact design.

For those considering building a small-form-factor PC using the Mini-ITX format, it's essential to keep this in mind when selecting a motherboard. While many SFF cases are designed to accommodate ITX motherboards without issue, others may require more careful consideration due to their smaller size or unique design requirements.

As we move forward with our build plans, it's clear that the Mini-ITX format presents both opportunities and challenges for enthusiasts and builders alike. With its promise of improved performance and efficiency, this new format is sure to be an interesting development in the world of PC hardware.

In related news, Asus has recently released a motherboard that takes advantage of the Mini-ITX format, offering improved performance and overclocking capabilities. We were sent this board for testing, and while it's not quite finished yet – we're waiting on the 3950 X to arrive – I thought it would be worth showcasing its design and features.

Ultimately, the success of the Mini-ITX format will depend on how well manufacturers can balance performance, space efficiency, and practicality. As with any new technology or design trend, there are bound to be challenges and trade-offs involved, but the potential rewards are certainly worth exploring.

As we move into the holiday season, many PC enthusiasts are left wondering what gifts to buy for their loved ones. For those who enjoy building and upgrading PCs, finding a suitable gift can be particularly challenging. However, with the rise of innovative hardware designs like the Mini-ITX format, there may be some exciting options on the horizon.

In our next article, we'll explore some potential gift ideas for PC enthusiasts, including new motherboards, graphics cards, and other components that are sure to impress even the most discerning builders. Stay tuned!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso with all the popularity of aim deep products lately we were sent a new one from Asus this is the ROG crosshair 8 impact looking for a new PC or PC hardware then today's sponsor micro Center is guaranteed to have what you need micro centers huge selection of hardware and devices along with their industry-leading prices mean you get more for your money this holiday season with build your own micro Center carries the latest in PC tech from all major brands while passionate knowledgeable sales staff are available to assist you with your next build not comfortable building it yourself then certified in-store technicians can build it for you in as little as the same day to see all that micro Center has to offer and to find the store closest to you click the sponsor link in the description below so here she is the asus rog are the rog republic of gamers which is technically a brand under asus I guess now Republic of gamers crosshair 8 impact me be calling impact is having an impact on them competition I don't know but we got a peel to do here these are never as satisfying they're like anyway if you're wondering why I'm all wet because I'm really excited about this board and it was hailing outside there's a minute ago and I was running around in it acting like an idiot oh that's a lot of hail ow Oh slippery - I guess California forgot that it was winter and then really quickly turned the thermostat back down ok so this is not a mini ITX board this is a mini DTX I'm not sure what the D stands for but basically the difference is most ITX boards stop right at the PCI Express slot this one is extended down below which is basically they just decided well you know if a graphics card has already taken up two slots and the chasis have to accommodate for that anyway well most of the chassis will talk about that in a sec why not extend the motherboard longer to get more things on there to make it make the layout a little more friendly the VRMs is usually the part that lacks the most when it comes to a small form-factor motherboard the VRMs are what is going to limit the power draw and stability of your overclock so your VRMs are not up to standard or they're not up to the task of overclocking then what will happen is they will get really really hot and then you end up having bad days when you overheat your VRMs so ITX motherboards are typically not as friendly with overclocking as say their full-size brothers like in this case here the crosshair Kate Hiro same chips that both X 570 both am for when it comes to the socket the difference though honestly is you're gonna give up four slots of RAM for two slots per channel versus one slot per channel over here on the mini GTX same socket same what we're talking about get one PCI Express slot on a mini ITX /dt x board vs however many are gonna be fit on the full-size ATX board but what you also are not getting with this is chipset cooling so you can see here we do have an x5 70 chipset cooler built into this motherboard it's a fan that's turning there so it's one of the drawbacks that you're going to have with a small form-factor motherboard now the reason why I'm even comparing these and showing you big versus small is because price point on x5 70 stuff especially like the mini DTX stuff is not cheap this is enthusiast great as far as I'm concerned although it's considered mainstream because of the CPU and the socket that it's occupying this is definitely going to be an enthusiast grade piece of product if we move to the back you can see we have integrated Wireless we've got the Q code read out with a reset button right next to it we've got our BIOS flashback and BIOS reset we've got our sound ports on the bottom and then typical USB C and then all the USB 3.0 is up here and then a single Ethernet jack and then this is basically just a vent to allow the air that flows through the heatsink with the active fans which are existing on this v RM to be able to escape but the active cooling on the v RM means that we're gonna be able to have a decent amount of overclocking with this now we do know already that the Rison 3 3000 series is fairly limited with overclocking most people hit a wall immediately at 4.2 hitting for 3 or higher becomes very difficult just because of the architecture so I wouldn't necessarily expect this to overclock any farther or any less than the mainboard because of the fact that we have a bit of an architecture limit at that point more so than the power delivery and stuff like that but it was just worth mentioning when it comes with a motherboard layout it's very well thought out because ITX motherboard sometimes you look at them and you go WTF what were they thinking with this layout it makes no sense whatsoever but at least here they have the power the 24 pin and the 8 pin CPU power on the same side making power routing very streamlined we've got 2 PWM fan headers right here near the CPU once a chassis one's the CPU header so if you're running an air cooler then you can plug it in right there that I'm gonna route over things the chassis fan is kind of out of place there in my opinion but it's it's nice if you need an extra fan header for let's say an AO or you can plug in both your AI fans there whatever RGB header here this is a 12-volt RGB is up here near the socket kind of a strange place for it to be to horizontally mounted USB 2.0 headers so these are still a necessary evil to have a lot of your AIO coolers a lot of your RGB control panels and stuff still use a USB interface we have a full size USB 3.0 right there we've got a looks like front side USBC connector right there to say to us well for say that's two in two different directions so one facing out one facing up it's always bugged my OCD to have them next to each other facing two different directions I think I just thought of why the graphics card is there so if you can't go up oh well then put four of them right there make it taller anyway Zizi i should be designing motherboards yeah anyway as phil just pointed out that's because of the graphics card unless you're running a single slot card well I guess it would still kind of be in the way anyway that's besides the point surface mounted buttons right here which is kind of nice you have a start button right there you've got your reset clear CMOS that's a actually look like safe boot and retry button now there's two things on here that I want to point out that really show how much effort AMD or basis rather has put into this motherboard is we'll start with this guy right here this is the so-dimm dot - if you guys have ever seen any of the big motherboards and it's surprising that the AMD crosshair hero does not have one but every other like X 299 motherboard like I'm using over here for my personal build the zenith board that we've used for thread Ripper in the past they've all had the dim dot - which essentially is an extension board it's got it's it's got this custom header that's designed to give you basically an expansion card so in this case they're calling it so dim that too clearly it's a play on small because you know small bored and so dim is the standard for memory and a met and I almost have MacBook yeah I guess I would be true to but in a laptop but what this gives us here is expandability where we can have 2 m dot 2 SSD is attached to it on either side and then we also have expandability with two additional fan headers as well as an addressable RGB header so it's not just being used for VM tube but because of the additional bandwidth that you have through there so dim set up you can actually have fan control and RGB through there now it has this connect this cover that goes on both sides I've already taken it apart so that we can kind of see you know it does have active cooling and such on there I think I've got on there backwards right now but this is kind of how it looks when it's put together and goes the other way actually so it kind of goes like that and then it goes like that sort of a deal I took it apart so you guys can see but you can see it does have heat pads on here so that way if you take the stickers off your m2s a lot of people forget to take the stickers off so these make a direct contact with your chips then what happens is these turn into a giant heatsink freedom too especially with the speed that PCIe gen 4 is capable of which is one of the main selling points to any x5 70 board if you care about your IO speed or especially your read/write speed then you're gonna want to keep the drives as cool as possible performance degradation is directly related to temperatures when it comes to SSDs especially m dot 2 but anyway this guy basically just snaps in here like this so what you need to be mindful up about at this point is you can see it sits up quite a bit taller then the vrm cooler here the heatsink so if you've got an a IO or you've got a big tower cooler of some sort going here or a down fire cooler though sometimes will take up the entire slot sometimes the down fire coolers will but right up against the graphics cards which as you can see the this occupies that space between the graphics card and that void that could sometime be taken up by the air cooler so it's something you need to be mindful of because if you don't use this you don't get any m2 on this motherboard usually you would have an m2 right here well or on the backside or right above the graphics card below the chip sometimes you'd have it right there horizontal but no both of them are designed to go on the sodium too so I thought initially that that's what this was but it clearly says right there supreme FX right on it so what we have here this is a PCI mini PCI Express that they've used to attach the sound card which to be honest I'm surprised because typically if they're going with some sort of a sound card like this they would just solder it right onto the motherboard which is what they've done in the past but I guess what that's allowed them to do is save space because you can see you've got some of your chips that stuff and other problems down here underneath it so again it's a space-saving maneuver but the nice thing about them using a PCI Express card like this is the fact that it has the front side audio connector on it which means it's got the shortest distance possible to communicate with the sound card sometimes they're nowhere near each other and what happens is you get the front side audio cable still crossing across I'd power cables and other interference even though this shielded you're gonna find that often times the front panel connector for the audio is the most staticky it's got the worst noise ratio so this should hopefully alleviate a lot of that since it's connected and separate from the rest of the motherboard so yeah I mean it's one of those things where this is what happens when you want to take something and really kind of have it be no compromises with the exception of its size because what we've got right here is in h2 10 from NZXT which is the chassis I'm planning on using for my next mod where I and I want to use this motherboard with a 39 50 X and as you can see it's kind of nice too because it definitely fills the void entirely one of the things look I'm one of those people that if it's very good it's heavy its value which apparently I am very valuable but as you can see right here it kind of fills the entire void one of the things I've always hated is that when you plug them a graphics card into a mini ITX motherboard the card hangs off the bottom of the card which is just always kind of bugged me aesthetically but I mean that's completely superficial I'm not import if it performs the way it's supposed to perform but as you can see this fills that void perfectly but there's one thing we need to talk about this with this real quick is although this motherboard will fit in probably 95% of ITX chassis x' that's not going to be true for all of them the ghost s1 that this would not fit in there because remember that uses a riser card and puts the graphics card on the backside of the board what was it like it was thing it was like that the X the shift X and the the shift we use the shift for film we use the shift X I know we didn't use the ship X but it's just a taller version of it that motherboard goes like this with the ports facing up not backwards so this extra distance would have meant that this board would not have mounted in that chassis and what's happened with a lot of ITX chassis x' is if started getting creative rather than just building a best basic rectangle that fits the perfect square that ITX typically is they started orienting it in all kinds of weird ways using riser cards and stuff to maximize the amount that you can fit inside of the chassis so that's something you definitely need to keep in mind if you're looking at building a small form-factor using this mini DTX format I don't know if we're gonna be seeing a lot of these in the future I have no idea if other brands have already started jumping on this format because it makes sense just extend it roughly an inch and a quarter or this is maybe I don't know 20 millimeters or so which seems like you could fit a lot more on it but you'd be surprised just how much it limits the options you have in chassis x' when it comes to this format so although they H 210 is not the smallest ITX chassis on the market it still uses a full sized ATX power supply but there's something in common in the three cases technically four if we do shifted shift X that is there's a common thread between all those chassis x' and that this this wouldn't fit in and I almost feel comfortable in saying if it uses an SFX power supply it's not gonna fit this so definitely do your check if you're planning on using this motherboard in a build for a small form factor if it is if it's an ITX case it uses a ATX motherboard or ATX power supply you're probably gonna be fine but if it uses an SFX chances are it is a very compact very space-saving chassis that mayor may not work with this because a lot of SFX mini-itx cases also seem to be using riser cards to get very creative on the way things are laid out so we were sent this a while ago from Asus it took me a while to kind of get to this I was expecting to already be building in this but because we did not receive a 3950 X in lieu of thread Ripper 3 stuff that we're doing it means that this was kind of put on hold that's okay I'm behind on builds anyway yes I got a finish nebula that's just on me I've been too busy with other things to finish it I haven't had it's my personal rig I'm I had pressure to get it done so I'm just been kind of floating along getting that done but I wanted to show you guys this one because I think with the 3950 X out now and this being able to run it and overclock it I think people might look at this and go oh man that's gonna that's gonna be perfect until you go to install it and you're like oh so I wanted to at least kind of show you an overview of the motherboard and then give you some food for thought so if you guys have any other components you think we should be taking a look at before the end of the year christmas is coming up a lot of gift-giving ideas and we're gonna have some gift not so much gift guide but kind of the idea of like what to buy the PC nerd and your family for Christmas because you know people like us we're not easy to shop for and you may not even know what you want for Christmas but right now you've got someone asking you like Bill what do you want for Christmas and you're like I don't know and they're like what you have like really hard hobbies to shop for I mean it's like would you try and buy your wife a pair of shoes for Christmas no you don't do that you give them a gift card guys I'm gonna go thanks for watching make sure you sound off in the comments below if you have anything else you think we should check out and links to this motherboard will be down there it's very robust it's very durable but links to this will be down in the description below if you guys want to see pricing and all that sort of stuff because pricing is ever-changing I'll be honest I have no idea what this cost right now but it's probably not cheap it's premium it's like 93 everywhere else but 91 in California I'm talking gasoline folks just turn it offso with all the popularity of aim deep products lately we were sent a new one from Asus this is the ROG crosshair 8 impact looking for a new PC or PC hardware then today's sponsor micro Center is guaranteed to have what you need micro centers huge selection of hardware and devices along with their industry-leading prices mean you get more for your money this holiday season with build your own micro Center carries the latest in PC tech from all major brands while passionate knowledgeable sales staff are available to assist you with your next build not comfortable building it yourself then certified in-store technicians can build it for you in as little as the same day to see all that micro Center has to offer and to find the store closest to you click the sponsor link in the description below so here she is the asus rog are the rog republic of gamers which is technically a brand under asus I guess now Republic of gamers crosshair 8 impact me be calling impact is having an impact on them competition I don't know but we got a peel to do here these are never as satisfying they're like anyway if you're wondering why I'm all wet because I'm really excited about this board and it was hailing outside there's a minute ago and I was running around in it acting like an idiot oh that's a lot of hail ow Oh slippery - I guess California forgot that it was winter and then really quickly turned the thermostat back down ok so this is not a mini ITX board this is a mini DTX I'm not sure what the D stands for but basically the difference is most ITX boards stop right at the PCI Express slot this one is extended down below which is basically they just decided well you know if a graphics card has already taken up two slots and the chasis have to accommodate for that anyway well most of the chassis will talk about that in a sec why not extend the motherboard longer to get more things on there to make it make the layout a little more friendly the VRMs is usually the part that lacks the most when it comes to a small form-factor motherboard the VRMs are what is going to limit the power draw and stability of your overclock so your VRMs are not up to standard or they're not up to the task of overclocking then what will happen is they will get really really hot and then you end up having bad days when you overheat your VRMs so ITX motherboards are typically not as friendly with overclocking as say their full-size brothers like in this case here the crosshair Kate Hiro same chips that both X 570 both am for when it comes to the socket the difference though honestly is you're gonna give up four slots of RAM for two slots per channel versus one slot per channel over here on the mini GTX same socket same what we're talking about get one PCI Express slot on a mini ITX /dt x board vs however many are gonna be fit on the full-size ATX board but what you also are not getting with this is chipset cooling so you can see here we do have an x5 70 chipset cooler built into this motherboard it's a fan that's turning there so it's one of the drawbacks that you're going to have with a small form-factor motherboard now the reason why I'm even comparing these and showing you big versus small is because price point on x5 70 stuff especially like the mini DTX stuff is not cheap this is enthusiast great as far as I'm concerned although it's considered mainstream because of the CPU and the socket that it's occupying this is definitely going to be an enthusiast grade piece of product if we move to the back you can see we have integrated Wireless we've got the Q code read out with a reset button right next to it we've got our BIOS flashback and BIOS reset we've got our sound ports on the bottom and then typical USB C and then all the USB 3.0 is up here and then a single Ethernet jack and then this is basically just a vent to allow the air that flows through the heatsink with the active fans which are existing on this v RM to be able to escape but the active cooling on the v RM means that we're gonna be able to have a decent amount of overclocking with this now we do know already that the Rison 3 3000 series is fairly limited with overclocking most people hit a wall immediately at 4.2 hitting for 3 or higher becomes very difficult just because of the architecture so I wouldn't necessarily expect this to overclock any farther or any less than the mainboard because of the fact that we have a bit of an architecture limit at that point more so than the power delivery and stuff like that but it was just worth mentioning when it comes with a motherboard layout it's very well thought out because ITX motherboard sometimes you look at them and you go WTF what were they thinking with this layout it makes no sense whatsoever but at least here they have the power the 24 pin and the 8 pin CPU power on the same side making power routing very streamlined we've got 2 PWM fan headers right here near the CPU once a chassis one's the CPU header so if you're running an air cooler then you can plug it in right there that I'm gonna route over things the chassis fan is kind of out of place there in my opinion but it's it's nice if you need an extra fan header for let's say an AO or you can plug in both your AI fans there whatever RGB header here this is a 12-volt RGB is up here near the socket kind of a strange place for it to be to horizontally mounted USB 2.0 headers so these are still a necessary evil to have a lot of your AIO coolers a lot of your RGB control panels and stuff still use a USB interface we have a full size USB 3.0 right there we've got a looks like front side USBC connector right there to say to us well for say that's two in two different directions so one facing out one facing up it's always bugged my OCD to have them next to each other facing two different directions I think I just thought of why the graphics card is there so if you can't go up oh well then put four of them right there make it taller anyway Zizi i should be designing motherboards yeah anyway as phil just pointed out that's because of the graphics card unless you're running a single slot card well I guess it would still kind of be in the way anyway that's besides the point surface mounted buttons right here which is kind of nice you have a start button right there you've got your reset clear CMOS that's a actually look like safe boot and retry button now there's two things on here that I want to point out that really show how much effort AMD or basis rather has put into this motherboard is we'll start with this guy right here this is the so-dimm dot - if you guys have ever seen any of the big motherboards and it's surprising that the AMD crosshair hero does not have one but every other like X 299 motherboard like I'm using over here for my personal build the zenith board that we've used for thread Ripper in the past they've all had the dim dot - which essentially is an extension board it's got it's it's got this custom header that's designed to give you basically an expansion card so in this case they're calling it so dim that too clearly it's a play on small because you know small bored and so dim is the standard for memory and a met and I almost have MacBook yeah I guess I would be true to but in a laptop but what this gives us here is expandability where we can have 2 m dot 2 SSD is attached to it on either side and then we also have expandability with two additional fan headers as well as an addressable RGB header so it's not just being used for VM tube but because of the additional bandwidth that you have through there so dim set up you can actually have fan control and RGB through there now it has this connect this cover that goes on both sides I've already taken it apart so that we can kind of see you know it does have active cooling and such on there I think I've got on there backwards right now but this is kind of how it looks when it's put together and goes the other way actually so it kind of goes like that and then it goes like that sort of a deal I took it apart so you guys can see but you can see it does have heat pads on here so that way if you take the stickers off your m2s a lot of people forget to take the stickers off so these make a direct contact with your chips then what happens is these turn into a giant heatsink freedom too especially with the speed that PCIe gen 4 is capable of which is one of the main selling points to any x5 70 board if you care about your IO speed or especially your read/write speed then you're gonna want to keep the drives as cool as possible performance degradation is directly related to temperatures when it comes to SSDs especially m dot 2 but anyway this guy basically just snaps in here like this so what you need to be mindful up about at this point is you can see it sits up quite a bit taller then the vrm cooler here the heatsink so if you've got an a IO or you've got a big tower cooler of some sort going here or a down fire cooler though sometimes will take up the entire slot sometimes the down fire coolers will but right up against the graphics cards which as you can see the this occupies that space between the graphics card and that void that could sometime be taken up by the air cooler so it's something you need to be mindful of because if you don't use this you don't get any m2 on this motherboard usually you would have an m2 right here well or on the backside or right above the graphics card below the chip sometimes you'd have it right there horizontal but no both of them are designed to go on the sodium too so I thought initially that that's what this was but it clearly says right there supreme FX right on it so what we have here this is a PCI mini PCI Express that they've used to attach the sound card which to be honest I'm surprised because typically if they're going with some sort of a sound card like this they would just solder it right onto the motherboard which is what they've done in the past but I guess what that's allowed them to do is save space because you can see you've got some of your chips that stuff and other problems down here underneath it so again it's a space-saving maneuver but the nice thing about them using a PCI Express card like this is the fact that it has the front side audio connector on it which means it's got the shortest distance possible to communicate with the sound card sometimes they're nowhere near each other and what happens is you get the front side audio cable still crossing across I'd power cables and other interference even though this shielded you're gonna find that often times the front panel connector for the audio is the most staticky it's got the worst noise ratio so this should hopefully alleviate a lot of that since it's connected and separate from the rest of the motherboard so yeah I mean it's one of those things where this is what happens when you want to take something and really kind of have it be no compromises with the exception of its size because what we've got right here is in h2 10 from NZXT which is the chassis I'm planning on using for my next mod where I and I want to use this motherboard with a 39 50 X and as you can see it's kind of nice too because it definitely fills the void entirely one of the things look I'm one of those people that if it's very good it's heavy its value which apparently I am very valuable but as you can see right here it kind of fills the entire void one of the things I've always hated is that when you plug them a graphics card into a mini ITX motherboard the card hangs off the bottom of the card which is just always kind of bugged me aesthetically but I mean that's completely superficial I'm not import if it performs the way it's supposed to perform but as you can see this fills that void perfectly but there's one thing we need to talk about this with this real quick is although this motherboard will fit in probably 95% of ITX chassis x' that's not going to be true for all of them the ghost s1 that this would not fit in there because remember that uses a riser card and puts the graphics card on the backside of the board what was it like it was thing it was like that the X the shift X and the the shift we use the shift for film we use the shift X I know we didn't use the ship X but it's just a taller version of it that motherboard goes like this with the ports facing up not backwards so this extra distance would have meant that this board would not have mounted in that chassis and what's happened with a lot of ITX chassis x' is if started getting creative rather than just building a best basic rectangle that fits the perfect square that ITX typically is they started orienting it in all kinds of weird ways using riser cards and stuff to maximize the amount that you can fit inside of the chassis so that's something you definitely need to keep in mind if you're looking at building a small form-factor using this mini DTX format I don't know if we're gonna be seeing a lot of these in the future I have no idea if other brands have already started jumping on this format because it makes sense just extend it roughly an inch and a quarter or this is maybe I don't know 20 millimeters or so which seems like you could fit a lot more on it but you'd be surprised just how much it limits the options you have in chassis x' when it comes to this format so although they H 210 is not the smallest ITX chassis on the market it still uses a full sized ATX power supply but there's something in common in the three cases technically four if we do shifted shift X that is there's a common thread between all those chassis x' and that this this wouldn't fit in and I almost feel comfortable in saying if it uses an SFX power supply it's not gonna fit this so definitely do your check if you're planning on using this motherboard in a build for a small form factor if it is if it's an ITX case it uses a ATX motherboard or ATX power supply you're probably gonna be fine but if it uses an SFX chances are it is a very compact very space-saving chassis that mayor may not work with this because a lot of SFX mini-itx cases also seem to be using riser cards to get very creative on the way things are laid out so we were sent this a while ago from Asus it took me a while to kind of get to this I was expecting to already be building in this but because we did not receive a 3950 X in lieu of thread Ripper 3 stuff that we're doing it means that this was kind of put on hold that's okay I'm behind on builds anyway yes I got a finish nebula that's just on me I've been too busy with other things to finish it I haven't had it's my personal rig I'm I had pressure to get it done so I'm just been kind of floating along getting that done but I wanted to show you guys this one because I think with the 3950 X out now and this being able to run it and overclock it I think people might look at this and go oh man that's gonna that's gonna be perfect until you go to install it and you're like oh so I wanted to at least kind of show you an overview of the motherboard and then give you some food for thought so if you guys have any other components you think we should be taking a look at before the end of the year christmas is coming up a lot of gift-giving ideas and we're gonna have some gift not so much gift guide but kind of the idea of like what to buy the PC nerd and your family for Christmas because you know people like us we're not easy to shop for and you may not even know what you want for Christmas but right now you've got someone asking you like Bill what do you want for Christmas and you're like I don't know and they're like what you have like really hard hobbies to shop for I mean it's like would you try and buy your wife a pair of shoes for Christmas no you don't do that you give them a gift card guys I'm gonna go thanks for watching make sure you sound off in the comments below if you have anything else you think we should check out and links to this motherboard will be down there it's very robust it's very durable but links to this will be down in the description below if you guys want to see pricing and all that sort of stuff because pricing is ever-changing I'll be honest I have no idea what this cost right now but it's probably not cheap it's premium it's like 93 everywhere else but 91 in California I'm talking gasoline folks just turn it off\n"