I don't understand why it is funny... Sure PS2 is old, but PS2 latency is less than USB. It's not a matter of backwards compatibility, rather giving you the best component support :) http://bit.ly/1wrCL4B
That is simply because USB is much more flexible interface. Nevertheless I think there is enough USB ports on this board, if the user wants more, they can simply use a hub. Also, there are already 4+2 USB 3.0 ports. I doubt it can add two extra USB 3.0 ports with out extra USB3.0 controllers + PCI express link requirements. And 3rd party controllers usually suck compared to the intel native implementations anyway.
@AnnihilatorX You're correct, this X99 has a maximum of 6 USB 3.0 ports and 3rd party controllers suck.
@hojnikb it's a simple concept. PS/2 has lower latency and in some cases less data corruption over long cables, but USB beats it hands down in pretty much every other aspect.
I did more research and found that MSI implemented a gaming USB port for low latency USB connectivity on some of their boards, which is neat but I have no idea how it works. Some keyboards like the Steelseries 6gv2 comes with a USB to PS/2 converter and they highly recommend using PS/2 where possible. This quote is Steelseries' reason why: "We absolutely recommend using the PS/2 connector when possible. First,it will give you total freedom with no limit to the amount of simultaneous key presses. And, equally as important, using the PS/2 may just improve your overall gaming experience. The reason is that when you use a USB keyboard your computer is actually using CPU time polling your keyboard. The higher the polling rate the more CPU time is used to perform the polling. And because of the built-in debounce rate found on any quality keyboard, any polling rate above 200Hz is simply a waste of CPU time and really just a result of pointless marketing hype. Unlike USB keyboards a PS/2 keyboard isn’t polled at all. The keyboard simply sends a signal to the computer as key presses are made, which causes a hardware interrupt, forcing the CPU to register the signal."
Huh? PS/2 is quite excellent for keyboard support and does N-key rollover. Works great for both old and new keyboards. Doesn't consume CPU-cycles in the same way, or has as much drivers to deal with. It's not like it has tons of COM-ports and Parallel ports.
USB can't do true n-Key rollover, but the manfuacture can make the key grid more efficient by spacing out the limitations (7 keys simultaneously pressed.) For example, some manufactures take the cluster of AW, SD, QE, RG, ZX, CV and LSHIFT+T and put them on different polling grids, so each of those clusters can be used simultaneously.
There is still a poll rate issue with USB simply because PS/2 has a dedicated keyboard controller INSIDE the keyboard AND on the motherboard, bypassing the need for the CPU to monitor the port. USB is a host-based controller and all devices are software-controlled by the CPU, there is no way around this.
Last I checked PS/2 keyboard processors are like 12mhz, so we're not talking a lot of processing power here so the real world impact is negligible. The real benefit of PS/2 is nKey Rollover and the freed up USB port.
Also, I'm sure ASrock desing new boards by starting with old designs and changing everything that needs to change. Removing the PS/2 would actually cost them a few hundred dollars worth of designer working hours, and probably reduce the manufacturing cost by less than a cent. And I don't see them selling millions of X99 boards.
No, it wouldn't man, removing the PS/2 port would take no more than 5 minutes in their PCB design program. It's a non issue. It's there because they want it there.
I've been working as an engineer for a good decade not, and I can assure you that absolutely nothing takes 5 minutes when it comes to industrial products. Once you are done changing the design files, the documentation, the ordering system, the assembly procedures, etc. you also need everything reviewed by the corresponding design authorities, I ensure you that at least 10 man-hours are spent. Hell, just a two-hour discussion of 5 people on the potential drawbacks of removing the port can take two hours and waste the 10 man-hours before anything is changed at all.
I run into n-key rollover issues all the time. Once you start typing >80wpm USB shows its limitations. It's also obvious in games like BF4 where pressing 4-5 keys simultaneously isn't uncommon. You need to read about the advantages of PS/2's polling rate before making such assumptions. Even serial ports have their function. It isn't useless like a parallel port or something...
If you have ever had to use a computer that had a usb driver fail then you'll know why they keep them their. It is a driver less port so when shit hits the fan you dont have to re-install the OS just to use your keyboard.
I am not so sure if PS/2 is lower latency. It has to go through the super-io chip, followed by the southbridge, while USB is just going through the southbridge(native).
They'll stop putting them on when Intel or Microsoft drops support for them in the hardware or OS. Most boards have as many USB ports/headers as the controllers they carry support so it generally doesn't reduce the number of USB ports on the board.
If you look at the picture ASRock could easily fit 6 more USB ports on there but haven't for either cost or lack of space on the PCB for more USB controllers. I don't think it's a stretch to say that most people don't need/care about having more than 8 USB ports on the back of their PC.
I plan to replace my ~5 year old ~$90 Sapphire PI-AM3RS785G with this one!
Using it as a desktop / gaming / home server all at the same time. Years ago I tested using a single PC with x2 keyboard, x2 mouse and x2 screen using "softxpand duo", my Athlon II X2 240 (at the time) did not work very well running 2 instances of Dota2. I recently got a Phenom II X6 1075T for $50 (seller's board broke and could not find replacement) and Radeon R9 280X for ~$300. I tried again using my own custom coded equivalent of "softxpand duo" running on Ubuntu 14.04 and it's super amazing! My mates and I all use one PC for all our studies / gaming needs. This motherboard with a Haswell-E 6-core would seriously rock! The 8 core is just too damn expensive even for us putting our money together :-(
That's probably just there to advertise their BIOS internet capabilities, which are pretty fun. I updated my AsRock Z87M Pro 4 BIOS via the internet and it worked flawlessly. You can also email support from within the BIOS and update drivers (that didn't work the one time I tired though). All in all, a decent addition worthy of being advertised, imho. :D
I actually don't like using 2 m2 slots over 1 m2 slot and 1 sata express. Since only 1 m2 slot will be a gen3 x4 slot the other slot is simply moving the sata express connector to an m2 connector. It basically limits your options of drives you can use. You don't need the saved space on a full atx x99 board. Everyone uses larger towers for x99 builds. I'd rather have 1 x4 3.0 m2 slot for a nice 1TB drive to store the OS and install all my important games and apps on and still have much room to spare to install future things on. This way i got my pc starting up and running all my programs incredibly fast with a drive with 2GB/sec reads and writes. Then with the 2tb 2.5 inch ssd's on the horizon get a nice 2tb sata express 2.5 inch ssd as my basic scratchpad for all my video editing, with 10gbit speed on sata express can still get a nice 1GB/sec read/write which will be enough for workin with videos. So I can work on my video stuff off a fast drive. And then a few 3.5" 6TB drives for my bulk media storage. Such a perfect future proof setup ready even for 8k video editing.
You end up with 3 tiers of storage (really 4 if you count a ram drive from the possible 16*8 128GB of ddr4 ram). Say like 96GB of ram drive space for super critical speed needs. 1TB of 2GB/sec storage access for booting the PC and all the OS files used as well as all your programs and games and apps installed for max performance accessing any of them. 2TB of 1GB/sec storage access basically used as a super large scratchpad for editing when a 96GB ram drive isnt enough say for uncompressed high resolution raw video. And then the final tier of 7200 rpm 6TB drives like WD black to store the huge amounts of media you have. Combine all these awesome storage tiers with the 5960x 8 core beast and you end up with a monstrous video editing machine.
Basically painting this huge picture to show why some people would opt for sata express and m2 rather than 2 m2. Now if both m2's were gen 3 x4 from cpu I could be persuaded as that is a good idea.
imagine how awesome that could be 2x ultra m2 slots pci-e 3.0 x4 to both of them with ssd's that can get close to maxing them out say 3200MB/sec read/write speeds and then raiding those 2 ssd's as raid 0 possibly achieving read/write of a whopping 6400MB/sec. That crazy being able to write over 6GB's a second. Basically 5 minutes and 20 seconds to entirely fill up 2 1TB ssd's
I zoomed in on the PCB just above the mPCIe which is above the Audio, and found "Killer lan1" and "Killer Lan2" printed on the board, Please god no, give us a pair of Intel NIC's please!!! I hope its just the same board as the fatality but without the killer nic. It also looks like their are mounts for the E2200 shield you can see in this location on the Fatality board.
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hojnikb - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
Heh, its funny to still see ps/2 ports on a mobo this pricey :)mellozor - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
I don't understand why it is funny... Sure PS2 is old, but PS2 latency is less than USB. It's not a matter of backwards compatibility, rather giving you the best component support :) http://bit.ly/1wrCL4Bhojnikb - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
I really dont see anyone using PS/2 keyboards on a system like this. It would be a better use of space to just add two extra usb3.0 portsAnd all that latency is getting really old. If ps2 was really that superior, why is everything usb nowdays ?
AnnihilatorX - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
That is simply because USB is much more flexible interface. Nevertheless I think there is enough USB ports on this board, if the user wants more, they can simply use a hub. Also, there are already 4+2 USB 3.0 ports. I doubt it can add two extra USB 3.0 ports with out extra USB3.0 controllers + PCI express link requirements. And 3rd party controllers usually suck compared to the intel native implementations anyway.mellozor - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
@AnnihilatorX You're correct, this X99 has a maximum of 6 USB 3.0 ports and 3rd party controllers suck.@hojnikb it's a simple concept. PS/2 has lower latency and in some cases less data corruption over long cables, but USB beats it hands down in pretty much every other aspect.
I did more research and found that MSI implemented a gaming USB port for low latency USB connectivity on some of their boards, which is neat but I have no idea how it works. Some keyboards like the Steelseries 6gv2 comes with a USB to PS/2 converter and they highly recommend using PS/2 where possible. This quote is Steelseries' reason why: "We absolutely recommend using the PS/2 connector when possible. First,it will give you total freedom with no limit to the amount of simultaneous key presses. And, equally as important, using the PS/2 may just improve your overall gaming experience. The reason is that when you use a USB keyboard your computer is actually using CPU time polling your keyboard. The higher the polling rate the more CPU time is used to perform the polling. And because of the built-in debounce rate found on any quality keyboard, any polling rate above 200Hz is simply a waste of CPU time and really just a result of pointless marketing hype. Unlike USB keyboards a PS/2 keyboard isn’t polled at all. The keyboard simply sends a signal to the computer as key presses are made, which causes a hardware interrupt, forcing the CPU to register the signal."
SirKnobsworth - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
USB 3 allows device interrupts ... I'm wondering if this could improve these issues somewhat.Morawka - Tuesday, August 26, 2014 - link
3rd party USB 3.0 Controllers are mostly fine. There is negligible benifit from being native.Your probably referring to the 3rd party Sata III controllers, which are far inferior to a native implementation.
Penti - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
Huh? PS/2 is quite excellent for keyboard support and does N-key rollover. Works great for both old and new keyboards. Doesn't consume CPU-cycles in the same way, or has as much drivers to deal with. It's not like it has tons of COM-ports and Parallel ports.extide - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
USB can do N-Key rollover too, if the manufacturer isn't a cheapass and uses a decent USB keyboard controller instead of a POS generic one.Samus - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
USB can't do true n-Key rollover, but the manfuacture can make the key grid more efficient by spacing out the limitations (7 keys simultaneously pressed.) For example, some manufactures take the cluster of AW, SD, QE, RG, ZX, CV and LSHIFT+T and put them on different polling grids, so each of those clusters can be used simultaneously.There is still a poll rate issue with USB simply because PS/2 has a dedicated keyboard controller INSIDE the keyboard AND on the motherboard, bypassing the need for the CPU to monitor the port. USB is a host-based controller and all devices are software-controlled by the CPU, there is no way around this.
Last I checked PS/2 keyboard processors are like 12mhz, so we're not talking a lot of processing power here so the real world impact is negligible. The real benefit of PS/2 is nKey Rollover and the freed up USB port.
zodiacfml - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
it is because some people ask for it.ShieTar - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
Also, I'm sure ASrock desing new boards by starting with old designs and changing everything that needs to change. Removing the PS/2 would actually cost them a few hundred dollars worth of designer working hours, and probably reduce the manufacturing cost by less than a cent. And I don't see them selling millions of X99 boards.extide - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
No, it wouldn't man, removing the PS/2 port would take no more than 5 minutes in their PCB design program. It's a non issue. It's there because they want it there.hojnikb - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
Yep. Its there because either there is still demand for it or they just didn't bother removing it.Gigaplex - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
They wouldn't even need to do that. They'd just simply not solder the PS/2 port onto the motherboard even if the PCB supports it.ShieTar - Tuesday, August 26, 2014 - link
I've been working as an engineer for a good decade not, and I can assure you that absolutely nothing takes 5 minutes when it comes to industrial products. Once you are done changing the design files, the documentation, the ordering system, the assembly procedures, etc. you also need everything reviewed by the corresponding design authorities, I ensure you that at least 10 man-hours are spent. Hell, just a two-hour discussion of 5 people on the potential drawbacks of removing the port can take two hours and waste the 10 man-hours before anything is changed at all.khanov - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
Ignoramus.Samus - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
I run into n-key rollover issues all the time. Once you start typing >80wpm USB shows its limitations. It's also obvious in games like BF4 where pressing 4-5 keys simultaneously isn't uncommon. You need to read about the advantages of PS/2's polling rate before making such assumptions. Even serial ports have their function. It isn't useless like a parallel port or something...scootd - Tuesday, August 26, 2014 - link
If you have ever had to use a computer that had a usb driver fail then you'll know why they keep them their. It is a driver less port so when shit hits the fan you dont have to re-install the OS just to use your keyboard.boogerlad - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
I am not so sure if PS/2 is lower latency. It has to go through the super-io chip, followed by the southbridge, while USB is just going through the southbridge(native).Flunk - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
They'll stop putting them on when Intel or Microsoft drops support for them in the hardware or OS. Most boards have as many USB ports/headers as the controllers they carry support so it generally doesn't reduce the number of USB ports on the board.If you look at the picture ASRock could easily fit 6 more USB ports on there but haven't for either cost or lack of space on the PCB for more USB controllers. I don't think it's a stretch to say that most people don't need/care about having more than 8 USB ports on the back of their PC.
kwrzesien - Tuesday, August 26, 2014 - link
I wish it had two, if only to work with older KVM's. What does it hurt, there is plenty of room on the back without any video ports?mellozor - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
I plan to replace my ~5 year old ~$90 Sapphire PI-AM3RS785G with this one!Using it as a desktop / gaming / home server all at the same time. Years ago I tested using a single PC with x2 keyboard, x2 mouse and x2 screen using "softxpand duo", my Athlon II X2 240 (at the time) did not work very well running 2 instances of Dota2. I recently got a Phenom II X6 1075T for $50 (seller's board broke and could not find replacement) and Radeon R9 280X for ~$300. I tried again using my own custom coded equivalent of "softxpand duo" running on Ubuntu 14.04 and it's super amazing! My mates and I all use one PC for all our studies / gaming needs. This motherboard with a Haswell-E 6-core would seriously rock! The 8 core is just too damn expensive even for us putting our money together :-(
Devo2007 - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
Excellent.... A motherboard worthy of my Transformers Bumblebee case mod idea.... :)(now if only I was skilled enough to actually do a good case mod)
imaheadcase - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
The other lan port has ASrock Cloud sticker on it. Is it just something asrock specific or is it a actual NIC you can use?extide - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
Just some marketing BS.Death666Angel - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
That's probably just there to advertise their BIOS internet capabilities, which are pretty fun. I updated my AsRock Z87M Pro 4 BIOS via the internet and it worked flawlessly. You can also email support from within the BIOS and update drivers (that didn't work the one time I tired though). All in all, a decent addition worthy of being advertised, imho. :DMikuni - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
What controller chips for USB and Sata? I'm never buying a mobo with Asmedia stuff again.Laststop311 - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
I actually don't like using 2 m2 slots over 1 m2 slot and 1 sata express. Since only 1 m2 slot will be a gen3 x4 slot the other slot is simply moving the sata express connector to an m2 connector. It basically limits your options of drives you can use. You don't need the saved space on a full atx x99 board. Everyone uses larger towers for x99 builds. I'd rather have 1 x4 3.0 m2 slot for a nice 1TB drive to store the OS and install all my important games and apps on and still have much room to spare to install future things on. This way i got my pc starting up and running all my programs incredibly fast with a drive with 2GB/sec reads and writes. Then with the 2tb 2.5 inch ssd's on the horizon get a nice 2tb sata express 2.5 inch ssd as my basic scratchpad for all my video editing, with 10gbit speed on sata express can still get a nice 1GB/sec read/write which will be enough for workin with videos. So I can work on my video stuff off a fast drive. And then a few 3.5" 6TB drives for my bulk media storage. Such a perfect future proof setup ready even for 8k video editing.You end up with 3 tiers of storage (really 4 if you count a ram drive from the possible 16*8 128GB of ddr4 ram). Say like 96GB of ram drive space for super critical speed needs. 1TB of 2GB/sec storage access for booting the PC and all the OS files used as well as all your programs and games and apps installed for max performance accessing any of them. 2TB of 1GB/sec storage access basically used as a super large scratchpad for editing when a 96GB ram drive isnt enough say for uncompressed high resolution raw video. And then the final tier of 7200 rpm 6TB drives like WD black to store the huge amounts of media you have. Combine all these awesome storage tiers with the 5960x 8 core beast and you end up with a monstrous video editing machine.
Basically painting this huge picture to show why some people would opt for sata express and m2 rather than 2 m2. Now if both m2's were gen 3 x4 from cpu I could be persuaded as that is a good idea.
Laststop311 - Monday, August 25, 2014 - link
imagine how awesome that could be 2x ultra m2 slots pci-e 3.0 x4 to both of them with ssd's that can get close to maxing them out say 3200MB/sec read/write speeds and then raiding those 2 ssd's as raid 0 possibly achieving read/write of a whopping 6400MB/sec. That crazy being able to write over 6GB's a second. Basically 5 minutes and 20 seconds to entirely fill up 2 1TB ssd'sMorawka - Tuesday, August 26, 2014 - link
Show us the Asus Rampage V Extreme Please!!!!!Hellfish4000 - Tuesday, August 26, 2014 - link
I thought I just read the exclusive on this board over on tons hardware?! I guess I don't understand what exclusive means.Redstorm - Thursday, August 28, 2014 - link
I zoomed in on the PCB just above the mPCIe which is above the Audio, and found "Killer lan1" and "Killer Lan2" printed on the board, Please god no, give us a pair of Intel NIC's please!!! I hope its just the same board as the fatality but without the killer nic. It also looks like their are mounts for the E2200 shield you can see in this location on the Fatality board.