It has 5 gbit lan... cuz the poor platform doesn't have enough lanes to drive more...
Timing is understandable, orders from intel hq came to push as much eol products as possible now, because pretty soon they will sell at a significant discount.
DMI 3.0 is 32 GBit/s, so 5Gbit ethernet can easily go on the chipset PCIe switch. Which goes to show just how far behind everything else wired ethernet has fallen.
You are right, the tech world really needs to massively go to higher because 1gb internet is all over the place now and they can't go higher because the average consumer would have issues plugging that into existing networking equipment. I suppose they could include a modem with USB-C connector instead of LAN, but you can't assume every USB-C device actually has USB3.0 or higher speeds, sigh. Plus many want their own router so it would be nice if routers on the market now were a bit forwards looking and did more than 1gbit.
And meanwhile LTE and such reach 1gbit when in fact data prices are such that Joe Average has no use for more than 50mbit or so.
"You guys are reviewing so many z270 boards all of a sudden"
An amusing or annoying quirk of the motherboard industry (depending on your POV) is that they'll promote motherboards right up to the very end. So when we reach out to vendors for review samples, sometimes we can get hardware that has a short remaining shelf life, especially since it takes some time to put together these reviews.
Unfortunately we don't dictate the hardware lifecycle schedule, so all we can do it get reviews published and try to stay ahead.
all of tweaktowns stuff is full of opinion, i quit reading it years ago. Their newsletters are good, but when you actually read the content you'll notice a heavy biased against Intel and Nvidia. It's amateur hour over there.
It is funny yo should mention intel and nvidia bias, because this place is full of it. And crapple of course. The richer the corporation, the more bias basically.
Indeed, this is one of the least-biased sites you will come across. Many of us felt an Apple-bias for some time, but I don't smell that any more.
What I do not like, is half-baked reviews. Review a CPU, gaming & all, just one time, and save us the speculation in the comments from the fidiots (they know who they are).
Unless it can't be used for basic gigabit service for some reason; I don't see why OEMs adding a 5/10GB port are still keeping 2x 1 GB ones. Either only have one extra-just because port; or go all in and put 4x 1gb ports on to allow using the board in a DIY router.
"One thing that we should note is that the advent of the Z270 chipset brought a change on the naming of the USB ports. What we knew as USB 3.0 ports are now being dubbed as “USB 3.1 Gen 1” and the 10Gbps ports are now called “USB 3.1 Gen 2”. We first encountered this change while reviewing the MSI Z270 SLI Plus a few months ago but it seems that most of the manufacturers are following suit, rewriting their websites and reprinting their manuals. Users need to be extra careful when very high bandwidth connectors are essential."
This's been the official nomenclature since the 3.1 spec came out. It seems odd to call it out in the text but still have 3.0 and 3.1 in the table. IMO anyone who wants to be unambiguous probably should call out 5 or 10GB for the next few years (or until 5GB ports go away).
I am confused! 4-way SLI? Am I living in a time bubble or something? I thought that nVidia announced some time ago that they were focusing on 2-way SLI due to scaling issues and that support for 4-way SLI would be minimal in the future.
Besides, with 4-lane pci-e on this thingy, if anyone really wanted to do 4-way SLI, it seems like Threadripper (or sIntel's equivalent enthusiast parts) would be a much better platform for 4-way SLI.
Maybe ASRock is just trying to prolong the wave artificially.
there are other niche uses for 4 way, a hobbyist mining rig, a small render farm for blender, or the well off who just want to throw money at making a stonking pc
4x SLI on Pascal works. I have 4x 1070 FTWs in my main rig. Search it out on a well-known video site.
Due to installed PCIe switches, all four of my GPUs 'see' a x16 3.0 slot each, but they are multiplexed together to share 40 available lanes from the CPU, and this seems more than plenty, so I shake my head to comments fighting over how many lanes you have over this amount, because this works just fine. *Maybe* 28 would be too few, but 40 is just fine. Depends on what you are doing I suppose.
I won't be buying Threadripper due to what I see as confusion over different modes of operation, and possible latency issues (depending on application), and the multiple internal dies. Back in the day, it amused me to see people poking fun at the 'Core 2 Quads' for not being 'real' quad cores, but nobody I have seen has mentioned that TR is not just two - but FOUR separate dies on the same package, whilst the competition - Intel, has all its cores on a single die / package this time around (as far as I know).
I'm slightly impressed with TR, but not enough to buy it, given I already have 14c/28t Xeon.
Well stone me. 2 / 4 dies? It still leaves the opportunity for increased latency, as some sites have mentioned. So my comment stands.
But yes, recent Intel confusion with socket / chipset compatibility leaves much to be desired. No way I'm going to defend that. But you'll know when you build your Intel rig, core-core latencies will be lower.
It seems weird that the MB makers are releasing so many z270 boards when it is basically at the end of life even before a year is up from when it was released. I guess Intel caught the MB makers off guard here as well and they are stumbling fast to get these boards out ASAP because of the R&D it cost to design them.
The NE5532 is an op-amp and not a headset amplifier.
It's been first released in 1985 and has been found in all kinds of electronics since then because it's cheap. I'm struggling to find a reason why it's mentioned as some sort of feature...
A 'headphone amplifier' is just an op-amp used correctly in its linear region. Marketing departments may wish to tell you otherwise, but there is nothing magical about them.
Is triple\quad SLI still a think? I mean, at what point are 2x 1080Ti's or 2x Vega64's not good enough for any game at any reasonable resolution even across multiple monitors?
Apparently there are enough buyers still out there (for multiple motherboard vendors no less) that want the braggingest brag of a gaming rig out there, regardless of the paltry 5% performance increase 3 and 4 cards affords.
There are other uses for 4-way GPUs other than gaming. An inexpensive deep-learning rig is one of them. 16 PCI 3 lanes still provide 15.8 GB/second total bandwidth. With the PEX 8747 chip (in a 2-GPU system), if a single card is exchanging data with the CPU, it gets the entire 15.8 GB/second bandwidth, and GPU to GPU transfers are at 15.8 GB/second without involving the CPU.
On GoogLeNet, with a GTX 1070, time spent transferring data at x16 is about 3% of runtime. With AlexNet (same hardware), it is about 5.5% of runtime. That means that for 95% of the job, there is no data going over the PCI x16 links. The PEX 8747 can give full access to the 16 PCI lanes to each GPU during that 95% of the time. With 4 GPUs, each gets x8 lanes, so the transfer time doubles, but it is still just around 10% of runtime, and only 40% of the total bandwidth is used (this analysis ignores optimizations possible through pipelining the data transfer with the compute).
The GTX 1080Ti is about twice the speed as the GTX 1070, so with 4 1080Ti cards, you are using near 80% of the bandwidth, which starts to become a stretch. But if you can afford 4 1080Ti cards, you can probably afford an HEDT machine. For getting started with deep learning, this motherboard, an 8700K processor, and 4 used GTX 1070 or GTX 1060 GPUs (after the mining craze goes bust) would be a very inexpensive way to build a real AI supercomputer.
Does anyone have any rumors/ideas on when the z370 version of this board will come out? (or the ASUS z370-WS version of their board?)
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Dr. Swag - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
You guys are reviewing so many z270 boards all of a sudden, but it feels a bit like a waste with z370 just around the corner, just saying.shabby - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
Ya it's kinda funny how the z270 I'll suffer eof so quickly... classic intel.shabby - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
Derp eolddriver - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
It has 5 gbit lan... cuz the poor platform doesn't have enough lanes to drive more...Timing is understandable, orders from intel hq came to push as much eol products as possible now, because pretty soon they will sell at a significant discount.
saratoga4 - Saturday, September 30, 2017 - link
DMI 3.0 is 32 GBit/s, so 5Gbit ethernet can easily go on the chipset PCIe switch. Which goes to show just how far behind everything else wired ethernet has fallen.Wwhat - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
You are right, the tech world really needs to massively go to higher because 1gb internet is all over the place now and they can't go higher because the average consumer would have issues plugging that into existing networking equipment.I suppose they could include a modem with USB-C connector instead of LAN, but you can't assume every USB-C device actually has USB3.0 or higher speeds, sigh.
Plus many want their own router so it would be nice if routers on the market now were a bit forwards looking and did more than 1gbit.
And meanwhile LTE and such reach 1gbit when in fact data prices are such that Joe Average has no use for more than 50mbit or so.
The whole thing seems poorly thought out.
Notmyusualid - Sunday, October 8, 2017 - link
More 'ddriver BS' - 5Gb/s LAN is seen as a cost-effective alternative to 10Gb/s NICs, that are still expensive to buy / implement.There is tons more connectivity from the DMI than is required by all the NICs on this board - as stated by others.
Please seek professional psychological help.
SharpEars - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
That's right, I want to invest >$200 in a soon to be obsolete motherboard.Gothmoth - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
you may not but anandtech likes to get all this intel money they spend on PR.Morawka - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
Hey i just sold my z89 Asus Maximus VI Extreme motherboard on ebay for $300, it's not that far of a stretch. a man needs what a man needs.Ryan Smith - Saturday, September 30, 2017 - link
"You guys are reviewing so many z270 boards all of a sudden"An amusing or annoying quirk of the motherboard industry (depending on your POV) is that they'll promote motherboards right up to the very end. So when we reach out to vendors for review samples, sometimes we can get hardware that has a short remaining shelf life, especially since it takes some time to put together these reviews.
Unfortunately we don't dictate the hardware lifecycle schedule, so all we can do it get reviews published and try to stay ahead.
HollyDOL - Tuesday, October 3, 2017 - link
Ye, Asus already has z370 boards on their website published. I suspect it's a matter of days before mobos and cpus start getting available.crashtech - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
Tweaktown reviewed this board back in April, when it was still relevant news. I hope Z370 board reviews don't have to wait 5 months as well.ddriver - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
But it wasn't "in depth", it was "hasty and inferior". As we all know, good in depth reviews take at least 5-6 months to make ;)Morawka - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
all of tweaktowns stuff is full of opinion, i quit reading it years ago. Their newsletters are good, but when you actually read the content you'll notice a heavy biased against Intel and Nvidia. It's amateur hour over there.ddriver - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
It is funny yo should mention intel and nvidia bias, because this place is full of it. And crapple of course. The richer the corporation, the more bias basically.Notmyusualid - Sunday, October 8, 2017 - link
@ MorawkaIndeed, this is one of the least-biased sites you will come across. Many of us felt an Apple-bias for some time, but I don't smell that any more.
What I do not like, is half-baked reviews. Review a CPU, gaming & all, just one time, and save us the speculation in the comments from the fidiots (they know who they are).
GrzesiuLN2 - Sunday, October 1, 2017 - link
Tweaktown is just awful when it comes to reviews. Their whole site is based on spamming adds and feeding the rumor mill.DanNeely - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
Unless it can't be used for basic gigabit service for some reason; I don't see why OEMs adding a 5/10GB port are still keeping 2x 1 GB ones. Either only have one extra-just because port; or go all in and put 4x 1gb ports on to allow using the board in a DIY router.1_rick - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
Seems kind of crazy to put 4 NICs on a motherboard like this. A super-gaming PC that's also a router? It's a floor wax AND a dessert topping!CheapSushi - Sunday, October 1, 2017 - link
Yeah....I DEMAND LESS FEATURES FOR A HIGHER PRICE! /sNotmyusualid - Sunday, October 8, 2017 - link
ha...DanNeely - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
"One thing that we should note is that the advent of the Z270 chipset brought a change on the naming of the USB ports. What we knew as USB 3.0 ports are now being dubbed as “USB 3.1 Gen 1” and the 10Gbps ports are now called “USB 3.1 Gen 2”. We first encountered this change while reviewing the MSI Z270 SLI Plus a few months ago but it seems that most of the manufacturers are following suit, rewriting their websites and reprinting their manuals. Users need to be extra careful when very high bandwidth connectors are essential."This's been the official nomenclature since the 3.1 spec came out. It seems odd to call it out in the text but still have 3.0 and 3.1 in the table. IMO anyone who wants to be unambiguous probably should call out 5 or 10GB for the next few years (or until 5GB ports go away).
MadDuffy - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
And then the Board Features table still has the old nomenclature.Even odder, JHL6540 is the Thunderbolt 3 controller, but is only referenced as USB 3.1
DanNeely - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
It might not have enough PCIe lanes connected to be usable in TB3 mode. IIRC seeing Intels TB controllers used in USB only mode a few times before.Gothmoth - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
ROTFL..... reviewing an already outdated z270.anandtech must be getting money from intel like mad.
where are all the AM4 and threadripper reviews?
shabby - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
When pigs fly...Gothmoth - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osSMJRyxG0kGothmoth - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
wonder how long it will last before it is censored...have a look at intels shady marketing strategys over the decades.
Notmyusualid - Sunday, October 8, 2017 - link
@ GothmothAnd this is news to you?
wiyosaya - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
I am confused! 4-way SLI? Am I living in a time bubble or something? I thought that nVidia announced some time ago that they were focusing on 2-way SLI due to scaling issues and that support for 4-way SLI would be minimal in the future.Besides, with 4-lane pci-e on this thingy, if anyone really wanted to do 4-way SLI, it seems like Threadripper (or sIntel's equivalent enthusiast parts) would be a much better platform for 4-way SLI.
Maybe ASRock is just trying to prolong the wave artificially.
MadAd - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
there are other niche uses for 4 way, a hobbyist mining rig, a small render farm for blender, or the well off who just want to throw money at making a stonking pcBrokenCrayons - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
Typical GPU mining on a large scale can work with a 1x PCIe slot so four 16x slots aren't really of any added value for that sort of situation.Notmyusualid - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
4x SLI on Pascal works. I have 4x 1070 FTWs in my main rig. Search it out on a well-known video site.Due to installed PCIe switches, all four of my GPUs 'see' a x16 3.0 slot each, but they are multiplexed together to share 40 available lanes from the CPU, and this seems more than plenty, so I shake my head to comments fighting over how many lanes you have over this amount, because this works just fine. *Maybe* 28 would be too few, but 40 is just fine. Depends on what you are doing I suppose.
I won't be buying Threadripper due to what I see as confusion over different modes of operation, and possible latency issues (depending on application), and the multiple internal dies. Back in the day, it amused me to see people poking fun at the 'Core 2 Quads' for not being 'real' quad cores, but nobody I have seen has mentioned that TR is not just two - but FOUR separate dies on the same package, whilst the competition - Intel, has all its cores on a single die / package this time around (as far as I know).
I'm slightly impressed with TR, but not enough to buy it, given I already have 14c/28t Xeon.
supdawgwtfd - Sunday, October 1, 2017 - link
TR is 2 dies.The other 2 dies are just there to help support the IHS.
Perhaps if you weren't completely ignorant you would know this. And saying TR is confusing compared to Intel is a laugh.
Had a look at Intel's X299 line up at all?
Noticed that they have many different CPUs all with different pcie lanes?
Now THAT is confusing.
Notmyusualid - Sunday, October 8, 2017 - link
Well stone me. 2 / 4 dies? It still leaves the opportunity for increased latency, as some sites have mentioned. So my comment stands.But yes, recent Intel confusion with socket / chipset compatibility leaves much to be desired. No way I'm going to defend that. But you'll know when you build your Intel rig, core-core latencies will be lower.
rocky12345 - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
Great review as always thanks.It seems weird that the MB makers are releasing so many z270 boards when it is basically at the end of life even before a year is up from when it was released. I guess Intel caught the MB makers off guard here as well and they are stumbling fast to get these boards out ASAP because of the R&D it cost to design them.
timecop1818 - Saturday, September 30, 2017 - link
This board was released months ago (like April 2017 or earlier), they just got around to reviewing itrpjkw11 - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
I really like the three M.2 connectors. I have no need, yet, for U.2, but I long ago ditched HDDs and now run two SSDs.rsandru - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
The NE5532 is an op-amp and not a headset amplifier.It's been first released in 1985 and has been found in all kinds of electronics since then because it's cheap. I'm struggling to find a reason why it's mentioned as some sort of feature...
edzieba - Saturday, September 30, 2017 - link
A 'headphone amplifier' is just an op-amp used correctly in its linear region. Marketing departments may wish to tell you otherwise, but there is nothing magical about them.extide - Friday, September 29, 2017 - link
WHY are we still seeing boards with SATA Express... That just needs to die!Regular Reader - Sunday, October 1, 2017 - link
Same reason this motherboard still has PS/2 on it.Samus - Saturday, September 30, 2017 - link
Is triple\quad SLI still a think? I mean, at what point are 2x 1080Ti's or 2x Vega64's not good enough for any game at any reasonable resolution even across multiple monitors?Regular Reader - Sunday, October 1, 2017 - link
Apparently there are enough buyers still out there (for multiple motherboard vendors no less) that want the braggingest brag of a gaming rig out there, regardless of the paltry 5% performance increase 3 and 4 cards affords.Notmyusualid - Sunday, October 8, 2017 - link
Its not all about gaming....CrazyHawk - Friday, October 6, 2017 - link
There are other uses for 4-way GPUs other than gaming. An inexpensive deep-learning rig is one of them. 16 PCI 3 lanes still provide 15.8 GB/second total bandwidth. With the PEX 8747 chip (in a 2-GPU system), if a single card is exchanging data with the CPU, it gets the entire 15.8 GB/second bandwidth, and GPU to GPU transfers are at 15.8 GB/second without involving the CPU.On GoogLeNet, with a GTX 1070, time spent transferring data at x16 is about 3% of runtime. With AlexNet (same hardware), it is about 5.5% of runtime. That means that for 95% of the job, there is no data going over the PCI x16 links. The PEX 8747 can give full access to the 16 PCI lanes to each GPU during that 95% of the time. With 4 GPUs, each gets x8 lanes, so the transfer time doubles, but it is still just around 10% of runtime, and only 40% of the total bandwidth is used (this analysis ignores optimizations possible through pipelining the data transfer with the compute).
The GTX 1080Ti is about twice the speed as the GTX 1070, so with 4 1080Ti cards, you are using near 80% of the bandwidth, which starts to become a stretch. But if you can afford 4 1080Ti cards, you can probably afford an HEDT machine. For getting started with deep learning, this motherboard, an 8700K processor, and 4 used GTX 1070 or GTX 1060 GPUs (after the mining craze goes bust) would be a very inexpensive way to build a real AI supercomputer.
Does anyone have any rumors/ideas on when the z370 version of this board will come out? (or the ASUS z370-WS version of their board?)
Notmyusualid - Sunday, October 8, 2017 - link
@ CrazyHawkPeople have been telling me since 2007, that mining is going to go bust:
1 Bitcoin equals 4469.43 US Dollar
Mining has changed, but alive & kicking!
oranos - Monday, October 2, 2017 - link
nobody knows how to push the irrelevant innovation of hardware quite like the ethernet industrywagletops - Tuesday, October 3, 2017 - link
save all these reviews for when the 370 comes out :)http://www.appcheatsonline.com/roblox-robux/