First a full shot of the board.
A while back ASUS asked me for motherboard input for future bulldozer boards. When a company asks for input you have to pick your battles wisely as they are more inclined to make sensible changes than drastic changes.
Knowing the power demands thuban had over deneb and the variance between wattage and amperage draw from deneb to thuban the first thing that I felt needed adressing knowing we would be seeing 2 cores added again is more input power.
Asus delivered in this respect, however the location of the of the extra 4 pin might have not been the best choice.
CH4
CH5
Why not the best location? Here's a shot of a 790 board in a worst case scenario benched for an obscene amount of hours non stop. As you see that general area is ICE/WATER.
Moving along the next thing that was logical to ask for was practical and effective heatsinks.
CH4 with all the bling removed to show the actual PWM sink.
CH5, I think ASUS managed to nail this one.
The discussion of lucid was also brought to the table It's pros and cons ( of which there are many on lucids end ) in the end ASUS pushed for sli licensing at which point opened the door for 4way sli with expander supporting bios's.
Unfortunately.....when mounted this poses a problem.
Luckily, with ROG connect switched on and the provided USB cable you can power on the board remotely and reset, shutdown remotely.
ROG connect has been removed from it's solitary sideway mounting to a normal USB port and is designated as white still.
Last but not least due to the severe temperatures needed to get the most out of AMD cpu's care must be taken in component and chip placement.
I found this crystal to be sometimes problematic if the board was to cold on CH4.
ASUS has taken care to relocate it further away on CH5.
More to come. This is just my initial musing and thoughts on the board for now from a xtreme cold benchers POV.
Other than the heatsink which I personally think is an improvement visually and practically none of the above mentioned should apply or concern the 24/7 crowd.
Pulled the heatsinks since CH4 was plagued by bad contact at launch. It seems Asus nailed this on the head as well and other than some users having a preference of which paste they use I find no need for users to remove sinks.
For those curious, pwm components have not changed, if it's not broken don't fix it is always a good approach.
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Originally Posted by theoldtimer
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