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  • yannigr2 - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link

    Any board with a cost higher than, maybe, $100, is not an option when we are talking about budget systems. It doesn't matter what name that board has or the manufacturer logo. Why spend for example $170-$200 for the unlocked Pentium and a mobo, when with the same money you could possibly go for a i3 or an AM3+ 6300? And for much less you can go for an unlocked 750K and a good FM2+ mobo.
  • dgingeri - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link

    This is almost identical to my Maximus VII Hero, which was $207 when I bought it. This board is definitely not a $100 board.

    Perhaps you don't know about the weakening of the US dollar lately. It's leading to higher import prices.
  • yannigr2 - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link

    Weakening of the US dollar? The last time I checked and that was today, euro was down at 1.26 dollars (1.254 now) and analysts are speculating that dollar is going to move even higher than that.
    You have to recheck your sources.
  • Mayuyu - Saturday, November 1, 2014 - link

    Exactly. If you don't earn US dollars, you really feel the pain of inflation.
  • ShieTar - Monday, November 3, 2014 - link

    Except for the fact that Europe is not importing too much consumer electronics from the US, but both economies are importing loads of stuff from China and Korea. And both the dollar and the Euro have been falling compared to both currencies for years now.
  • Zap - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link

    Totally agree. Micro Center has an in-store (for those lucky enough to live near one) bundle with the Pentium AE + MSI Z97 PC Mate motherboard for $99. Yes, a $100 overclockable bundle! I got one, and it works well. That's the true budget overclocker bundle.

    My only wish now is for a micro ATX or mini ITX version.
  • kmmatney - Saturday, November 1, 2014 - link

    I have the Microcenter bundle as well. There is no need to spend more for an AE Pentium, as this board can already overclock it about as high as you can go.
  • DIYEyal - Tuesday, November 4, 2014 - link

    That's a fantastic deal!
  • Flunk - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link

    Seeing as the normal z97 pro is about $190, I don't think we can expect this to be any cheaper than that. $70 CPU and $190 board just doesn't make sense. You'd be better off with a $190 CPU and $70 board.
  • ShieTar - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link

    Normal, yeah. But its not like ASUS have a first here, there is already the ASRock Z97M Anniversary which you can get for 90$ (80$ after some rebate-thingy?). So that's pretty much the price they need to hit in order to sell this board.
  • danjw - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link

    Asus, a little hint, no one uses PCI slots anymore. So save a little money and drop the connectors and traces. Other than that, it sounds like a nice board for budget gamers.
  • nathanddrews - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link

    My Audigy4Pro does. I still use it for older EAX-enabled games that don't otherwise support surround sound over HDMI.
  • dgingeri - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link

    I still have a PCI audio card, a HT Omega Striker 7.1. I haven't been able to use it in quite a while because my boards haven't had PCI slots, but I still have it, and it still has updated drivers.
  • DanNeely - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link

    The bigger money savings (still only a dollar or so) would probably be in not having the PCIe-PCI bridge chip needed to add legacy PCI in the first place. The problem is that Intel's chipsets don't offer enough PCIe lanes for full ATX boards. The 16 on the CPU generally go to 2 slots; leaving 5 positions for the chipset to fill. It has 8 lanes; but a few of those get eaten by onboard devices: Audio, network, possibly a real USB3 controller (instead of a hub), possibly a firewire controller (although these are mostly history), possibly PCIe based storage (m.2 or sata express), or possibly thunderbolt.

    As a result if the mobo vendor wants to offer an x4 slot off the chipset (or even just use a large number of extra onboard devices) they need to either leave a few slots locations on the board empty or use a bridge chip of some sort. The PCIe-PCI bridge is cheaper than a PLX to multiply 2 lanes into 4 or 4 into 8; so especially on budget boards it tends to be what's picked.

    Skylake is rumored to be bumping the CPU from 16 to 20 lanes to better support PCIe storage. While that change will help keep the lane shortage from getting worse on gaming systems, they really do need to offer a chipset variant with 12 lanes instead of 8 if they want OEMs to stop using PLXes/bridge chips just to fill out higher end boards. (And if they want to boost thunderbolt adoption, they need to put TB into the chipset as well).

    Fortunately it appears that they are bumping PCIe and USB3 significantly on the higher end 100 series chipsets. The Z170 is being rumored to offer 20 PCIe lanes, 10 USB3 ports, and support for up to 3 x4 m.2 SDDs. However it's not quite as good as it initially sounds, to get those numbers they've heavily pumped up output multiplexing: The 36 PCIe/USB3/Sata3 lanes/ports are only backed by 26 outputs from the chipset; meaning there're 10 shared outs up from 4 on the current generation: 4 USB3/PCIe3, and 6 PCIe/Sata. It's still a big jump from the 18 configurable IO ports on the 80/90 series chipsets though.

    http://www.extremetech.com/computing/186210-intels...
  • DanNeely - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link

    Something I didn't notice before; the ExtremeTech article has the CPU staying at 16 lanes and all the growth on the chipset which I suppose makes sense with sataexpress needing PCIe and Sata connections. They've bumped the DMI bandwidth up with a new version as well; but since all the articles I can find use different units for DMI 2 (20gbit/sec) and DMI3 (8 giga-transfers/sec). None of them have stated the width of DMI3; or commented on encoding details but if we assume it continued to track PCIe standards, DMI3 will have double bandwidth/lane. However, unless Intel also doubled the width of it as well the risk of bottlenecking is significantly higher since the southbridge is now offering ~4x as much IO capacity. That might not be a real world concern since maxing out traffic every IO port at once is a really contrived scenario; OTOH I don't know how close DMI2 is to being saturated in real world scenarios.
  • StrangerGuy - Friday, October 31, 2014 - link

    At 4-core side of things, I would rather *very* much give Intel the an extra $100 for a stock clocked 4.2GHz 4790K instead of saving that $100 with a 4690K and then use the money on cooling and a "better" mobo. 4-core OCing is so overrated since Devil's Canyon.
  • Neil131 - Sunday, March 1, 2015 - link

    Did Asus realeased this already in the US? I live in Taiwan and I got his board for about US$160.00 Paired it with an i5-4690k. If your looking for a mobo for the Pentium-AE, MSI Z97 pc mate is the best out there, at about $90... more or less...

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