NZXT announces the N7 Z370, its first motherboard

[Xlucine]

Loudish fans in offices aren't always terrible. Computer noise is generally pretty continuous, so you hear less noise from the sound (sound is pressure fluctuations around P0, noise is what you hear). Speech OTOH has a lot of amplitude modulation, so is harder to tune out & more distracting - to solve this, it's common for offices to inject white noise (or some other colour) to cover office conversations. Computer fan noise is also a nice steady broadband hum, so fulfils a similar function.

Sound is easy to measure and quantify, noise depends on who's hearing it and what else is around.

[philehidiot]

My girlfriend wants dinner on the table for 1930 so this will have to be a quick reply... did someone say "cuck"?

Having a wife means I'm trained to near-immunit from Ragequit and similar ailments.

I just take a fist full of drugs. Prescribed ones but still. most addicts would kill for my stash.

Suggestion is noted and politely declined. Vodka or mead are generally better for me, but my propensity toward the frequent handling of firearms, explosives and fast moving vehicles (often at odd and unpredictable times) tends to put alcohol quite low down my list of priorities.

Now, you see, I handle firearms on a worryingly regular basis and ride a 1250cc motorcycle... the former I find is very much helped by the addition of alcohol although the latter I've not tried. Mostly as becoming intimately familiar with a tree isn't top of my list of priorities. Funny story actually, a while back I was zeroing the scope on a rifle after a few adult beverages... fired off a test shot and bam, straight into the middle of the target. Proudly declared "scope's zeroed". No one else managed to get a shot even on the target with that rifle. On examination the scope was a good 8 or so degrees off.... like, visually obviously off. I think my "test shot" technically missed.

After that point I just removed the scope, declared innebraition and we used the iron sights.

As for my energetic materials, I have moved into the girlfriend's and whilst she will tolerate my armoury, she will not tolerate stuff that goes pop. I had to get rid of a load of really good stuff including MK9 Thunderflash flashbangs (186dB, 500,000 candlelight for "battle simulation training"... ahem), smoke grenades and I sent my mother away with a handbag full of magnesium ribbon... I'm a generous son.

I'm a musician. I pick up on, but am rarely that bothered by, fan noise. I don't even need try in order to hear at least five different reverberations from the PCs in the office right now... and there's 43 to choose from, today.

I used to be a musician. I regret giving it up. The girlfriend has a piano and I had a tinkle on it a while back but it didn't do for me what it used to. Plus she was annoyed about having to clean off the urine.

No, but tech is increasingly expensive these days, so unfortunately little justification is even needed.

I honestly do think this is a mobo for idiots with too much money. I have to say you and the other chap have changed my mind a little but I still think the cash could be far more effectively spent. My other issue which has just come to light is that we never know what is around the corner - my CPU is in the range where it will be seriously affected by the patches for these new security issues and if it kills my PC's performance then that's a new mobo as well. Investing in something like this is a long term thing and frankly Intel especially seems to be doing its best to limit the longevity of products. From little things like DRM being in the hardware and requiring a CPU upgrade to meet the latest standards (HDCP??) to things like these bugs making a whole load of CPUs obselete.

Never cared to learn the full reasoning behind it, but my CH kit fails and crashes and glitches on USB3, while it's fine on USB2. Must be a powered port, so maybe that's a factor?
But even VR headsets can be quite problematic on 3, sometimes.

Interesting, I guess that does give a decent reason to have enough USB 2.0 ports for older kit to work.

Pfft.... you bought Razer. Your problem. No sympathy!

Thanks, it's nice to know people care about my suffering. Actually, now the bugger works, it's a damned fine keyboard aside from the macro stupidity and stupid software that I hate with a passion. The hardware is really good, but that's because it's really not theirs. The keyboard design is standard in almost every way and they've used Cherry Blue keys which are utterly awesome and what I learned to type on. The only reason I'd not recommend this keyboard is the damned software / firmware and that's a real shame. I used to actually have two keyboards on my desk, the Razer one for when it worked and a crap one for when it didn't. Now it's mostly reliable after I threatened it with the keyboard gulag.

Life ain't always grand for a dog, either... One of mine has epileptic seizures and another just got over pancreatitis!

That's pretty crap. Good on you for not taking the easy route and putting them down like a lot of people do. Me and the girlfriend want a dog but frankly I'm too crippled to be walking it reliably and it's not fair for her to do all the work and ont op of that we both work hours which just aren't compatible with a dog. I'm not getting one to leave it on its own. The answer is of course two dogs, a dog flap and a garden but it still seems mean to leave them alone for so long.

I looked at the price and then the feature set.
My first thought was that it looked like it was made of LEGO™.
My second thought was that it had no RGB lighting on the board itself.
My overall conclusion is that this is marketed for Gamers, which is the main reason why it costs so much.

Not much more to it than that, although I note that at least they're not really trying to sell it as the best thing in history since sliced bread, like certain other "by gamers, for gamers" companies do...

Yeh, I agree.

Anyone even half-serious about their audio would probably suggest that this means you're not even half-serious about your audio. They do with me!

See, I *have* tested some properly expensive sets.... and they are GOOOOOOOOOD....... but they're also expensive and I really don't care all that much, as long as my cheap sub-£100 setup sounds good enough to me. I do have this little box thing that runs my audio, something like a SoundBlaster I think, which was given to me as a gift... but couldn't tell you what it's called or even what brand my headphones are these days... I have red ones. Might be SteelSeries.

I have a decent soundblaster card which gives me access to a load of post processing stuff like compression and mock surround stuff which would make any self styled "audiophile" explode with horror. A set of decent speakers at around the £90 mark and two sets of headphones at similar prices (one set Grado for music and one set closed back with a flat frequency response for when I don't want to disturb people) last decades and do me just fine. I'd like to try expensive ones but frankly I just can't justify even wanting to be tempted.

Welcome to the world of Gaming products.
Don't look at Gaming swivel chairs - You'll burst a blood vessel!!

Fapping chairs.

Not slamming. Just commenting on.

Yeh, I regretted that choice of words after I posted but actually had to do some work and couldn't change it.

RGB controllers do have their uses, sometimes beyond just controlling RGBs too, if you're into that aspect of modding. I'm also not in anyway against having decent sound systems, but note that most decent sound systems don't seem to make use of whatever the mobo has, either. I further note that a lot of professional music studio kit is also not gold plated and I promise you those still manage VERY well!!

If you really want a giggle, have a look at the "audiophile" cables and so on and then have a look at what they use in filming and broadcast... it's just funny.

Again, other boards have had great success with this approach and avoided any detriment. The benefits may well be purely aesthetic, but that's the selling point in terms of maketing Gamer kit for Gamers.
But neither do they pretend it makes the slightest bit of difference, either, which is acceptable to me if I were to buy one.... which I might if it had lights on the board... and didn't look like LEGO™....

PC Lego... maybe a new product?

It's not really an overclocking board though, so all is good!

Then why bother with the silly branded caps?!

I have a few choice touches with which I like to colour my text. It seems like the right thing to do. I don't use the French accents so much because I don't know French enough to use them properly.... and because it's French...

Cheese eating surrender monkeys with their stupid accents and their town called "Breast".

I usually have touches of humour and jesting in my posts, although it doesn't always come across.

Yeh my humour tends to cause offence.

Whereabouts?
I used to work at Northwick Park in Harrow. They had awesome sub, sub-sub and sub-sub-sub levels there where Medical Records Dept were hidden away, along with one of the few working Pater Noster lifts remaining!

I'm around Yorkshire at the moment. Did some work in Bradford and they had an amzing nurse's tunnel from the hospital to their accommodation. Pipes, cables, moss.... no creepy, translucent dead girls which disappear and reappear but still... awesome.

Marketing, budget, profit, Gamers......

Ain't that the truth.

[adidan]

That was a 'quick' reply?

[philehidiot]

My last PC used to be able to feed coil whine type noise from my GTX 460 into my audio output somehow. In many games it wasn't noticable, but in some it was. Age of Empires 3 was a fantastic example, running at hundreds of FPS on the menus, with higher FPS causing louder noise.
So, in a Skype call with friends also playing it, they'd hear this same coil whine whenever I spoke. I was in the amusing position of being isolated from civilized humans and *still* able to frustrate them with the noise. Because it was directly fed through my mic output somehow, along with voice. Something to do with uninsulated audio traces, if memory serves.

Back on topic, I actually like the look of it, but I don't much care for the platform or software based controls and the price is disturbing. If they made an AM4 version I have to wonder who would choose it at a price premium over, for example, Taichi.

Yeh this is either due to poor noise rejection or isolation. If you have one you don't really need the other. I've never seen physical EM isolation as a real solution but proper rejection will really solve the issue. The problem is that things like common mode rejection tends to take up space with components and proper software based noise rejection takes time and research. Personally, I like the "sense it all, sort it out later" approach rather than hardware filtering / blanking but I'm a knob.

[philehidiot]

That was a 'quick' reply?

Aye, that quickie took me 30 minutes.

I use the same definitions in bed. Just divided by 10.

[MLyons]

Seems to be a rebrand of one of these http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Pro...nID=0#Overview

[adidan]

Aye, that quickie took me 30 minutes.

I use the same definitions in bed. Just divided by 10.

Aye, i find getting out of bed takes at least 3 minutes these days...

[adidan]

Anyway, this board. What is it about this that makes it have a £300+ price tag? I mean I seriously have no idea.

[Ozaron]

Anyway, this board. What is it about this that makes it have a £300+ price tag? I mean I seriously have no idea.

Probably all those thus-far-unpaid people who were forced at corporate-gunpoint to figure out how to build a two tone motherboard that integrates with company software in time for CES, with no prior experience and just resources you'd expect from a company that primarily sells big metal boxes and rainbow LEDs.

Just a feeling.

[philehidiot]

Probably all those thus-far-unpaid people who were forced at corporate-gunpoint to figure out how to build a two tone motherboard that integrates with company software in time for CES, with no prior experience and just resources you'd expect from a company that primarily sells big metal boxes and rainbow LEDs.

Just a feeling.

Ha!!

[Ttaskmaster]

frankly Intel especially seems to be doing its best to limit the longevity of products.

You do realise you live in a corporate world, right?
That's how things work, nowadays.
People wanted cheap, so we got cheap junk. Junk isn't as good as quality stuff, so they made the junk better, which means it doesn't last. Now they can charge more money for junk because it's quality junk, they make lots of money because it cannot last... and of course will have no interest in giving up their profits so you can enjoy having money.

The rest is just down to what you think the product should be, versus which market they've actually aimed it at.

[FRISH]

No thanks...

[tinbin]

too expensive for me.. nice motherboard