Matte Black Motherboard Setup... Absolutely gorgeous!

you guys remember this remember when nzxt decided we're going to build motherboards now it didn't quite go as well as they had planned well they're continuing with their new n7b550 motherboard one that i was a little bit skeptical to take a look at but now that i've had a chance to kind of take a look at it already off camera and kind of see some of the build features and the changes they've made i'm kind of looking forward to this one [Music] all right so i kind of skipped the unboxing on this one because what's in the box is extremely basic so you get your quick start guide and manual here which is you know i wish they had just stuck to the traditional book but whatever that's fine m.2 drive hold down screws right there you get four sata cables two of them are double 180s and then two of them are 180s with a 90. and then you get your antennas so what i like about this is a lot of companies now have started moving on to the antenna extension if you will which i get works well for reception and such i just hate having loose wires hanging off the back of your motherboard that you then have to route up somewhere that's always falling over and stuff so these do just screw into the back side of the motherboard just like you would always expect to see they do swivel upward that way you can keep the antenna upright and then you've got obviously your uh multiple bands on here so it'll do wi-fi 6e by the way this is a wi-fi 6e enabled motherboard uh it does have a real tech nick in there if you're wondering about the ethernet and it obviously has bluetooth so that's why you have your multiple antennas and such you have your bluetooth radio you have your wi-fi radio and uh i'm just happy to see that they directly connect to the motherboard i've never personally had an issue with the antennas attached to the motherboard versus the wired ones that you could stick up on top of your case or on your desk or something so that's all that comes in the the box nothing too crazy no not a bunch of extra stickers and a bunch of crap that you're just not going to use in fact it doesn't even have a driver disc at least they're not giving you the cd coaster anymore you can put your cup on so let's go and talk about the build quality and some of the changes here one of the issues that many people had myself included with the n7 which i it's interesting to me that they're still calling an n7 when it really is an entirely different motherboard even though this is intel and that's amd this is their first amd board by the way i wanna talk about some of the physical changes that they made because of the fact that if you remember my very first video where i took a look oh wow and the this one started to discolor over time too because it is white if you take if you remember my very first video i talked about how i cut the absolute crap out of myself i think phil remembers i was bleeding all over the place because the metal is sort of sharp the bottom side not too much in terms of i mean some of these areas here have some really high traces that stick up and can cut you but the biggest issue for me quite honestly was the way that these covers removed so this is just the chipset hope i don't cut myself again but i need to demonstrate so it's just a little chipset cover here which you don't technically need to take off it just showing you the way it attaches it's got the little ball nubbins right there a little bit of rubber on there to protect it from scratching this is obviously where you get to like your n.2s and stuff so you would have to stick your fingernail in there and pull it out so there's access to one of the m.2s yet another one right here and i'm trying not to rip my fingernail back that's just a cover for continuity there's nothing under there so that's just there to make it look like well if you got one on the bottom you should have one on the top and then you got this little cover here which exposes your other m.2 and then it was trying to take this other cover off which i think is screwed down yes it is screwed down so i'm not going to go yanking on that that is where i ended up cutting myself now here's the biggest problem people had with the original n7 the oem for that or the brand that makes the motherboard for nzxt is eps how many of you just went whoo what's an eps isn't that power for your cpu eps has a brand that was much more known for making just basic workstation motherboards no frills didn't really have a whole lot of experience if you will in building z390 chipsets that are designed for overclocking on 9th gen intel and having a feature set or bios that could back it up or heck even build quality because i'm going to tell you right now this is one of the flimsiest motherboards we ever reviewed that's not the case for the b550 motherboard and i really hope they bring the changes they integrated into the new n7b550 into the intel chop intel chopped sets as well all right first things first i told you i hated these covers right guess what these are magnetic they just got this little tab right here that goes in to the underside and you see the little nubbin right there that's the magnet so when you're done you just get into the groove yes there you go magnet same thing with this one so you get your m.2 is really simple really easy they're magnetized now you still don't have active cooling when it comes to the m.2 this is something i would have liked to have seen nzxt incorporate we know m.2 drives get hot we also know that if they get too hot they throttle so here is an m.2 drive right here you can see a little bit of grease still on there from the motherboard i took it out of that has thermal pads on there having thermal pads properly touch the nand and the controller and a little cover to create a an additional heat spreader can help with temperatures it doesn't mean it's going to there's more that's involved in that like for instance is the underside being cooled see we have chips on the bottom side right here underneath this sticker so if you're only cooling one side of it and the other side is getting hot it can still thermal throttle so you can see the nzxt has still not incorporated any sort of active cooling now the oem for this motherboard is asrock so they moved on to a brand that's obviously much more known as rock's been kind of quiet lately though they don't advertise as hard as say msi or asus or gigabyte they asrock for the longest time had some of the best mid-range mainstream motherboards that you could buy you guys remember the xtreme 4 that was a motherboard back for fx that was just like completely unbeatable in terms of its value set its feature set and just its reliability given those factors taken into account so i would have liked to have seen them add some sort of m.2 active cooling to this in fact what i need to do right now is i'm going to go ahead and install it on this motherboard because of the fact that i am going to also be running this motherboard um for a while on our test bench which is what test benches are for so that we can just get a real good sense of what its long term reliability is going to be like the other thing that they really kind of kept in tradition is the full cover for the motherboard to make it look nice and pretty and i'm not going to bother taking the full cover off because again it is screwed in from the bottom side but this does give you a nice clean aesthetic to look at so they do come in white and they do come in black this is the black one here and i threw on our black amazon cooler with the black nzxt fan because i thought it just really kind of keeps that whole murdered out theme looking are going which looks really nice but the layout makes a whole lot of sense so in terms of pcie or pci express it is a pci express gen 416x on the top slot and it does have a pcie gen3 16x full size so you have two full-size pci express ports it does support both crossfire and quadfire if you're running really old graphics cards because we all know that's technology nobody uses anymore and then you've got uh additional pci express 1x right here um so that you can use things like capture cards sound cards or whatever is going to end up using that particular slot but in terms of the arrangement it makes a lot of sense so you've got your 8-pin pcie power 8-pin eps power for your cpu plus a supplemental 4-pin if you're going to be using a high core count cpu we do have a 5900 x in here so i would probably use both for the for the sake of just knowing we have enough power cpu header right next to that over here we have our aio pump and i'm glad to see this up here at the top i'm so sick of brands that will put it right next to the socket because your power cable is not two inches long so having it up top means you can route it with cables that are already going through your motherboard tray and back out on top to have nice neat logical cable managed routing you have the retention of their um proprietary rgb headers so we'll kind of show you that this here real quick that's that existed on the originals as well because nzxt does have and where'd i put it here we go because nzxt does have their nzxt cam if you're using those headers you won't necessarily need the control box that comes with cam meaning less wires less things to manage and a much more simple way of wiring up their rgb the nzxt fans as you can see on the bottom do have an in and out so they have daisy chainable fans which means if you're using one of the uh wires that come with the the fans themselves you can plug the proprietary in right into the motherboard or out i should say right to the board you do have two headers here take this put it to the inside of your fan in not inside the fan but the inside of the fan plug that in and now this fan will have rgb connected to the motherboard without having to have anything extra to work it but jay i don't have nzxt cam and i don't want to use nzxt cam well right here at the bottom you've got your standard 12 volt non-adjustable rgb which is the white and then a standard 5 volt argb 3 pin to the left of that which is in the gray so you can use whatever other rgb which is the more standard headers if you want but if you're using nzxt fans and cam then you can daisy chain these for having one connection or up to two if you want to use led strips and stuff just to keep the wiring nice and neat and clutter free when it comes to other fan headers we've got two more to the right of that right over here these are our chassis headers so i like that we have a lot happening on the top side 24 pin power plug plus usbc right next to it six sata six gigabit per second ports and then we have a usb 3.0 on either side of it if i was to make an arrangement suggestion i'm sure there's some sort of a pcb reason why they didn't i would have liked to have seen both usb 3.0 next to each other and then maybe move the sata 6 down that way you have the plugs right next to each other making it easier to cable manage rather than having those separated bottom we do have surface mounted buttons we have a reset and a power switch and then moving this way we have three more system fan headers three usb 2.0 headers do you know how many brands are starting to emit usb 2.0 headers from their motherboards entirely having none whatsoever meaning you have to run some sort of an internal usb hub uh which they do make where it can turn a usb 3 into usb uh two and then you have like six of them or eight of them having three of those is nice because there's a lot of stuff whether it be aios or if you're using the cam header you know box itself usb 2 headers are how almost all these rgb plugs or boxes connect to the motherboard to communicate having one is never enough having three well that's awesome because even if you don't use them you have them and then as i already showed you right here we have our argb and standard rgb and then we have our front audio which nobody should ever use because it's analog and extremely noisy so with that said let's go ahead and get it fired up and i'm curious about the bios functions i want to see what bios features are in here especially with amd having very specific very proprietary functions like precision boost overdrive per core overclocking sometimes you can do per core as well as all core overclocking separate i'm curious as to whether any of that made its way into the n7b550 so here we go here's the fan hooked up to uh the cam header and as you can see it defaults to white which is nice to see not rainbow puke like so many brands out there anyway here's the bios first things first it's extremely clean like almost suspiciously clean you know it's kind of like if weight that's how heavy something is indicates quality how cluttered a bios is almost makes you feel like that gives you features i guess but if they give us what we care about and cut the rest of the crap i'm okay with that let's look at the overclocking tab overclock mode bus speed auto so that's going to be like our base clock right there so b clock 100 is default soc in uncore oc mode so that's kind of neat and if you don't want to if you want to know what a feature does it tell you right over here on the right and it looks like it's a description that actually means something whereas other motherboard manufacturer brands i don't want to necessarily name them will be like click here to tell you what future does b clock adjusts the b clock so here it's telling you soc in encore mode is amd overclocking setup forces cpu soc encore components eg the infinity fabric and memory and integrated graphics to run at their maximum specified frequencies at all times so by enabling that we're just telling it go highest frequency allowed now those other things are going to determine what makes it allowed but that's highest frequency allowed so we've also got uh vddp voltage uh ccd voltage which is kind of nice dram setting so xmp here is our 3200 megahertz it immediately changes everything changes our voltage changes our core clock or our frequency for the ram infinity fabric and dividers so you can leave that at auto which is fine if we go over here and since we set our uncore to to enabled which makes it run at its maximum setting it's going to run a maximum setting of one half of what the ram is set to so that that frequency ratio of one half gets you the best infinity fabric performance so it's going to be running at 1600 megahertz because that's half of 3200 when it's set to auto or you could manually set it to 1800 but then you created a weird um offset there which isn't recommended so leave it at auto unless you're going higher than 4000 megahertz which i don't actually recommend and then leave it at 1800 megahertz oh my god overclocking profiles that you can activate from the overclocking tab why has nobody else thought of this before yeah i know this existed in their old bios and stuff it's just other brands they're still like let's go all the way over here way off to the right so that you can enable the profile that you then have to go all the way over to the left to start tweaking oh look resize bar support so here it is resizable bar is active in this bios which is nice front panel hd hey look at that this is how you can turn on and or change the type of audio controller for the front panel amd pbs nvme rate system to set your raids okay we got rate functionality in here pcie and graphics lanes configurations you can change the configuration of the lanes and how they're divided amd overclocking all right so this is interesting that it's not in the overclocking tab but this is where you can start to figure out your eco mode which is disabled good precision boost overdrive let's go ahead and set this to enabled and this gives us our power limits here but i'm not seeing where it's giving us our offset in terms of frequency so if i go to advanced i bet you that's where it'll be oh yeah right here max cpu clock override 200's as far as they're letting us go that's kind of the standard with pbo here's a curve optimizer where you can right positive magnitude okay so this is more just form formulomatic formulatic formula formula stuff formulaic whatever i like formulatic though formula matic and then pbo limits we can come in here and make these manual right so you could go in here and then start to over or overdrive all this stuff manually if you want to if you don't understand any of the scalers and stuff i would just leave it on auto and then max cpu boost clock override at 200 megahertz what do we have for tools ssd secure erase tool okay so if you want to actually truly wipe your ssd i guess you could try to do that here um i don't know what sanitization of the drive means okay that says format so we'll not click that because it's got my os on it and then our bios instant flash tool so if we had our um if we had a usb stick in here to do our bios flash we could do that and something else i want to mention is this board does also have a bios flashback feature on the back of it itself so if you have a system that won't boot because you've worked the bios or you completely hammered it in some way by messing up settings and even it clears cmos doesn't fix it you can do a bios flashback from the back side of the motherboard without the system actually being booted which is a nice function and one of the things i was going to say is this this motherboard doesn't have a cpu and a cpu optional header so say if you're having two fans hooked up right for push pull on an air cooler like this if you want them both to operate the same rpm which is what you want for the least amount of having a sort of cross drop or drop pressure across the fins you want them to operate the same rpm so this is saying that you can set the cpu fan and the water pump switch to either being cpu pan or pan cpu fan or water pump so that's kind of nice that you can adjust that all right and then it has this fan tuning software built in which is where it would basically go through it will talk to the fans i have an rpm wire and it will apply voltage and as it applies voltage it kind of monitors what the rpms are and then it will learn here's the range of each fan attached to each header so it can then start to smart control the fans all right so it's actually booting and i had to go ahead and plug in my sata ssd as well because the test bench it came off of it put the bootloader on the sata ssd but the os is on the mp600 because windows windowsing all right so i downloaded a cam and i know right now a lot of you are probably already groaning and i hate built-in software and for those of you that are actually capable understanding how some of this can actually help your system we'll go ahead and move forward so pc monitoring here you can see your cpu usage your gpu usage ram usage network speed both up and down your storage capacity and what's used on it and i also like that it shows your top processes so you can see here what is actually causing you know any sort of slow down or hog of your system cam is also really lightweight now versus what it used to be i think the problem is with people that are groaning they haven't used it in a long time and yes back in the day when it was more of a beta project it was a very intensive resource hog it's a lot leaner now than it used to be but if you're using an nzxt motherboard there's no reason why you shouldn't use cam because it's how you control so many facets of your motherboard for instance here's the air fan and by default the lighting is white like i said and that's what the lighting will be if it's plugged into the rgb header at the top designed for nzxt's lighting system but if you start changing the settings right here there you go you can see now everything in cam automatically controls any devices plugged into those headers without needing the control box for it which is in my opinion cooling this is this right here is already why i would use this particular piece of software with an a with an nzxt motherboard because you can control the fan speeds and the curves right here you don't have to go into the bios and start playing with like temperature thresholds and percentage stressful thresholds you can just change it all right here so for instance the only fans we have plugged in right now are the cpu fan and then we also have um this fan plugged into which i believe is our aio no i think it's one of the chassis yeah it looks like it's one of the chassis connectors so you could go in here you could rename it if you wanted um cpu air cooler right now that we named it we can change the profile if we want so their silent performance or custom and then if you go custom you can start changing the band curve however you want it so i mean if you don't see the benefit or the strength of having you know the ability of controlling your fan curves from software on your motherboard headers then i don't know what to tell you if you were running one of their digital power supplies from nzxt you could also get information here on how many watts you're drawing so if you ever wondered like how many watts is my system pulling when i'm gaming you could have this up on another monitor or in the background and then fire up your game and fully load your gpu and you can see exactly how many watts you're drawing from the wall same thing here with audio devices if you have any sort of audio devices that are supported you'd be able to go in here and fine-tune the mixer and whatnot and then for settings you can change the account name and start cam with or without windows and it's all nice and easy now i'm using guest mode and one of the things that people are not happy about with cam is the fact that well you've got to make an account well i've always used guest mode personally and as you can see right here that's working just fine that's pretty much all we're going to talk about today this is sort of a first look at their b550 motherboard i'm gonna run this as our test bench now for a while with our 5900x to see how well it performs so far it's doing really well the aesthetics are there it looks better than it ever did the functionality in terms of the way the little covers work already is just this is what they had me at the cover honestly and the fact that this one although it does come in white and black just looks so good being all solid black like that with the black cooler black fan black gpu i could see this being a really nice blacked out theme if that's what you were going for so anyway if you guys want to take a look at the n7 motherboard uh check the description down below you guys will find a link to the product web page where you guys can go and learn more about it pricing and all that pricing right now time making this video is about 229 for this motherboard although that might sound like a lot to get a lot of functionality that's in this motherboard from some of the other brands will run you three four five hundred dollars don't get me started on our current test bench motherboard for amd which was over seven hundred dollars so anyway if you guys want to learn more about the n7 b550 motherboard full specs of uh memory compatibility which by the way i forgot to mention does support 4 600 plus megahertz on the memory i've not personally run any amd cpus with memory that high but yeah compared to the n7 z390 motherboard they have come a long way not just with a better oem but also better build quality small functions like the little magnetic covers make me happy nzxt seamlessly integrating with it and not taking up a whole bunch of resources on your system uh it just makes me happy so i'm curious this board's only been around for a few weeks i'm curious if any of you guys are actually running it if you are sound off in the comments below with what your experience has been like that way um we can we can hear how you guys feel about it phil's still running the camera and the light's still red so i'm just still talking can i go now

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 594,436

Keywords: nzxt, b550, amd b550, amd n7 b550, black motherboard, best amd moterboard, motherboard, mobo, b550 mobo, overclocking, 5900x, amd 5900x, nzxt motherboard, nzxt n7

Id: owBpIVNqYtg

Length: 22min 25sec (1345 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021