Asus Apex:
The benefit to staying on this socket is that it is very mature and well refined several times over, Asus knows what to expect and how to build upon reference board design with high accuracy.
The Apex board is overclocking platform for the ROG brand and features only 2 DIMM slots to achieve higher memory frequencies. It also features the DIMM.2 slot for dual M.2 cards connected to the PCH. ASUS has chosen to use less SATA ports and not share bandwidth but the DIMM.2 connected to the PCH is only 4x PCIe lanes (2x2) and the maximum bandwidth you will be roughly 3300MB/s so running two 960 Pro drives in RAID 0 would be overkill. And another feature not found on most other boards in this segment is the dual 8 pin 12 volt CPU power connectors. No doubt in this boards ability to deliver power to the CPU. Available in the Asus BIOS is memory and overclocking profiles, the memory profiles are for most memory available for those who avoid manually setting memory timing or rely on XMP or for those who need to jump to LN2 settings without having to press all the buttons. Just be aware that you must know what kind of memory modules you have and further voltage tweaking may be needed to reach the presets settings. |
The Apex has all the OC features available from ASUS as this will be the best available OC board of the Z370 series. The OC Panel is also supported on the Apex.
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Bifurcation is not available but needed for X16 Hyper card use to see beyond the first drive. This segments a PCIe X16 3.0 slot into 4x4 lane arrangement to allow four M.2 devices to be seen from one card.
Dielectric spray:
This protection is required for running sub zero for days or even weeks without stopping. An example would be the Sysmark image below, That benchmark takes several hours to run and having to run it several times cannot be done with pouring LN2.
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You seen the picture and wondering what is all the messy spay? One of the most important rituals we have is to insulate our boards with many different methods, my preferred method is to use "WD-40 Water Resist" Silicon spray. It dries clear and undetectable. I coat the entire area around the CPU, the back of the CPU, and the back of the motherboard behind the CPU socket and towards the memory. I will let the board dry for about an hour and then build up Frost King layers to make a nice flat surface. Where you see if on the table and on the tops of parts will also dry nice and clear, no mess.
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