Differences in Asus Boards?

Exactly where in the hell do Strix boards fall?

I understand rampage and zenith are top tier boards and apex is overclocking.

Maximus and Crosshair are enthusiast mainstream boards.

Prime boards are more high end business pro like boards.

Pro gaming is middle of the road I assume.

Tuf are budget performance

But where in the hell do strix fall in the line? Are they above or below something else?

Tuf boards are supposed to be the durable ones with 5 year warranties.

I would put the Strix boards in between the high end ROG and the Prime boards.

Rampage / Zenith are HEDT ROG boards (ROG = top teir gaming boards)
Maximus / Crosshair are mainstream ROG lines
STRIX is budget ROG line (sometimes reffered to ROG STRIX)
Pro Gaming boards were stripped ROG boards but as of now replaced fully by STRIX/Prime, last pro gaming they made was the Z170 Pro gaming i think.

Prime is standard non ROG consumer line really its own range in itself sense you can find anywhere from full featured to basic Prime boards

TUF is now being marketed as kind of below STRIX for gamers but yeah budget performance / looks i guess idk its a mess.

I've wondered about this as well. For example, I've owned deluxe boards before (p4c800-e deluxe and p8z77-v deluxe), so what's the equivalent of the deluxe line?

Prime line would probably be equiv to the old non branded "normal" line deluxe just means its got more features/options so Prime-A would be closest eqiv. These days pretty much all the mobo makers are branding things, Asus started it first with ROG boards way way back.

I miss the days when everybody had only 3-4 ATX boards. Now it seems like everybody has 8-10 ATX boards for each chipset and it takes an hour or two to figure out the differences.

The marketing teams at all the motherboard manufacturers have made a mess of things. Even I can't always keep track of this shit.

Love me long time?
Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/237490/...ntation-explained-prime-series-takes-backseat

Strix boards fall toward the middle of the road ROG series, gamer type boards. Decent OC features, but mostly target toward gamers.

Rampage is top shelf gamer, Apex is 100% Extreme OC with ROG badging.

Dan_D said:

The marketing teams at all the motherboard manufacturers have made a mess of things. Even I can't always keep track of this shit.

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This. I don't see how they make any money with all these models. Seems like they competing with themselves more then other manufactures. So many trims of boards don't get sold I am sure. All you need is a Budget board and 2 mid tier and 1 top of the line board with everything including the kitchen sink in there also. It makes it so hard to decide which to buy cause 2 or 3 board look to have similar specs but could be $50 difference.

pretty easily if you look at lineups tons of the boards are exactly the same just slightly different components or looks board layouts identical. there is very few truly unique and one off board designs, its actually one of the things that makes the asus apex boards special they are one off designs made for overclocking, also this is likely why gigabyte and asrock are so late to ever launching their xoc boards as of late, they can't keep up with it, the x299 oc formula from asrock just now finally is in retail i think, both of them completely skipped over doing a z270 board for example (asrock had already put out their awesome z170 oc formula however but they stopped making it leaving no retail availability this whole year pretty much :S)

Most of the motherboards ( PCB ) are the same, however, the motherboard components, ic's, etc can be different.

A good recent example of this is from ASRock. Their x299 Fatality Board and their X299 Taichi boards are the exact same board. They simply dress up the PCB with different flair and flash.

So the sound chip features might vary from one board to the next, etc. Ethernet, USB, etc etc.

Personally speaking, it's all branding and hoopla. Stay focused and avoid spending money on the higher end boards. You're just spending money to make yourself feel better.

You can get very good overclocks and stability with Asus boards across their product line from the lowest of the low to their highest end.

Their cheapest mid range boards are a great place to start and you would be extremely hard pressed to see any difference at all with anything else moving up in price point from a performance and stability POV.

Don't buy wifi if you don't need it. Don't buy into higher end boards with a DSP, etc. Instead invest in a 4 port USB 3.1 card and use/move that from box to box. An external DAC you can also
move from box to box and you side-grade / upgrade etc etc. I bring these features up because more often than not these are what board manufactures use to up-sale you into buying higher
end motherboards. Better sound, WIFI, More USB Ports, etc.

A good rule of thumb is to just understand that everyone out there on earth has made it their business to separate you from your hard earned money. Avoid marketing gimmicks and being up-sold. Armed with this knowledge you learn to treat all marketing with a bit of skepticism which you should be doing in the first place.


This Asus x270 board will perform exactly the same as any of their highest end boards and it's only $109 dollars.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132939

Also, a thing about reviews. Don't get discouraged when you want a board but it has maybe a few more bad reviews than what you would like. Read carefully. A lot times you can tell it's user error because of impatience, negligence, etc. 9 out of 10 times a bad review is not really a bad review I've found.

Hope this helps.

this new Ryzen lineup from AMD has really mixed things up....
building a new system after my FX8350 became EOL
Tried the Asus Prime and Asus Strix,but both were inferior to my old Asus Sabretooth rev2 ??...
eventually settled on the Asus Crosshair Hero v1,lotsa money but it has the options i want to get the most from my Ryzen 1700.

The worst part is AMD and Intel using similar chipset naming conventions. Z370 vs. X370? It's horseshit.

Dan_D said:

The worst part is AMD and Intel using similar chipset naming conventions. Z370 vs. X370? It's horseshit.

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you can thank AMD for that, they basically coped intels numbering scheme for all chipsets and made the number 1 digit bigger because they i guess still think people associate bigger numbers and computers as being faster or better in some way. i mean the way they did it with the chipsets so blatantly its kind of suprising they didn't start ryzen off at 8xxx numbering instead of 1xxx like they did which made far more sense and wasn't an attempt to just 1 up and big digit over intel's model.

The Z-370 reviews were so off the Wall and the IO protector and Heasinks are so crazy looking I avoided them all this time.
I picked up a Astock Tachi this time around I'm actually afraid to use a different brand mabye I should wait for my Asus Z-170 to break on me.

bigdogchris said:

Love me long time?

Spoiler

Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/237490/...ntation-explained-prime-series-takes-backseat

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"The "Republic of Gamers" (ROG) brand has a clear sub-division, with boards featuring just the "ROG" moniker next to brands such as Crosshair (AMD MSDT), Maximus (Intel MSDT), Rampage (Intel HEDT), and Zenith (AMD HEDT), making up the upper-end; and the Strix brand making up the upper-mid range bulk. The ROG Crosshair, Maximus, Rampage, and Zenith sub-brands will get extensions such as "Ranger," "Hero," "Formula," "Impact," "Gene," "Extreme," "Code," and "Apex;" while the ROG Strix brand will be sub-divided as Strix-E (topmost), Strix-F (second-best), Strix-G (micro-ATX), Strix-H (entry ATX), and Strix-I (mini-ITX)."

Yep it is ridiculous.
I'm racked off with how difficult it is to disseminate where motherboards stack up.
As pointed out they should make less variety and pass the savings on so we get more for less and make it easier to choose.

It would be almost forgivable if manufacturers actually listed the detailed specs, but you have to resort to reviews to hunt down the actual differences.

Meeho said:

It would be almost forgivable if manufacturers actually listed the detailed specs, but you have to resort to reviews to hunt down the actual differences.

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Most manufacturers don't provide detailed specs to us. We usually have to figure things out for ourselves. ASUS is one of the few that will provide real technical details on what's on the motherboard. Even then, certain aspects of the design are kept as secret as possible. Some of it's understandable because they don't want the other manufacturers copying them. It's an eventuality, and they realize it but they try to keep any technical lead over the competition for as long as they can. Six months, or one product cycle is usally the longest they can keep anything a secret from the other guys.

Dan_D said:

Most manufacturers don't provide detailed specs to us. We usually have to figure things out for ourselves. ASUS is one of the few that will provide real technical details on what's on the motherboard. Even then, certain aspects of the design are kept as secret as possible. Some of it's understandable because they don't want the other manufacturers copying them. It's an eventuality, and they realize it but they try to keep any technical lead over the competition for as long as they can. Six months, or one product cycle is usally the longest they can keep anything a secret from the other guys.

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Secrets, ok. But not even power phases, cooling implementation...

Meeho said:

Secrets, ok. But not even power phases, cooling implementation...

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No, they rarely tell us even that much. I've got to count the phases and take photos and enlarge them so I can read what's on components. If I'm lucky their documentation mentions the number of phases and who made them.

I remember the days when the TUF branding meant you were getting a good motherboard with a longer warranty, not an entry level gaming motherboard.

Yeah, I was looking for a motherboard recently and holy mother of god it is annoying to figure out what the differences are even between models in the exact same line. The "compare" tools are just retarded. I don't want two complete feature lists with slight formatting differences to ensure they don't even line up. You're making me do the work by eyeballing it, and even making THAT hard to do.

How about this, marketing guys?

GamerDOOM 6, contains all the features of GamerDOOM 5, but adds 4 more USB 3.1 Generation 1.1 Subsection 2 Paragraph H ports, and adds the phallus shaped M.2 heat sink.
GamerDOOM 7, contains all the features of GamerDOOM 6, but replaces the Murderer1000 with a LAN chip which will actually work, and uses better audio components.

It's not rocket surgery, but you'd think it was.