welcome to my unboxing of the ASUS P9 x79 Pro so this is more of a uh value
oriented although it's very difficult to say that with a straight face value
oriented x79 board it features most of
the same key key marketing points as the
other p9x 79 boards such as their all
new digital power control for the CPU and the RAM so dual intelligent
processors so they've got the epu as well as the TPU the TPU is cool we
actually have a showdown coming down coming up on my ncixcom channel where
I'm going to show you the ASUS TPU versus the OneTouch one button
overclocking efforts that MSI and Gigabyte have come up with and let's
just say the TPU wins by a fairly significant margin okay precise power
control so there's the digi plus vrm one click speed up
with their ASUS SSD caching which uses a thirdparty SATA controller in order to
enable that rather than the Intel controller because the Intel controller on x79 does not support that even though
z68 does UEFI BIOS ASUS's UEFI BIOS is
excellent uh Bluetooth enjoyment okay and quad Channel DDR3 for more bandwidth
and up to eight dims this fully SLI and Crossfire X ready and concludes support
for all the latest 2011 processors including core i7s and core i7 extremes
on the LGA 2011 platform so I'm going to go ahead and take this board
out like that and we're going to show you guys the accessories so it comes
look at that I've had okay like I said not really a value board still a very
pricey board comes with a three-way SLI Bridge you won't need that for a value
board okay we've got four right angle SATA 3 6 gbit per second cables and two
right angle SATA 2 3 gbit per second cables our front Hue connector so that's
for plugging in your front uh Power and reset and all that stuff a little bit
more easily uh flexible ASUS SLI Bridge
an IO Shield hey look at that CPU installation
instructions in full color ha oh as well
as oh this is awesome this is awesome USB BIOS flashback so using that white
port and this button right here without a CPU plugged in without RAM plugged in
with nothing but power and a motherboard you can just load a BIOS file onto your
USB drive plug it in there and you can Flash the bio
without any components Plugged In which means that say a new CPU gets released
and you buy it and you sold your old CPU and oh it doesn't post because it's not
updated for the new CPU yeah doesn't matter because you can Flash the latest
BIOS with just a USB key you don't even need a CPU so we've got our utilities
and driers disc which you should not use you should throw it away and download
the latest from the ASUS website and I think that pretty much covers the
accessories for the P9 x79 Pro so let's
go ahead and get this baby opened
up don't worry I'm working on it I'm
trying here guys I'm trying here we go all right so there is our sexy x79 board
because which x79 board is not sexy I would argue that they all are okay so
here we have some stickers telling the same things that were already on the outside of the box and since at this
point we've already bought the motherboard I'm not sure why they're still trying to sell it to us but power
to them okay what else we got here aha this is a good one usb3 boost why wasn't
that on the box that's an awesome feature let me see if it is on the box
it must be no way it's not even oh this
is one of the best features on this motherboard so it supports the upcoming
well I yeah upcoming cuz there's really no devices on the market yet that
support it but it supports the upcoming uas P um method of transferring data to
usb3 which means using the same usb3 ports with uh updated firmware on your
usb3 devices you can get much much better transfer speeds and even on non
uasp USB devices you can still get
better transfer speeds because you can use the scuzzy protocol which is faster
cool right fan Expert Plus allows you to install AI Suite to and set custom fan
profile see they've got a little tiny picture there and you can set fan curves
based on temperatures and RPM targets and all that kind of good stuff which is
great normally you have to buy like expensive third party controllers in
order to do stuff like that so what do we got here we got our LGA 2011 socket
which has 2011 pins and came out in year 2011 cool we've also got eight that's
right eight DDR3 memory slots which are supporting a grand total of at this
point in time up to 64 gigs of memory because we only have 8 gig dims as far
as unbuffered dims on the desktop go we got a heat pipe here and a vrm solution
that actually extends all the way to the back check that out so we've got a heat
sink here on the uh on the voltage Regulators that are on the back the
thing about these x79 boards is look how much space gets taken up by the sheer
size of the socket and all the memory slots around it so the motherboard
manufacturers have had to be very Innovative about where they squeeze the
voltage uh the voltage Regulators because look at this here's our 8 Pin
CPU power capable of sucking up to 200
Watts through the socket they have to build enough digital power regulation
modules around it in order to handle that kind of a load without overheating
or causing any kind of instability it's actually kind of a Marvel that they can
do it at all to be perfectly blunt here is our eight pin power connector and
it's ideal location at the top edge of the board here's our 24 pin power
connector and it's ideal location at the right hand edge of the board USB 3 front
panel header in its ideal location along the right hand edge of the board and
check this out we've got on the Intel controller 2 SATA 3 6 GB per second
ports four SATA 2 3 GB per second ports
and on the third party controller with caching enabled we've got the two more
SATA 3 6 GB per second ports front panel
connectors are here the TPU can be enabled or disabled with a Hardware
switch here but you can also turn it off and on in the bio so I don't really see the point of that uh there's a clear
Simo switch three front panel USB two headers there's the epu which is the
energy saving version of a TPU which is a power more go faster button uh version
so the energy saving version I would say is less relevant on a performance
platform like this uh front post LED or
not front post LED there's the actual TPU chip here's your built-in power and
reset switches 1 2 3 four uh PCI Express
16x Slots of which two are wired for 16x
two are wired for 8X so it's going to run a little something like this 16 16
1688 or 8888 2 PCIe 1.0 slots or PCI e1x slots
and no PCI slots yes this is a new high-end performance platform there are
no PCI slots and no PS2 ports we got 1 two three I'm actually not sure if this
one even works as a regular USB port but I'm going to count it so four six USB
2.0 ports four USB 3.0 ports a BIOS
reflash button here gigabit Ethernet optical audio out that looks like power
D SATA cool beams two of those and bluet
bluetoo and 7.1 audio out so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first
look at the P9 x79 Pro from ASUS don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech tips
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