welcome to yet another unboxing video today we have a product that I am pretty
excited to take a look at this is the P9 x79 WS so what we already know about it
based on the Ws in the product name is that this is a workstation grade board
from a Seuss so that means usually in
the past tons of PCIe slots workstation
features and workstation grade reliability so this is the kind of thing
you might want to use for a rendering machine or if you're like some of ASUS's
customers even a very very high-end
gaming machine because yes while all of that stable you know quality stuff is
there this is also an completely overclocking friendly motherboard as
well so let's have a look at what we've got in terms of included access you're really far away let's have a look at
what we've got in terms of included accessories we have four sat 3 6 GB per
second cables four SATA 2 3 GB per
second cables various colors uh that's an interesting strategy we've got a
Molex to 2 SATA power adapter we have a four-way SLI Bridge bam matte black PCB
on that by the way looking boss three-way SLI Bridge also with a matte
black PCB love it and then we've got uh the usual two-way SLI Bridge it's a
flexible one it's an orange one I sure hope if you buy this board you're going
to go with three or four-way SLI so that you can use one of those instead we've
got a seral riser so that's a PCI bracket that you can plug into the board
if you still need cereal that is a very workstation friendly feature we've got Q
connectors for front USB as well as the front panel connectors for power and
whatnot we have a an e SATA as well as USB 2 PCI back uh PCI back plate and
then we've got our IO shield and finally the user guide as well as a DVD which
you won't use because you're going to download the latest off the ASUS website
for all your drivers and utilities and whatnot and speaking of utilities and
drivers and whatnot this one needs lots of them because it has a lot of
different features that are actually pretty cool so let's take out the board
and then we will get into all of that
neat stuff so the first thing the first
thing we see on this board is that it has yes count them 1 two 3 four 5 six
PCI Express 16x physical slots so not
all of these are actually wired for 16x in fact only this one and this one are
actually wired for 16x these ones are all wired for PCI e8x
now bearing in mind this is a PCI Express gen 3 board which means that
even PCIe 8X is going to have the same
bandwidth as PCIe 16x Gen 2 so I'd be
comfortable running a graphics card in any one of these slots no problem also
remember on x79 there's no funky some of
the PCI Express Lans are coming off the chipset and some are coming off the CPU
none of that everything is coming out of the same place so there's no additional
latency penalty for using a particular slot versus another one so these are
your two main PCI Express 16x slots for
two-way graphics card configurations for three-way I guess I'd probably go with
one two
three then for four-way you don't really have much of an option it's 1 2 3 4 so
those are your preferred configurations uh what else we got on here aha like all
of ASUS's x79 boards this one has eight
dim slots which means support for oodles and boatloads of memory which is
definitely necessary for a workstation environment where you might be doing 3D
rendering or heavy video editing heavy photo editing all of those kinds of
workloads where you need a ton of RAM so that is buil in to this particular board
there is our LGA 2011 socket with our 8 Pin power connector nothing really EX
iive on this board like no 28 pins or anything like that it's not really
necessary anyway but uh but there you have it there is our CPU pwm of note on
this board is the fact that it does use Digi plus power control so that it is
digital vrm for both the memory and the
CPU very very cool thing to have we've also got a very unique cooling Solution
on this board check this out so we've got the heat sink up here for the CPU
pwm we've got an additional couple of heat sinks over here that are going to
help us dissipate some more heat and then finally we've got your standard low
profile heat sink on the Intel chipset
itself so that one actually isn't cooling a whole lot but these other guys
are going to be taking care of most of the cooling which is going to be or most
of the heat which is going to be produced by this so going back to the
board what else we got here we got memo K which increases memory compatibility
allows you to get into the BIOS to configure things we've also got an easy
plug so this is additional power for the board in the event that you do need it
this is particularly necessary for boards that have that are intended to
have a ton of graphics cards installed in them 24 pin power connectors in its
ideal location along the right hand Edge we've also got an epu button that's for
power saving USB 3 front panel connector in its ideal location we've also got
sata3 6 gbit per second connectors these two run off the Intel chipset these two
run off of a thirdparty Marvel chipset and they also support ASUS's SSD caching
feature so remember x79 unlike z68 does
not natively support SSD caching caching so ASUS has implemented that with a
thirdparty chipset these four are SATA 2 3 gbit per second so you'll use that for
your lower performance or your storage drives or whatever else the case may be
on the front we've got our front panel connectors for your LEDs your power
button your reset button all that good stuff we have an internal USB port this
is Handy for you know more like server and workstation grade applications so if
you have for example a storage device or something that actually connects with
one of these internal ports and you don't want to run it through a pass throughout the back of the case this is
a very handy thing to have two USB 2.0 ports onboard power button so yes we
still have those uh those awesome Enthusiast grade features even though it
is a workstation board ASUS has really included everything here more fans I'll
point out all the fan locations afterwards uh clear seos but that is not
hold on yep clear seos jumper TPU so
that is for that is more for performance whereas the epu is more for Energy
Efficiency front fire wire and we've already covered the PCI slot so couple
more things just want to show you guys where all the fan connectors are on this
board cuz that can often influence whether to go with a particular board
for a build whether it has good access to your fans so we have 1 2 3 4
five six uh uh uh six pwm fan connectors so
that is uh let's see yeah I'd say that's pretty good placement cuz a lot of the
time you're going to have a chassis fan in the top that you got to deal with you're going to have a chassis fan in
the back you got to deal with you might have a couple of CPU fans that you want
to plug in if you got like a big knock to a D14 cooler that deals with your
front fan and that deals with sort of your either your front fan or some other
fan pretty well taken care of as far as
I'm concerned on the back of the board we find just an additional metal strip
for cooling some pwm components so that means a case like an antech 1100
wouldn't be a bad idea cuz it has some cooling that you can direct at the back
of the board for additional well cooling
let me just see if there's anything I'm missing here before we get too far into it so it does support both four-way SLI
and four-way Crossfire it does have ah this is good dual Intel Ethernet server
grade land port so that means no thirdparty chipsets we are using the
Intel Ethernet ports and nothing else it also has an LED a couple different LED
buttons uh here if you want to come closer has a couple different LEDs on it
I actually am not 100% sure where they are but I know that one of them turns
either um green blue or red to indicate whether
you're in power saving mode regular mode or overclocking mode and then there's
also an additional LED set that hold on
let me just find this
guy aha indicates whether you have any
errors ah this one sweet
so this doesn't happen to me often but I've totally blanked give me a sec guys
let's do the I/O so we've got our PS2 keyboard and mouse ports dedicated ports
I know I'm oldfashioned but I still like them seven regular USB 2 ports this gu
is compatible with uh isus BIOS flashback which allows you to throw a
USB drive with the correct BIOS file in there press this button and without even
memory or a CPU installed you can Flash to the latest BIOS very cool optical
audio out the Dual gigabit Ethernet uh dual gab Ethernet by Intel fire wire two
USB 3.0 ports remember there's two more supported from the internal header as
well as 7.1 analog audio out there's also some cool BIOS features to go along
with this board including pressing F3 or F12 to easily access your frequently
used functions as well as to take a screenshot of your BIOS to send to
others to help them to achieve the same level of performance that you have once
you've tweaked things as much as you want there's also fan Expert Plus which
is a really cool way to manage all of these fans that you can plug into the board you can either set profiles or
even temperature curves so that means if your temperatures go up the fans will go
up if your temperatures go down the fans will spin down which is very very neat
this board also supports aha look there's a label right there usb3 boost
which is basically just a way of making any USB 3 Drive perform a little bit
faster and usb3 devices that support uasp significantly faster which is cool
as well so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the p9x 79 WS
workstation board don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for more
unboxings reviews and other computer videos crazy Russian found the light
that lights up and tells us that the the everything is okay light this one right
here so blue so you can see we're running in normal mode or as normal as
things can be with an extreme Edition and 32 gigs of mismatched memory
installed so we're just making sure that everything's running okay with this
board before it goes into a high-end
Workstation