ASUS P9X79 Pro X79 Gaming Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,455 words · ~7 min read
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welcome to my unboxing of the ASUS P9 x79 Pro so this is more of a uh value
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oriented although it's very difficult to say that with a straight face value
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oriented x79 board it features most of
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the same key key marketing points as the
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other p9x 79 boards such as their all
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new digital power control for the CPU and the RAM so dual intelligent
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processors so they've got the epu as well as the TPU the TPU is cool we
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actually have a showdown coming down coming up on my ncixcom channel where
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I'm going to show you the ASUS TPU versus the OneTouch one button
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overclocking efforts that MSI and Gigabyte have come up with and let's
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just say the TPU wins by a fairly significant margin okay precise power
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control so there's the digi plus vrm one click speed up
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with their ASUS SSD caching which uses a thirdparty SATA controller in order to
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enable that rather than the Intel controller because the Intel controller on x79 does not support that even though
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z68 does UEFI BIOS ASUS's UEFI BIOS is
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excellent uh Bluetooth enjoyment okay and quad Channel DDR3 for more bandwidth
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and up to eight dims this fully SLI and Crossfire X ready and concludes support
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for all the latest 2011 processors including core i7s and core i7 extremes
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on the LGA 2011 platform so I'm going to go ahead and take this board
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out like that and we're going to show you guys the accessories so it comes
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look at that I've had okay like I said not really a value board still a very
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pricey board comes with a three-way SLI Bridge you won't need that for a value
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board okay we've got four right angle SATA 3 6 gbit per second cables and two
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right angle SATA 2 3 gbit per second cables our front Hue connector so that's
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for plugging in your front uh Power and reset and all that stuff a little bit
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more easily uh flexible ASUS SLI Bridge
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an IO Shield hey look at that CPU installation
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instructions in full color ha oh as well
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as oh this is awesome this is awesome USB BIOS flashback so using that white
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port and this button right here without a CPU plugged in without RAM plugged in
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with nothing but power and a motherboard you can just load a BIOS file onto your
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USB drive plug it in there and you can Flash the bio
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without any components Plugged In which means that say a new CPU gets released
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and you buy it and you sold your old CPU and oh it doesn't post because it's not
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updated for the new CPU yeah doesn't matter because you can Flash the latest
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BIOS with just a USB key you don't even need a CPU so we've got our utilities
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and driers disc which you should not use you should throw it away and download
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the latest from the ASUS website and I think that pretty much covers the
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accessories for the P9 x79 Pro so let's
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go ahead and get this baby opened
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up don't worry I'm working on it I'm
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trying here guys I'm trying here we go all right so there is our sexy x79 board
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because which x79 board is not sexy I would argue that they all are okay so
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here we have some stickers telling the same things that were already on the outside of the box and since at this
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point we've already bought the motherboard I'm not sure why they're still trying to sell it to us but power
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to them okay what else we got here aha this is a good one usb3 boost why wasn't
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that on the box that's an awesome feature let me see if it is on the box
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it must be no way it's not even oh this
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is one of the best features on this motherboard so it supports the upcoming
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well I yeah upcoming cuz there's really no devices on the market yet that
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support it but it supports the upcoming uas P um method of transferring data to
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usb3 which means using the same usb3 ports with uh updated firmware on your
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usb3 devices you can get much much better transfer speeds and even on non
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uasp USB devices you can still get
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better transfer speeds because you can use the scuzzy protocol which is faster
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cool right fan Expert Plus allows you to install AI Suite to and set custom fan
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profile see they've got a little tiny picture there and you can set fan curves
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based on temperatures and RPM targets and all that kind of good stuff which is
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great normally you have to buy like expensive third party controllers in
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order to do stuff like that so what do we got here we got our LGA 2011 socket
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which has 2011 pins and came out in year 2011 cool we've also got eight that's
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right eight DDR3 memory slots which are supporting a grand total of at this
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point in time up to 64 gigs of memory because we only have 8 gig dims as far
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as unbuffered dims on the desktop go we got a heat pipe here and a vrm solution
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that actually extends all the way to the back check that out so we've got a heat
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sink here on the uh on the voltage Regulators that are on the back the
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thing about these x79 boards is look how much space gets taken up by the sheer
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size of the socket and all the memory slots around it so the motherboard
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manufacturers have had to be very Innovative about where they squeeze the
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voltage uh the voltage Regulators because look at this here's our 8 Pin
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CPU power capable of sucking up to 200
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Watts through the socket they have to build enough digital power regulation
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modules around it in order to handle that kind of a load without overheating
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or causing any kind of instability it's actually kind of a Marvel that they can
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do it at all to be perfectly blunt here is our eight pin power connector and
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it's ideal location at the top edge of the board here's our 24 pin power
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connector and it's ideal location at the right hand edge of the board USB 3 front
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panel header in its ideal location along the right hand edge of the board and
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check this out we've got on the Intel controller 2 SATA 3 6 GB per second
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ports four SATA 2 3 GB per second ports
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and on the third party controller with caching enabled we've got the two more
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SATA 3 6 GB per second ports front panel
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connectors are here the TPU can be enabled or disabled with a Hardware
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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
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Simo switch three front panel USB two headers there's the epu which is the
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energy saving version of a TPU which is a power more go faster button uh version
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so the energy saving version I would say is less relevant on a performance
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platform like this uh front post LED or
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not front post LED there's the actual TPU chip here's your built-in power and
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reset switches 1 2 3 four uh PCI Express
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16x Slots of which two are wired for 16x
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two are wired for 8X so it's going to run a little something like this 16 16
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1688 or 8888 2 PCIe 1.0 slots or PCI e1x slots
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and no PCI slots yes this is a new high-end performance platform there are
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no PCI slots and no PS2 ports we got 1 two three I'm actually not sure if this
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one even works as a regular USB port but I'm going to count it so four six USB
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2.0 ports four USB 3.0 ports a BIOS
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reflash button here gigabit Ethernet optical audio out that looks like power
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D SATA cool beams two of those and bluet
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bluetoo and 7.1 audio out so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first
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look at the P9 x79 Pro from ASUS don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech tips
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