Asus P9X79-E WS Ultimate X79 Motherboard Unboxing & Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
2,059 words · ~10 min read
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Corsair RM series power supplies are optimized for silent operation click now
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to learn more welcome to my unboxing of
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a product that gets me personally extremely excited more so than an Rog
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board or a regular motherboard definitely this is the P9
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x79 ews so this is an updated version of the
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P9 x79 WS WS is for workstation which is
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not to say that this board is not going to be a highly capable overclocker or R
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able to run a highly capable gaming machine it just means that it goes
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beyond that to more like workstation or
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even you know light Home Server grade validation and componentry so on the
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front you're going to find the usual core i7 extreme and NVIDIA SLI and AMD
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cross fireex Badges and all that stuff but whoa hold on a minute what's this
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Zeon 5 support yeah you can chuck a Zeon here in ECC memory NVIDIA Tesla support
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it's actually validated to run with NVIDIA Tesla compute cards uh that's
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something you're not going to find on your typical run-of-the-mill $100
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motherboard not only that but check this out guys so there's a little badge right
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there you can go have a look at while I open up the box fourway SLI or Crossfire
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at a 16x link speed now there is some
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you know of course it takes some funny business to make that happen with
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respect to you know plx switches or whatever else but if you want four cards
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running at 16x then this is pretty much
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the only way to go it's got full support
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for the latest ivybridge e processors on the LGA 2011 platform it's also got
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support for the older LGA 2011
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sandybridge ebased processor so anything with that fits in an LGA 2011 socket you
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can pretty much put in here and let's go
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ahead and spread out all the accessories cuz it comes with absolutely everything
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so four-way s Bridge right there nice uh
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sexy black four-way s Bridge four or rather three-way s Bridge right there it
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also comes with check this out fire wire header and USB 2.0 headers so just in
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case you still need fire wire it's like it's got everything IO Shield is right
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there then we've got a regular SLI
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Bridge wish that was black but I guess you know whatever it's not really targeted directly at Gamers eight SATA
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cables so four of them are straight for them are right angle actually sorry two
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more SATA cables as well as a Molex to dual SATA adapter haven't seen one of
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these included with one of their boards in a while and check this out a Serial
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Port Riser so you can go ahead and throw that in one of your extra PCI slots and
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a DVD and Q connectors and a quick start
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users guide or users guide whatever you want to call it so who is this
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motherboard for if it can overclock and
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it can game but it's validated with Teslas and all this stuff well well the
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answer is pretty much anyone particularly people like me where you're
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doing video editing and you have some pretty exotic weird hardware and what
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would otherwise be considered a gaming rig so I'm running a graphics card which
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happens to be a dual GPU graphics card so sometimes there's compatibility
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issues there I am running a high-end RAID controller so it's an LSI 926 8i
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with eight ssds on it so I need maximum throughput to my card I need
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compatibility which I'm not getting with my current Gigabyte x79 s up5 and I
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could I was running a 10 GB network card so that's another thing that might be
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kind of a a weird thing internally here we run quadros all that kind of stuff
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you might also want to run a high-end sound card it's going to be validated
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it's going to actually work so let's go let's move into what they've actually
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improved with the ews so they've improved the power delivery it's got
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their latest digital power for both the CPU as well as the memory they've also
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got a newly updated ufi so of course full support for ivybridge E the Zeon
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based CPUs remember those are required for ECC memory support so if you do want
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to run ECC RAM which is basically a more stable reliable memory particularly for
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high-capacity configurations it has the same overclocking options as you'd find
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on any other board but because of the quality of the components it's going to
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probably do better than most of the other boards with the exception of probably the x79 deluxe as well as the
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Rampage for Black Edition just because those ones are really tuned and tweaked
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for iy Bridge e now there's some other updated stuff as well the Dual Intel
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Ethernet solution is probably mostly geared towards the pro users but
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basically it's two 210 series controllers that offer better throughput
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lower CPU utilization as well as some more um you know more prograde
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controller options so you it's optimized for things like virtual machines for
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example uh let's cover the layout so what you may or may not have noticed
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about this board is it's a little bit on the wider side and it has some of the
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most complete IO that you will ever see
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there's seven full PCI Express slots
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there are 10 SATA connectors there is
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pretty much everything you could possibly imagine there's a USB port built in to the bottom right hand of the
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board this can be used for things like encryption keys that would normally be
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just permanently plugged into the system unless you wanted to remove them all
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that kind of really cool stuff you've got your eight pin CPU connector in its
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ideal location along the top left you've got some of the cooling For That
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Advanced vrm over here and then there's actually a heat pipe that connects it to
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a secondary set of sort of heat sink fins over here that allows you to
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dissipate some additional heat with the incidental air flow that's going to come
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from your CPU cooling solution so this is also connected via a heat pipe to
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this massive sort of I guess block of
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metal down here hard to call it a heat sink which is then connected by heat pipe to this guy right here so cooling
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is actually spread out a fair bit on the board you've got eight DDR are three
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memory slots so these are going to be running at higher speeds than what you'd
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have seen on the older board particularly because ivybridge e CPUs
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have a stronger memory controller than Sandy Bridge e CPUs the 24 pin
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connectors in its ideal location along the right hand Edge you still got things
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like onboard power and reset buttons as well as their M button which allows you
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to boot even with sort of weird memory configurations gives you a chance to
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actually configure them it has an epu switch over here as well as its USB 3
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front panel header in its ideal location along the right hand Edge although I'd like to see a right angle connector if I
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could have one you've got two SATA 36 GB
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per second and four SATA 2 3 gbit per second connectors running off the Intel
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chipset and four SATA 3 6 gbit per second connectors running off of an
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updated controller that ASUS has added to this board that has support for their
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new SSD caching to which allows you to use an unlimited size SSD to cach your
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mechanical volumes remember they do have to all be plugged into the same controller versus Intel's rst technology
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that you to a 60 gig SSD onboard post
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readout onboard front panel connectors which of course you have I explained the
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USB port here before uh front USB 2 just
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one header for that front fire wire as
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well as there's that serial front panel audio and your TPU switch so that's for
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optimizing for performance as opposed to
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epu which is more about optimizing for power efficiency now let's get into that
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PCI Express configuration so all all the
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blue slots are capable of running at full 16x speed even with all of them
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populated so if you were running a four-way graphics card configuration you
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would plug into all the blue ones this top blue one runs at 16x regardless but
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the other blue and black ones will split into 8X 8X mode once you start to
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populate them so the black ones only run at 8X the 16 ones run at
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16x which is pretty fast now if you were to populate all those cards and you
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weren't to plug in any auxiliary power you would actually have a very good
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chance of burning out your 24 pin connector over here because they
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particularly High draw graphics cards and things like that draw Power not only
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from the connectors that are plugged directly into them but also from the slot so you're going to want to plug in
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this six pin PCIe connector right here if you've got any more than probably
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about two high draw cards plugged into these PCI Express slots that's going to
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make sure that you don't burn out your board which is going to be big problem
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for you when we move around to the back of the board we find out why there
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weren't any USB 2.0 headers because there's 10 usb2 ports on the back a PS2
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keyboard mouse combo Port USB bi flashback this is Handy cuz even if you
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brick the board in the middle of a flash you can usually restore it optical audio
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out those dual Intel gigb Ethernet controllers as well as USB 3 and ah yes
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dual eeta 6 gabit per second so that is
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fast eeta 7.1 audio out and I mean
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realistically what do you use something like this for for me extreme ly high-end
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gaming rig with weird Hardware in it maybe you're someone who uses um I don't
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know a video capture device in order to run like a really high-end camera for
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your game stream or whatever else you might want to do with it um that that is
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who I see this being uh aboard for or if you're looking to build something like a
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workstation that is going to be running you know fire G cards or quadros or
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Teslas or you know quad gigabit Ethernet
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NYX or any of those kinds of things that require not only the compatibility that
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it's validated for but also the throughput because if you plug some of
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these cards into you know slots that might look like 16x slots on regular
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consumer boards but are actually running at 8X or 4X or whatever speed they're
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running at you might not get the maximum performance that you should be able to
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achieve with that card so we're going to be using this board for an upcoming
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ultimate build guide that'll be sort of what we'd consider to be the ultimate
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video editing rig and I'm extremely excited about that so I think that
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pretty much wraps it up thank you for checking out my unboxing of the p9x 79e
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deluxe did I say Deluxe because I meant WS it's certainly you know Deluxe enough
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for you know from my perspective don't forget to like the video if you liked it
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