ASUS P9X79 WS High Performance Workstation Motherboard Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
2,060 words · ~10 min read
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welcome to yet another unboxing video today we have a product that I am pretty
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excited to take a look at this is the P9 x79 WS so what we already know about it
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based on the Ws in the product name is that this is a workstation grade board
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from a Seuss so that means usually in
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the past tons of PCIe slots workstation
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features and workstation grade reliability so this is the kind of thing
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you might want to use for a rendering machine or if you're like some of ASUS's
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customers even a very very high-end
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gaming machine because yes while all of that stable you know quality stuff is
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there this is also an completely overclocking friendly motherboard as
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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
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what we've got in terms of included accessories we have four sat 3 6 GB per
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second cables four SATA 2 3 GB per
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second cables various colors uh that's an interesting strategy we've got a
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Molex to 2 SATA power adapter we have a four-way SLI Bridge bam matte black PCB
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on that by the way looking boss three-way SLI Bridge also with a matte
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black PCB love it and then we've got uh the usual two-way SLI Bridge it's a
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flexible one it's an orange one I sure hope if you buy this board you're going
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to go with three or four-way SLI so that you can use one of those instead we've
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got a seral riser so that's a PCI bracket that you can plug into the board
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if you still need cereal that is a very workstation friendly feature we've got Q
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connectors for front USB as well as the front panel connectors for power and
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whatnot we have a an e SATA as well as USB 2 PCI back uh PCI back plate and
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then we've got our IO shield and finally the user guide as well as a DVD which
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you won't use because you're going to download the latest off the ASUS website
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for all your drivers and utilities and whatnot and speaking of utilities and
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drivers and whatnot this one needs lots of them because it has a lot of
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different features that are actually pretty cool so let's take out the board
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and then we will get into all of that
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neat stuff so the first thing the first
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thing we see on this board is that it has yes count them 1 two 3 four 5 six
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PCI Express 16x physical slots so not
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all of these are actually wired for 16x in fact only this one and this one are
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actually wired for 16x these ones are all wired for PCI e8x
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now bearing in mind this is a PCI Express gen 3 board which means that
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even PCIe 8X is going to have the same
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bandwidth as PCIe 16x Gen 2 so I'd be
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comfortable running a graphics card in any one of these slots no problem also
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remember on x79 there's no funky some of
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the PCI Express Lans are coming off the chipset and some are coming off the CPU
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none of that everything is coming out of the same place so there's no additional
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latency penalty for using a particular slot versus another one so these are
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your two main PCI Express 16x slots for
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two-way graphics card configurations for three-way I guess I'd probably go with
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one two
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three then for four-way you don't really have much of an option it's 1 2 3 4 so
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those are your preferred configurations uh what else we got on here aha like all
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of ASUS's x79 boards this one has eight
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dim slots which means support for oodles and boatloads of memory which is
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definitely necessary for a workstation environment where you might be doing 3D
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rendering or heavy video editing heavy photo editing all of those kinds of
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workloads where you need a ton of RAM so that is buil in to this particular board
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there is our LGA 2011 socket with our 8 Pin power connector nothing really EX
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iive on this board like no 28 pins or anything like that it's not really
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necessary anyway but uh but there you have it there is our CPU pwm of note on
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this board is the fact that it does use Digi plus power control so that it is
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digital vrm for both the memory and the
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CPU very very cool thing to have we've also got a very unique cooling Solution
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on this board check this out so we've got the heat sink up here for the CPU
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pwm we've got an additional couple of heat sinks over here that are going to
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help us dissipate some more heat and then finally we've got your standard low
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profile heat sink on the Intel chipset
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itself so that one actually isn't cooling a whole lot but these other guys
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are going to be taking care of most of the cooling which is going to be or most
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of the heat which is going to be produced by this so going back to the
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board what else we got here we got memo K which increases memory compatibility
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allows you to get into the BIOS to configure things we've also got an easy
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plug so this is additional power for the board in the event that you do need it
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this is particularly necessary for boards that have that are intended to
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have a ton of graphics cards installed in them 24 pin power connectors in its
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ideal location along the right hand Edge we've also got an epu button that's for
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power saving USB 3 front panel connector in its ideal location we've also got
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sata3 6 gbit per second connectors these two run off the Intel chipset these two
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run off of a thirdparty Marvel chipset and they also support ASUS's SSD caching
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feature so remember x79 unlike z68 does
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not natively support SSD caching caching so ASUS has implemented that with a
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thirdparty chipset these four are SATA 2 3 gbit per second so you'll use that for
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your lower performance or your storage drives or whatever else the case may be
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on the front we've got our front panel connectors for your LEDs your power
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button your reset button all that good stuff we have an internal USB port this
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is Handy for you know more like server and workstation grade applications so if
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you have for example a storage device or something that actually connects with
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one of these internal ports and you don't want to run it through a pass throughout the back of the case this is
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a very handy thing to have two USB 2.0 ports onboard power button so yes we
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still have those uh those awesome Enthusiast grade features even though it
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is a workstation board ASUS has really included everything here more fans I'll
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point out all the fan locations afterwards uh clear seos but that is not
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hold on yep clear seos jumper TPU so
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that is for that is more for performance whereas the epu is more for Energy
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Efficiency front fire wire and we've already covered the PCI slot so couple
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more things just want to show you guys where all the fan connectors are on this
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board cuz that can often influence whether to go with a particular board
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for a build whether it has good access to your fans so we have 1 2 3 4
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five six uh uh uh six pwm fan connectors so
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that is uh let's see yeah I'd say that's pretty good placement cuz a lot of the
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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
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the back you got to deal with you might have a couple of CPU fans that you want
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to plug in if you got like a big knock to a D14 cooler that deals with your
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front fan and that deals with sort of your either your front fan or some other
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fan pretty well taken care of as far as
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I'm concerned on the back of the board we find just an additional metal strip
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for cooling some pwm components so that means a case like an antech 1100
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wouldn't be a bad idea cuz it has some cooling that you can direct at the back
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of the board for additional well cooling
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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
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and four-way Crossfire it does have ah this is good dual Intel Ethernet server
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grade land port so that means no thirdparty chipsets we are using the
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Intel Ethernet ports and nothing else it also has an LED a couple different LED
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buttons uh here if you want to come closer has a couple different LEDs on it
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I actually am not 100% sure where they are but I know that one of them turns
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either um green blue or red to indicate whether
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you're in power saving mode regular mode or overclocking mode and then there's
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also an additional LED set that hold on
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let me just find this
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guy aha indicates whether you have any
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errors ah this one sweet
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so this doesn't happen to me often but I've totally blanked give me a sec guys
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let's do the I/O so we've got our PS2 keyboard and mouse ports dedicated ports
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I know I'm oldfashioned but I still like them seven regular USB 2 ports this gu
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is compatible with uh isus BIOS flashback which allows you to throw a
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USB drive with the correct BIOS file in there press this button and without even
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memory or a CPU installed you can Flash to the latest BIOS very cool optical
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audio out the Dual gigabit Ethernet uh dual gab Ethernet by Intel fire wire two
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USB 3.0 ports remember there's two more supported from the internal header as
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well as 7.1 analog audio out there's also some cool BIOS features to go along
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with this board including pressing F3 or F12 to easily access your frequently
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used functions as well as to take a screenshot of your BIOS to send to
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others to help them to achieve the same level of performance that you have once
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you've tweaked things as much as you want there's also fan Expert Plus which
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is a really cool way to manage all of these fans that you can plug into the board you can either set profiles or
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even temperature curves so that means if your temperatures go up the fans will go
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up if your temperatures go down the fans will spin down which is very very neat
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this board also supports aha look there's a label right there usb3 boost
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which is basically just a way of making any USB 3 Drive perform a little bit
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faster and usb3 devices that support uasp significantly faster which is cool
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as well so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the p9x 79 WS
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workstation board don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips for more
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unboxings reviews and other computer videos crazy Russian found the light
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that lights up and tells us that the the everything is okay light this one right
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here so blue so you can see we're running in normal mode or as normal as
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things can be with an extreme Edition and 32 gigs of mismatched memory
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installed so we're just making sure that everything's running okay with this
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board before it goes into a high-end
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Workstation