Asus have launched their new workstation motherboard for the Intel x79 platform called the P9X79-E WS. The motherboard has support for up to 4 way x16 graphics; that means the board is perfect for 4-way SLI or CrossfireX! The board packs seven PCI Express 3.0 slots and is based around the Intel X79 chipset which is of course the LGA 2011 socket. The 7 PCI Express 3.0 slots can support up to 4 dual slot cards or 7 single cards to meet the user’s needs.
The motherboard features Asus’ Dr. Power which they claim helps to prevent sudden shutdowns by using power supply heath monitoring and event notifications. It also packs two server-grade Intel I210 Gigabit LAN controllers for reliable, fast and stable Ethernet connectivity.
You may have noticed that the board has no active cooling compared to some other X79 boards on the market. This is due to Asus’ fanless thermal design which uses copper heatpipes to transfer the heat from warm components to heatsinks which have improved thermal transfer. As a consequence this ensures 0dB operation, helps to extend hardware longevity and improve stability.
It supports quad channel server-grade DDR3 EEC unbuffered memory as well as the more common DDR3 non-EEC across the 8 DIMM slots, which is nice to see. The P9X79-E WS has 6 SATA 6Gb/s ports and 2 SATA 3Gb/s ports. Asus say the board features 91% power efficiency due to the EPU chip helping to regulate power usage when the CPU is loaded in the 30-80% range, along with enhanced heat removal and high speed storage and data transfers with the use of Asus SSD Caching II.
As this board is part of the Asus Workstation Series of products it is designed to bring you ultimate reliability and quality through their 24×24 initiative which is 24 hour non-stop use and a 24-month (2 year) life cycle supply guarantee; which is very impressive.
The motherboard uses a durable ten-layer PCB with 100% ultra-long life solid state capacitors. It also features Asus’s DIGI+ VRM technology for the CPU and DRAM which Asus claim provides super-accurate voltages for better efficiency, stability and performance. The board also comes with some Asus exclusive features such as Asus SSD Caching II, USB BIOS Flashback, USB 3.0 Boost, Fan Xpert+, UEFI BIOS and AI Suite II. The board is compatible with Intel Phi 3100 Coprocessor series(active fan SKU only) and Nvidia K20C GPU accelerators.
There is currently no news on availability or pricing at this time. The information given in this article is correct at the time of writing.
