More X79 Motherboards Revealed by Manufacturers
With the pending release of the Intel X79 Sandy Bridge-E platform slated for November, manufacturers have begun readying their motherboards and here is a sneak peak of a few.
Recently, we shared with you a sneak peek of the Asus’ ROG (Republic of Gamers) Rampage IV Extreme and eVGA X79 E779 Classified motherboards. Today, we share a sneak peek of some of the other upcoming Intel X79 motherboards.
- Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3
- Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5
- Asus P9X79 Deluxe
- Asus TUF Sabertooth X79
- eVGA X79 FTW
Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3: Has four DDR3 DIMM slots, four PCI-Express 3.0 x16 (two capable of x16,x16) and two PCI-Express 2.0 x1 expansion slot. There two SATA 6 Gb/s (white), four SATA 3 Gb/s (black) from the Intel X79 controller and four SATA 6 Gb/s (gray) from a Marvell controller. The I/O panel comes with the standard variation of USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports, along with 8+2 channel HD audio and Gigabit LAN connection.
Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5: Has eight DDR3 DIMM slots, three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 (two capable of x16,x16), two PCI-Express 2.0 x1 and one PCI expansion slot. There are two SATA 6 Gb/s (white), four SATA 3 Gb/s (black) from the Intel X79 controllers and four SATA 6 Gb/s (gray) from a Marvell controller. The I/O panel comes with the standard variation of USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports, along with 8+2 channel HD audio and Gigabit LAN connection.
Asus P9X79 Deluxe: Has eight DDR3 DIMM slots, four PCI-Express x16 (unclear if they are PCI-Express 3.0 or a combination of 3.0 & 2.0) and two PCI-Express 2.0 x1 expansion slot. There are eight internal SATA ports, including two SATA 6 Gb/s (gray), four SATA 3 Gb/s (blue) from the Intel X79 controller and two SATA 6 Gb/s (white) from a Marvell controller. The I/O panel comes with the standard variation of USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports, along with 8+2 channel HD audio and two Gigabit LAN connections.
Asus TUF Sabertooth X79: Has eight DDR3 DIMM slots, two PCI-Express 3.0 x16 (capable of x16,x16), one PCI-Express 2.0 x16 (@ x8), two PCI-Express 2.0 x1, and one PCI expansion slot. There are eight internal SATA ports, including two SATA 6 Gb/s (brown), four SATA 3 Gb/s (black) from the Intel X79 controller and two SATA 6 Gb/s (white) from a third-party controller. The I/O panel comes with the standard variation of USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports, along with 8+2 channel HD audio and Gigabit LAN connection.
eVGA X79 FTW: Has four DDR3 DIMM slots, four PCI-Express 3.0 x16 (two capable of x16,x16), one PCI-Express 2.0 x16 (@ x8) and one PCI-Express 2.0 x1 expansion slot. There are only six internal SATA ports, including two SATA 6 Gb/s (red) and four SATA 3 Gb/s (black) from the Intel X79 controller. The I/O panel comes with the standard variation of USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports, along with 8+2 channel HD audio and two Gigabit LAN connections to list just a few of the options.





Because there's nothing new here, folks. It should really just be called X68 because there's nothing new in the chipset other than a lot of pins.
I mean:
-No native USB 3.0 ports
-No replacement for USB 3.0 ports (Light Peak/Thunderbolt) in sight
-Not enough native SATA 6GB/s ports (there are TWO).
And the only real reason to buy a board like this is with a processor that costs 600+ dollars (existence of the i7-3820 is completely redundant due to the i7-2700K, which performs no better in games than the i5-2500K does).
It's not actually a real enthusiast platform.
If it were, it would have the features above.
It's just priced that way, because it can be.
is it me or the atx form factor is too small for x79?
Because there's nothing new here, folks. It should really just be called X68 because there's nothing new in the chipset other than a lot of pins.
I mean:
-No native USB 3.0 ports
-No replacement for USB 3.0 ports (Light Peak/Thunderbolt) in sight
-Not enough native SATA 6GB/s ports (there are TWO).
And the only real reason to buy a board like this is with a processor that costs 600+ dollars (existence of the i7-3820 is completely redundant due to the i7-2700K, which performs no better in games than the i5-2500K does).
It's not actually a real enthusiast platform.
If it were, it would have the features above.
It's just priced that way, because it can be.
If your buying these types of motherboards... your propably not looking for gaming unless your looking at tri or 4-way gpu setup.....
Mainly these board will be used for stuff that's memory limited or memory bandwidth limited such as rendering.
Look beyond the gaming world
Likewise, good games dont use almost any ram, because all the textures / models / etc are on the gpu. All you have on the cpu is the games internal representation of the game world and all the settings for the game to operate on.
So you dont need more than 4gb of ram, with pretty wide frequency yields, you dont need more than a dual core cpu (because all the parallel work is being done gpu side anyway) just so the OS is running on one core and the game runs uninterrupted on the other.
The bottlenecks always reduce to the gpu doing more complex rendering math and the hard drive loading textures (and with sufficient video memory, you just load every texture before you even use it and the hard drive latency becomes irrelevant except at start up of the game). So you just want an SSD for start up time and first load times and the best gpu you can get to paint sparkly lights.
So gaming platform wise, none of these recent releases mean dirt. Nothing has for a while, except graphics cards. We oversell the processor and ram and undersell the gpu - its always worth it to go from a 570 to a 580 and trade in the i7 for an i5 and the 12 gigs ram for 4 gigs. The main system really doesnt matter anymore, its that giant hunk of independent computer doing all the rendering that is important now.
Servers though, especially for the web, will be all over this. 16 - 32 gb system ram + 8 threads to run at 4.5 - 5 ghz is enough to host a pretty popular web site for a hella lot less than a server rack. You could easily handle a butt load of web framework page generation on a system built in a traditional case now, and that is where these platforms have their place to shine - highly parallel web frameworks that need all the pages in ram to build html css and javascript to ship to a fewer as fast as possible.
-No replacement for USB 3.0 ports (Light Peak/Thunderbolt) in sight
-Not enough native SATA 6GB/s ports (there are TWO)
I see USB 3 on the I/O panel for all of them.
EVGA is the only board with just 2 SATA 6 Gb/s ports. The ASUS boards have 4 and the Gigabyte boards have 6.
What he is meaning is native connections to the chipset (in this case the X79) instead of using an extra controller on the MB to achieve the same thing.
Even with this chipset, it wont have "true" native usb 3.0.
Although about the "not enough sata 6GB/s ports", According to wiki, there should be enough ports 6GBs
for MB markers to use.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_X79
6× SATA 6 Gbps ports
4× SATA 3 Gbps ports
PCI Express 3.0 ×4 uplink for dedicated storage bandwidth
8 PCIe 2.0 lanes
14 USB 2.0 ports
Integrated Gigabit Ethernet MAC (Lewisville PHY)
Intel Rapid Storage Technology enterprise 3.0
SATA RAID support (0/1/10/5)
Write journaling
100 MHz BCLK
Supports processor, memory and chipset overclocking
Supports Intel Extreme Tuning Utility 3.0 (XTU)
8-layer PCB, 2 oz copper recommended
32 GB of RAM, easy, for like 200 bux. 64 GB if you need some kind of crazy rendering thang goin' on... About 1000 bux... Unreal...
Just imagine the radiation pouring into the air and your electricity meter spinning as fast as a Raptor hdd
Ya you really need to revise your thinking. I am absolutely stoked about this platform, and not because I need a new gaming rig. I want it for the 8 DIMM's. Can't beat that at all!