Asus Rolls Out P9X79-E WS LGA2011 Motherboard

Asus has launched its new P9X79-E WS motherboard. This motherboard features the LGA2011 socket and has support for both Ivy Bridge-E CPUs and Xeon Ivy Bridge-EP CPUs. The motherboard features the X79 chipset. This motherboard has a very broad and complete feature set.

The motherboard has support for up to 64 GB of DDR3-2133 ECC memory split through eight memory slots. This allows for quad-channel memory support. Beyond that, the motherboard has a total of seven PCIe x16 slots, allowing for four-way SLI or CrossFireX. The CPU is fed its power through a 10-phase VRM design, which is fueled by a single 8-pin EPS connector. The memory has its own 2+2 VRM power circuitry. The motherboard also has plenty of storage connectivity; it features six SATA3 ports and four SATA2 ports, as well as another two eSATA3 ports.

External connectivity is taken care of by a legacy PS/2 connector, two eSATA ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB 3.0 ports, 10 USB 2.0 ports, a USB BIOS flashback button, 7.1 channel HD audio, as well as an optical TOSLINK port. Internally, the motherboard also has two USB 3.0 ports through a header.

The Asus P9X79-E WS motherboard is already available at select retailers for an MSRP price of $499.99.

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Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

7 Comments Comment from the forums

hardcore_player

can't wait to compare this one to my rampage iv extreme
Reply
shadowfamicom

Impressive offering. Gonna stick with my MSI Big Bang II though... when they start making more 16gb DDR3 sticks gonna fill it up with 8 of them and make a crazy RAMdisk.
Reply
ssdpro

X79 really does feel like "2011" these days with 2 native SATA 6Gb/s ports and no native USB 3.0. PCIe 3.0 that "might work"? Crippled chipset? NEXT!
Reply
JOSHSKORN

No Thunderbolt?
Reply
mapesdhs

I currently have the normal WS. This new model looks like ASUS' response
to the Asrock X79 Extreme11, except without adding SAS. It's nice that the
E improves the multi-GPU support to be 4-way @ x16 each, not so much for
gaming but for those using CUDA, etc., but a real shame that the 3rd party
6Gbit ports are still by Marvell because their controller is awful. 2 native Intel
ports just isn't enough. Does anyone make a decent SATA3 controller besides
Intel??

The only thing that annoys me with these boards is the locking mechanism
for the PCIe slots. With multiple cards installed and a big air cooler, it's kinda
hard to reach the latch to extract a card.

Performance-wise though, they're very good.

Ian.

Reply
purrcatian

@mapesdhs
As far as I know, the only thing that comes close are LSI SAS controllers. But even then, they are not as good for most applications.
Reply
mapesdhs

I have lots of SAS controllers. It depends what you're doing. SAS cards give
excellent sequential I/O, but 4K random is limited by the card's ASIC, which
can ruin the potential of multiple SSDs connected to such cards. They make
more sense when used with Enterprise SAS/SATA for strong sequential, but
with battery-backed cache to give strong 4K performance aswell (I get 2GB/sec
on one of my PCIe cards) combined with data reliability in the event of power
failure. But yes, multiple SSDs in RAID would work better with a bunch of native
Intel SATA3 ports if only such were available (alas most boards only have two).

Where you are wrong however is if one is just using a normal single mechanical
drive. A SAS card with a 600GB 15K SAS leaves any SATA in the dust when it
comes to general performance, while even just 3 of them will give more than
700MB/sec sequential.

The caveat though is that some SAS cards with 6bit SAS support will link at
only 3Gbit when connected to a SATA3 device. In the case of LSI, one can
user particular firmware releases to solve this issue for specific cards.

Ian.

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