Asus has announced a new motherboard – the B85-Pro Gamer. This motherboard is set to make part of the company's new 'Gamer' lineup of products.
The motherboard features the LGA 1150 socket and is built with the B85 chipset. It can thus swallow a number of Intel Haswell processors. The CPU socket is wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots, which will allow you to install up to 32 GB of DDR3 memory. Do remember though, because the board is based on a B-series chipset, it's likely that you won't be able to overclock your CPU if you get a K-series processor.
Regarding expansion, users will find two PCIe x16 ports, one of which operates with only four lanes. Beside this, there are two PCIe 1x ports along with three legacy PCI ports.
The motherboard's PCB is built on a red and black theme, which should match a lot of complimenting gaming hardware.
Rear I/O is handled by a pair of PS/2 ports, an HDMI port, a DVI port, a VGA port, four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet (Intel-made), along with a 7.1 channel analog HD audio. The audio on this motherboard is driven by Asus' SupremeFX audio circuitry, meaning you'll get pretty decent sound from the motherboard itself, and also won't need a dedicated headphone amp, as that's also built in for up to 300 Ω headphones.
At the time of writing there was no word on pricing or availability, though we can expect for this to be a relatively affordable board.
