Intel Outs DX79SI Extreme Series Motherboard Details

By Douglas Perry
published

Intel has published details about its DX79SI Extreme Series Sandy Bridge-E motherboard on its website a bit earlier than anyone expected.

According to the product brief, the board will be supporting both AMD Crossfire and Nvidia SLI configurations via three PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots, include eight DIMM slots, two Firewire and 14 USB 2.0 ports, as well as two SATA 6.0 Gb/s and four SATA 3.0 Gb/s connectors. There is no native USB 3.0 support, however, as Intel takes that route via a separate NEC controller to support this feature in two available ports. Also, there are two PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots and still one remaining PCI interface.

Intel will be marketing this board toward "champion gamers" and enthusiasts "who live to push their systems way beyond the limits." The DX79SI will come Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility, an Express Installer as well as ESET Smart Security 5 Antivirus.

Douglas Perry
38 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Kamab
    8 DIMM slots is pretty overkill for a gamer.
    Reply
  • cobra5000
    Hooray for, "champion gamers", everywhere! /s
    Reply
  • alidan
    what is the point of 14 usb2 ports?

    keyboard (mine is ps2, i believe thats the name)
    mouse
    stick (mine can be a usb, but not its basic connection, its old as hell)
    pad
    external hdd (better with usb3) 2
    mic
    tablet

    really i only have 6 things, and 2 of which would benefit from usb 3 how can usb 3 still not be a standard port in new motherboards?
    Reply
  • alidan
    Kamab8 DIMM slots is pretty overkill for a gamer.they use the word enthusiasts

    i would personally load up 32gb of ram in that, and set probably 24gb of that to ram disk
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    ... you could cram 64GB of ram on that puppy if you used 8GB sticks. Move over SSD, and welcome back Ram drives!
    Seriously though, what can this possibly offer a gamer that 1155 SB cannot? Games are still only designed for 4 cores and 4GB of ram. I suppose this has more PCIe lanes, but considering we have not tapped out the 16x slots (unless you count the 590 which might), you do not need that many PCIe lanes to be effective, you just need them well distributed. Sure, some day future games could take advantage of this kind of hardware, but so long as the console crowd must be appeased on current gen hardware, then this will not happen.

    What I really see this for is content creation. Imagine complex cad or video work on something like this. It would be a dream come true, and would push the system to it's max. throw a few revo drives, and some high end workstation graphics, and this would really let content creators push their work through much faster.
    Reply
  • vicskyline96
    wow, an recent intel motherboard that is actual competition to other high end motherboards, great!
    Reply
  • thesnappyfingers
    Everything is not made for gamers...but everything should be
    Reply
  • spentshells
    I saw a video on this a while back, or just the development team.
    It sounds awesome.
    Reply
  • beenthere
    This looks like a solution for a problem that does not exist. I mean really (8) DIMM slots and (14)USB ports - for what purpose?
    Reply
  • jn77
    beenthereThis looks like a solution for a problem that does not exist. I mean really (8) DIMM slots and (14)USB ports - for what purpose?
    Well, 8 dim slots @ 8gb dims per slot is 64gb of ram, 14 usb ports would let me get rid of 2 USB hubs..... all you need is Windows 7/64 or linux and you are gold.

    My Q6600 is suppose to support more than 64gb of ram and that never happened, it is great to finally see some movement.
    Reply