Asus Intros Gamer Line With B85-Pro Gamer Motherboard
Asus has announced its B85-Pro Gamer motherboard.
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.
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Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.
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TheinsanegamerN a gaming motherboard that cant overclock? what is next, a eatx motherboard with only pcie 1.0 slots? most gamers, if they are spending big bucks, would probably rather go for the k series for overclocking.....Reply -
Morbus If this is like 80USD, then it kind of justifies the purchase, but I'd still go for a H-series motherboard, at that price-range.Reply -
pills161 ReplySo it is like the poor mans RoG?
I was going to say the same thing, looks similar to the Hero sans the overclocking, but who buys a "gamer" board just to run everything at stock? -
lunyone Sell it for $80 or less and you have a winner! We should call it the "WannaBE" gaming Mobo "I think it can, I think it can, etc.". Besides no OC'ing, the theme is the same as the ROG style, but with limited options.Reply -
KosherGrimace This would've been acceptable for a smaller form factor, but not ATX. Not enough value for hardware real estate.Reply -
tinmann The two PCIe x16 ports, one of which operates with only four lanes is the real deal breaker for me.Reply -
amk-aka-Phantom Replya gaming motherboard that cant overclock? what is next, a eatx motherboard with only pcie 1.0 slots? most gamers, if they are spending big bucks, would probably rather go for the k series for overclocking.....
Cut them some slack. Overclocking is overrated, mostly a marketing gimmick these days. No real performance game in games between running your CPU at 3 or 4 GHz. What matters is GPU, RAM and SSD. As long as you've got a decent i5, you're set and can forget about the whole OC BS and save money by getting non-OC-capable chipsets and CPUs.