Thread: Asus PxiX79 Pro

The PxiX79 professional is the first CPU board we have seen with Intel's X79 Express chipset and LGA2011 socket, which you will require to utilize Intel's fresh Sandy Bridge Extreme chips.


As you had look for an enthusiast board for an enthusiast processor, the PxiX79 professional is both vastly costly and completely loaded. It has 4 PCI Express x16 slots and supports together 3-way SLI and Quad-GPU CrossFire X, has 4 SATA3, four SATA2 and two eSATA slots, as good as 4 USB3 and six USB2 slots on the rear panel and one USB3 and three USB2 headers for further ports. There are too a vast 8 memory slots for up to 64GB of DDR3 memory; Sandy Bridge E processors support quad-channel RAM, and the ports are colour-coded accordingly.


It is a bang-up-to-date board, so you do not acquire any legacy ports or headers; there are no PCI ports and only two PCI Express x1 slots, one of which will surely be blocked through your graphics card. You can ever utilize the PCI Express x16 ports with PCI-E x1 and x4 cards.


Setup is easy, as the P9X79 has power and reset keys on the board, a numeric LED shows for status contents and a CMOS reset switch for while things go wrong. The UEFI BIOS has a graphical user interface so you can adjust the CPU



board up with your mouse, and has lot of overclocking and voltage settings; when trying this board, we had no troubles acquiring a Intel Core i7-3960X processor up to 4.8GHz. You should have some trouble with cooling, thanks to twin processor fan headers and four system fan headers scattered about the board.


We first functioned our benchmarks with iv GB of RAM in a double-channel configuration, but adjusting another couple of DDR3 examples in quad-channel mode created no difference to any of our tries. The board's other headline characteristics is its SSD caching which, as on the Sapphire Z68 Pure Platinum board, utilizes an SSD to save frequently-accessed data.


SSD caching setup is simpler on this board then on Sapphire's; on the Sapphire Z68 we had to fix the controller to RAID manner and reinstall Windows on the chief disk, early enabling SSD caching in Intel's Rapid Storage tool, but on Asus's board you only have to plug the SSD and a common hard disk into the two SATA3 slots with the 'SSD caching' sticker, then function Asus' SSD caching utility to turn on caching - no Windows reinstall is needed. As with Sapphire's board, with SSD caching modifies the Computer booted long faster (25s instead of 1m 30s) and could read documents at a much quicker rate, but write velocities were unaffected.


This is a vastly costly board, and as it is the first Socket LGA2011 example we have seen we do not have anything to equated it to. However, it is completely loaded, simple to set up and let us function pretty ambitious stable overclocks, so is a good purchase nonetheless.