ASUS P9X79 PRO

Professionally Done

The ASUS P9X79 PRO’s lower price point and blander box design is a misleading thing. Here we are, thinking that we could probably expect less from ASUS’ other X79 motherboards and be disappointed. We probably shouldn’t have passed that judgement that early.

To start with, the P9X79 PRO doesn’t hold back when it comes to the whole package. On the board alone, we can find eight memory banks, four on each side. Under those DIMM slots are the few features you can find on most ASUS motherboards, which include MemOK!, DRAM LED and the internal SuperSpeed USB 3.0 header.

At one corner, we could see that it features SSD Caching, something ASUS cooked out on their own. The board supports six SATA ports (two SATA II 6Gbps slots, with four SATA II 3Gbps ones alongside). On the PCIe department, the P9X79 PRO has four PCIe x16 slots and two PCIe x1 slots. This board supports 3-way SLI or Quad-GPU SLO, as well as CrossFireX with two cards and two dual GPU cards. The way we looked at it, ASUS didn’t skimp out on any features at all. This is one wholesome package.

We had the Intel Core i7-3960X installed onto the motherboard, along with 16GB of DDR3 memory (running at 1600MHz), an NVIDIA GeForce GTX580 GPU and an SSD with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit installed. The benchmark results were fantastic, closer to what the X79 Sabertooth gave us.

Diving into the BIOS gave us an impressively simple and easy to use UEFI interface, which does a great job at organising options to what we need and giving us a simplified but detailed outlook at the motherboard’s status. Using the standard clock tweaker, we pushed the P9X79 PRO to 3.9GHz and the results were excellent. Better cooling and more persistent tweaks could’ve definitely given us better.

CHIP CONCLUDE : Don’t let the lower price point fool you: the ASUS P9X79 PRO is a top-grade, professionally done motherboard that doesn’t skimp out on the features, and nor its overclocking potential.

(previously published on issue February 2012)