Taking a look at the board, it uses an ATX form factor and carries on with the military type styling that we’ve come to know from the TUF series boards. Just like the 990FX board, it doesn’t include the thermal jacket that we saw on the P67 Sabertooth and includes some other unique cooling features including twelve strategically placed sensors which allow you to tweak using the Asus AI suite software to give you the best possible cooling and thermal dynamics. The board itself also features some other cooling features towards the rear I/O and the bottom corner of the board with an active cooling solution over the Intel X79 chip which will hopefully assist when going extreme in terms of overclocking.
The socket area is very spacious and provides a lot of room for large CPU coolers. Either side of the socket, we see four DDR3 slots, totalling a massive eight DIMM slots, and whilst a lot of rumours have been flung around about the architecture, we can’t comment as of yet due to the Intel NDA.
Moving over towards the expansion slots, we find three PCI-Express x16 slots of which the upper lighter brown slots run at x16, whereas the single dark brown x16 slot only runs at x8 speeds. There are also two PCI-Express x1 slots and a legacy PCI slot for older generation expansion cards.
The front panel connectors on this board are spaced out nicely and include plenty of USB 2.0 connectivity as well as your usual suspects of audio headers, COM port and front panel power button and LED headers.
As said earlier, this board does include an active cooling solution, which is something that we haven’t seen on a motherboard for quite some time, but is obviously there for a reason and sits comfortably over the Intel X79 chip. We can only assume that this assists in providing the best stability and hopefully also gives extra headroom for overclocking, which we’ll show you when the NDA lifts and we’re permitted to show to you.
In its usual location, we find eight SATA ports in a variety of colours. The two brown ports are SATA III and run on the Intel X79 chipset, whilst the four black ports are SATA II and utilise the same X79 chip. The two grey/white SATA ports run from the Marvel 9128 controller and run at SATA 6GB/s speeds. RAID support for the X79 based ports include RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10.
Now I doubt the price tag will oblige to our budget…
Still great way to make us drool Andy 😛
Nice looking board, I always liked the color scheme of Sabertooths (not that it matters too much, but still). One question though: When exactly will the NDA be lifted?
Can't say when sorry
Andy, you say it has "An RJ46 Gigabit Lan port". Did you mean an RJ45?
I did mean RJ45 and have changed that, clumsy me with my fat fingers. Thanks for the headsup!
Nice and impressive, but chipset/mobo fans = no go for me. They are noisy, they break quickly (my experience with them) and you have to RMA the board for a triviality like that. Just put some beefy copper heat sinks on instead.