14 DAY TRIAL // The Republic of Gamers brand is one that ASUS only slaps on top of its absolute best consumer hardware, so it stands to reason that the B85-Pro Gamer has a lot of things to offer despite the choice of chipset.
Which is to say, the motherboard boasts the B85 chipset instead of the Z87 commonly found on high-end / gaming platforms.
ASUS does have Z87-based motherboards, like the Z87-A. The ATX B85-Pro Gamer actually resembles it quite a bit, or at least its PCB does.
For one, it has an 8-phase VRM (voltage regulation module), which controls the power that makes it to the LGA 1150 CPU socket.
A single PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot is available, but there is a PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot as well, even if it does work in physical x4 mode (it is wired to the B85 PCH).
On that note, a pair of PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots are found on the motherboard as well, along with three legacy PCI slots.
On the matter of virtual memory, ASUS installed four DDR3 DIMM slots on the B85-Pro Gamer motherboard.
So there should, in theory, be room for 32 GB or even 64 GB of DDR3 RAM, assuming you can find modules with high enough individual memory capacity.
And since fourth-generation Haswell central processing units (CPUs), like previous-generation Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge, have integrated graphics, ASUS included DVI, D-Sub and HDMI outputs on the I/O rear panel.
Moving on, the newcomer has a pair of SATA 3.0 Gbps ports (SATA II) for hard disk drives (HDDs), solid-state drives (SSDs) and hybrid drives (HHDs or SSHDs), plus four SATA 6.0 Gbps connectors (SATA III).
Obviously, you'll want to populate the latter type first, and only use the SATA II ports if you already have four storage devices in the PC for some reason.
Other features include a premium Intel I217V GbE controller (Gigabit Ethernet), SupremeFX audio (with a 115 dBA SNR CODEC), electrolytic capacitors, a 300Ω headphones amp (made by Texas Instruments) and ground-layer isolation.
Finally, ASUS included high-grade black solid-state capacitors and DRAM over-current protection, plus ESD dampening circuits along the rear panel ports, as dictated by the “Gamer's Guardian” technology. UEFI BIOS is just the well-mixed and easily anticipated icing on the cake.
Sadly, the price of the ASUS B85-Pro Gamer is not known, despite that the product page is already up and running.
