Asus definitely took its time when it comes to making the P9X79 WS workstation motherboard available in Europe, but this LGA 2011 solution has now finally started selling in this part of the world with price being set at 330 EUR ($445 US).
On a first look, one would be tempted to believe that the P9X79 WS is nothing more than a slightly modified version of the P9X79 Deluxe that was revealed a short while ago.
However, when moving closer to this workstation motherboard, one gets to see that
Asus made quite a few design changes starting with the cooling system, which now links all the VRM heatsinks to each other and also with the PCH heatspreader.
In addition, the expansion slot layout was also modified to feature no less than six PCI Express x16 slots, two of them working at full x16 speeds, while two other are limited at x8.
The speed of the remaining two PCIe x16 slots is set at x4 and the P9X79 WS is compatible with quad-GPU AMD CrossFireX and
Nvidia SLI setups.
As far as storage is concerned, Asus' latest creation comes with four SATA 3Gbps ports and four SATA 6Gbps port, two of the latter being driven by a third party Marvell PCIe 9128 controller.
On the back of the P9X79 WS, Asus has installed all the usual ports and connectors including a pair of USB 3.0 ports, 7.1-channel audio with S/PDIF out, a FireWire port, and dual Gigabit Ethernet connectors driven by Intel NICs.
One of the USB 2.0 slots installed is colored white to mark the fact that this can be used for upgrading the
motherboard's BIOS without a CPU, while two additional USB 3.0 ports are available through an on-board header.
Asus’s creation should be available as we speak for 330 EUR according to
HardwareLuxx, which is significantly more than the $379.99 the Taiwanese makers is asking for this board in the US.
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