14 DAY TRIAL // Together with the Black Extreme version of the X79R-AX we detailed at the start of this week, ECS also unveiled a much simpler version of its LGA 2011 motherboard that is known as the X79R-AX Black Deluxe.
The board takes a lot of its design cues from its older brother and it sports the same four DIMM slots that are placed around the LGA 2011 socket.
These work in a quad-channel mode and support DDR3 speeds of up to 2400MHz, while to the left of these ECS has placed four PCI Express x16 slots, which are driven by the 40 lane PCIe controller integrated inside Sandy Bridge-E processors.
Just two of these slots are able to provide graphics cards with the full PCIe x16 bandwidth, as the other two have only eight PCI Express lanes routed to them, but the X79R-AX Black Deluxe seems to be compatible with 4-way SLI and CrossFireX GPU setups judging by the pictures provided.
The rest of the expansion options include a pair of PCIe x1 slots, six SATA 3Gbps and four SATA 6Gbps ports, two of the latter being driven by a third party controller as the Intel X79 chipset has support for only two such ports.
Moving to the back of the motherboard, we see than the X79R-AX Black Deluxe has cut some corners in terms of connectivity when compared to its older brother as the Deluxe drops eSATA, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth from the features list.
Users however still get four USB 3.0 ports and 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out, while two additional USB 3.0 ports are available through an on-board header.
No information regarding pricing or availability was made public by ECS, but more details should be unveiled as we get nearer to the Intel Sandy Bridge-E processor launch.
