14 DAY TRIAL // Now that Intel's Sandy Bridge-E CPUs has become official, motherboard makers have started launching their LGA 2011 solutions for these processors, ECS just announcing the Black X79 Series of Intel X79 boards.
The Black X79 Series is comprised of two LGA 2011 motherboards, the X79R-AX Black Extreme and X79R-AX Black Deluxe, both of the featuring similar specs including support for SLI and CrossFireX setups.
Just as most other Intel X79 boards out there, ECS' latest offerings also sport 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.
The rest of the expansion options include a pair of PCIe x1 slots, up to eight SATA 6Gbps and four SATA 3Gbps ports, six of the former being driven by a third party controller as the Intel X79 chipset has support for only two such ports.
An on-board USB 3.0 pin-header is available on the board's PCB, and more USB 3.0 ports were installed on the rear I/O panel, where ECS has also placed 7.1 channel audio connectors with S/PDIF out.
The higher-performing Black Extreme motherboard adds to these ports a Bluetooth radio transmitter and a Clear CMOS switch, while also getting on-board Power and reset switches and a BIOS debug display.
Sadly, ECS hasn't provided us with any information regarding the pricing of its two motherboards, but these should begin to make their appearance on retailer shelves shortly.
