Asus P9X79 Deluxe Review
PrintA deluxe board with an enthusiast price tag
Let’s be frank: If you’re even thinking about buying into Intel’s deliciously fast LGA2011 platform this early, you are an enthusiast—Enthusiast with a capital-freaking-E, since you can’t even look at LGA2011 without buying a $550 chip.
So if you’re jumping in, you might as well use both feet. Asus’s P9X79 Deluxe certainly fits that bill, delivering cool features and a stout price tag: This X79-based board will set you back a cool $400.
“Deluxe” features on board include digital VRMs, Asus’s trademark UEFI, and built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, with a bundled smartphone app that enables you to remotely overclock and monitor your system. This board also has an all-new feature that lets you use a particular USB port to update its BIOS without a processor installed.
The P9X79 Deluxe offers top-notch performance and all the needed amenities.
The P9X79 is an eight-DIMM-slot board, not one of the weaker four-slot boards that limit your upgrade path. The eight-DIMM design will let you build a 32GB PC for less than $200 in memory cost. Doing that on any four-slot board will set you back more than $1,000. What do you do with 32GB? You set up a RAM drive, of course! We set up a RAM drive on this board using eight 4GB sticks of Corsair Vengeance RAM and saw read speeds of 4GB/s. Take that, SSDs!
But what you get in RAM, you lose in storage. The PCH in the X79 has the circuitry to support many more SAS and SATA 6Gb/s ports, but compatibility concerns caused board makers to “de-feature” it at the last minute. So instead of a board bristling with 10 SATA 6Gb/s ports, we get the standard Z68 layout of two SATA 6Gb/s and four SATA 3Gb/s. Asus tries to beef up the board’s six standard ports (four 3Gb/s and two 6Gb/s) with a Marvell 6Gb/s controller that also does SSD caching. Few of us could afford to install that many HDDs given today’s prices, of course, but that doesn’t render the lack of native support any less of a letdown—this is a $400 motherboard, after all.
We fired up Intel’s new DX79SI mobo to compare its performance to that of the P9X79. While we don’t normally expect to see big performance deltas between boards based on the same chipsets, the Asus board generally produced better benchmark numbers, with one significant exception: Intel’s board delivered much faster SATA 6Gb/s write speeds. We normally use OCZ’s Enyo external drive to test USB 3.0 performance, but the P9X79’s USB controller uses the new and speedier UASP protocol, so we also used an OWC SATA 6Gb/s drive inside a new Asus enclosure. With UASP, we saw USB 3.0 speeds climb to a nice 225MB/s read and 217MB/write. We would have liked to compare this to a USB 3.0 enclosure that doesn’t support UASP, but our generic USB 3.0 enclosures don’t seem to like any SATA 6Gb/s drives.
In the end, The P9X79 Deluxe gives you just about everything an enthusiast would truly want: SLI, tri-SLI, CrossFire X, PCIe 3.0, tons of overclocking features, lots of USB 3.0 ports, and truly fast performance (albeit only in comparison to the limited number of X79 boards we’ve seen so far). Now if only it had more SATA 6Gb/s ports and the price wasn’t so painful.
$400, www.asus.com
Asus P9X79 Deluxe
MCLEAN DELUXE
Tons of USB 3.0 ports; well laid out; fast.
MCHOTDOG
Painful pricing; needs more SATA 6Gb/s ports.
9
Benchmarks
| Asus P9X79 | Intel DX79 | |
|---|---|---|
| PCMark7 Overall | 3,662* | 3,489 |
| Valve Particle (fps) | 299* | 260 |
| SiSoft Sandra (GB/s) | 39.9* | 38.9 |
| SATA6 Seq. Read (MB/s) | 508* | 499.9 |
| SATA6 Seq. Write (MB/s) | 224 | 252.2* |
| USB 3.0 Seq. Read (MB/s) | 198 | 202.3* |
| USB 3.0 Seq. Write (MB/s) | 175* | 168.5 |
| SLI Compliance | Yes | Yes |
| 32GB RAM Compliance | Yes | Yes |
We tested both boards with a 3.3GHz Core i7-3960X, 16GB of DDR3/1600, a 150GB Western Digital Raptor, a GeForce GTX 580, and 64-bit Windows 7 Professional SP1. Performance scores for the SATA 6Gb/s and USB 3.0 were attained using CrystalDiskMark 3 run against an OCZ Enyo USB 3.0 drive and an OWC Mercury Extreme Pro SSD.
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16
Comments
LabGuy
March 26, 2012 at 7:39pm
Well I'm one of those who finally gave up waiting for the next best thing on the horizon. With RAM prices tanking and SSD which will hold my Windows 7 Ultimate, Adobe CS5.5 Master Collection and MS Office 2010 at a reasonable price it made sense to jump in at this time. I'm not a gamer so the 3930K chip was fine for my HD Video editing with room to overclock if I so desire down the road.
Here is my computer used to make this post with only a few tweaks coming down the pike.
Lien Li PC-70 (oldie but goodie)
P9X79Delux
Intel 6 Core i7-3930K Processor
(12M Cache, up to 3.80 GHz)
32GB Corsair Vengeance RAM
Corsair Force GT 180GB SSD SATA
Western Digital Caviar black 2tb SATA
ATI FirePro V8750 Graphics Card GB 900MHz GDDR5
Corsair HT1000 Power Supply
Pioneer BluRay 12x Burner
Other goodies, USB 3.0 front case mod, FireWire 400/800 card
XSPC liquid cooling block and AquaComputer reservoir (mon in the works)
(2) Dell 24" UltraSharp IPS Monitors (IPS is a great platform all the way around)
aferrara50
January 22, 2012 at 5:03pm
at $400 you might as well go for the Rampage IV Extreme. It's only another $50, like chocking on a gnat after you've swallowed an elephant. IMO the only two asus boards to buy are the RIVE and the WS. Couldn't be happier with my RIVE so it would be hard to recommend anything else. So much aftermarket support it's amazing.
TheMiddleman
January 21, 2012 at 2:59am
More waiting for me too, I guess. Whats the point of Sata III if I can only set up two of them in a Raid array? Give me Raid on at least six of them, with the other two left over for my BD drive and CDRW drive, and I'll be happy.
And none of that 'Speeding HDD' crap, like what you pulled with my much loved Maximus II board. Make it native, without additional drivers loaded into the OS, and we're good. Otherwise, don't even freakin' bother.
Sentinel137
January 20, 2012 at 11:03pm
It looks like another year to wait out, Till I see native SATA 6 x 6 or 8 plugs for hard drives that are able to RAID across all those plugs and native USB 3 across the back side with no 2.0 USB (old school) I'm not biting,
Yea if I was going to spend that kind of D notes I want what I pay for, At this time these x78 boards still look half baked like last years 1155 and 1156 boards, Half breaded SATA ports and USB ports with Half Breaded RAID support,,
Cheese and Bread Let not forget about that new PCI E 3.0 thats just around the corner for Quad SLI at X 16 across all the lanes not just one, where it drops down to 16x8x8x8 or some thing like that,,on the amount of cards you drop in,,
dgrmouse
January 20, 2012 at 9:38pm
I've been watching motherboard prices soar over the last decade, but I don't have a good appreciation of what is making costs rise. It would be wonderful if some publication would do some tear-downs to show us the difference between a $70 socket 1155 board and a $400 1155. Is the extra $300 pure profit, is it tied up in licensing fees, are there so many traces that the board requires extra layers? What gives?
dgrmouse
January 20, 2012 at 9:31pm
"Let’s be frank: If you’re even thinking about buying into Intel’s deliciously fast LGA2011 platform this early, you are an enthusiast—Enthusiast with a capital-freaking-E, since you can’t even look at LGA2011 without buying a $550 chip."
Can't we go back to calling the category "Xtreme" or "OMGZExtreme" or just plain "stupid?" An enthusiast is someone who fondly remembers learning their first programming language, not a person willing to pay a 400% premium for a 5% upgrade. Sorry, Gordon, but enthusiast has become a term used by morons to describe other morons.
imagonex
January 20, 2012 at 6:01pm
I like Asus! They make shiny stuff with pipes and doodads on them. And, it smells nice. MMMM...fresh motherboard scent...mmmm...
streetking
January 20, 2012 at 3:32pm
how about while youre telling us about setting up a nifty ram drive, you make a how-to article on doing so?
dgrmouse
February 04, 2012 at 10:59am
I must admit, I emitted an audible cheer when I got my March issue last week and noticed on the cover that it included a HOWTO on RAM Disks. Good job, Alex & Max PC. Keep up the good work.
aferrara50
January 22, 2012 at 5:25pm
memory.dataram.com is the where I found the software for mine. Definitely crucial to have with a x79 build. It's easy to setup and the trial version lets you make a 4gb ram disk (recognized under my computer as a harddrive) and the paid version allows the sky as the limit. I leave 16gb for the system to use and allocate my other 48gb on the ram disk. Works like a charm if you leave your system up and running for long amounts of time.
dgrmouse
January 20, 2012 at 10:02pm
I agree that this or nearly any other topic would be better than yet another press release for a motherboard that no sane person will be buying.
livebriand
January 20, 2012 at 2:51pm
"This board also has an all-new feature that lets you use a particular USB port to update its BIOS without a processor installed."
I was wondering if someone would come up with a feature like that. I've always wondered how the motherboard manufacturers expect you to be able to use their motherboard if the bios it ships with doesn't support the newer processor you want to use.
alexw1234
January 21, 2012 at 9:27am
Just move all these features about $150 down in price and I might bite.
FrancesTheMute
January 20, 2012 at 1:25pm
I was planning on upgrading to X79 from my X58, but I think I'm going to wait until Ivy Bridge comes out instead. The performance gains of X78 over Sandy Bridge weren't really enough to justify the extra expense.
Funny how financial decisions can change in just 3 years. I don't remember if X58 was a huge improvement over what the mainstream was at the time, but I didn't really care and just went for the enthusiast. Now I'm hesitant to spend that much extra.
aferrara50
January 22, 2012 at 5:22pm
I went from a 920 to a 3960X and the improvement is huge. The 3960x at stock scores double what the 920 does on benchmarks and is a rendering beast. At 5.0ghz I'm getting rendering times 1/3 that of my 920 at 4.2.
By upgrading you are committing to a huge financial decision and the cost doesn't equal the performance. IB won't be worth buying either, only the IB-E 8 cores in Q4 of this year.
TheMiddleman
January 21, 2012 at 3:22am
I think in your case it's more about timing than price. What's the point in rebuilding your system now when Ivy Bridge parts are going to be dropping in 2-3 months anyway? Sandy Bridge-E is a weird sort of stop-gap, and entirely unnecessary in my book.
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