ASUS P9X79 Deluxe Motherboard Review

[Apoptosis]

ASUS P9X79 Deluxe Motherboard Review

The ASUS P9X79 Deluxe motherboard that is feature rich as well as has all of the capabilities that all X79 based motherboards have. Some of the great features that ASUS included are: BT GO 3.0, and WiFi connectivity with other WiFi/Blue Tooth (BT)connected devices. So, let's step inside and see what the ASUS P9X79 Deluxe motherboard has in store for us.



Article Title: ASUS P9X79 Deluxe Motherboard Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1987/1/

[Major_A]

What software did you use to create the RAM Drive? RAMDisk?
http://www.filehippo.com/download_ramdisk/

[DragonFury]

Yep that is what i used, right now I am using Ram DISK plus, it allows me to allocate a bit more memory as a storage device for 14 days, there are free Ram drive programs out there. Hereis a list of them, Ram Disk seems to be a bit faster then the few others I have played with.

[Major_A]

I was playing around with RAMDisk a while back and it kept messing up (the software not the virtual drive). I was just curious if you had a better alternative. Thanks for the link and good job on the review.

[DragonFury]

at first I did have minor issues regarding ramdisk when I first started playing with it, but now everything is fairly solid. and thank you.

[Wilburbruno]

I`m surprised (and happy) there`s not more difference going from a i7 970, which is my current system, to the X79 platform. You mention UEFI bios, usb 3 and more sata III ports as being reasons for upgrading, but since i allready have sata III and usb 3 onboard my X58 (allthough slower, I know), this is a long way from justifying such an expensive upgrade. A "newer" X58 board with sata III, usb 3 and enough ram will still rock for some time. I am aware that a 2011 hex core is conciderably faster than the 970, but for anything other than benchmarks, I dont think I would even be able to tell a difference, especially when gaming. Even the number of pci-e lanes or pci-e generation dont make that much of an impact. Coming from a older Core2 Quad or a AMD system over to X79 makes a lot more sense. The X58 is a incredible long-lived platform in my opinion. I enjoy building new systems, don`t get me wrong, but I expect significant benefits when I do.

[DragonFury]

It comes down to what are you wanting to do, with your computer? My computer is expanding into more then a typical gaming rig, so the upgrade to the P9X79 Deluxe made sense for me. I been running the X58 since they were an engineering sample; my first 1366/X58 based computer was a Core i7 920 was a engineering sample I received 2 weeks prior to its official release, with the first Intel X58 SO motherboard. So I been using that based platform for quite a while now.

Just to add there was more to my upgrade then what i stated in the review, though I did hint to them reasons, and the only way I was going to be able to have them capabilities was to move to a platform that had those capabilities built in so that I am not having to buy "extra PCI-E cards" and eat up the remaining PCI-E expansion ports and sacrifice the use of possibly getting a third video card and or a Revo Drive while using a X58 based platform, and the Z77 platform was not going to maintain the shear amount of PCI-E lanes similar to a X58, and have the other capabilities I was looking for. Those other capabilities I was looking into was built in WiFi, and Blue Tooth while maintaining 36+ PCI-E lanes at the same time.

[RogueCylon]

Don't rule out the Z77 boards. The P8Z77-V Premium as a statement piece could have provided you with enough PCI lanes, plus a lot of other extras including native thunderbolt. Really expensive, but at least you have the more advanced board.

[DragonFury]

it uses a PCI-E booster chip, I dont like booster chips. so lets do some math 340 for 3770K Cpu 450 for motherboard = 790. 300 for the 3820 370 for the p9x79 Deluxe = 670 and all of my 40+ PCI-E lanes are native to the CPU. Native will always out perform booster chips.

[RogueCylon]

Can you elaborate on the Premium using a PCIe booster? I'm unaware of this and would like clarification. I was under the impression that the P9X79 was a pre-implementation of PCIe 3.0, whereas the Z&& premium is a full PCIe 3.0 implementation.

[Apoptosis]

The ASUS P8X77V Premium uses a PLX PEX 8747 bridge chip for 8/x8/x8/x8 PCIe 3.0 operation. This is how you get the NVIDIA Quad-SLI support on this board.

Since the board uses the PLX PEX 8747 chip, it means that single GPU performance is going to be negatively impacted versus a board without this chip due to all the extra routing and latency induce by the bridge chip.

You can read more about the PLX PEX 8747 PCI Express Gen 3 switch here - http://www.plxtech.com/products/expresslane/pex8747

If you need multiplexing and 4-way graphics then it's worth it, but for single card users it just hurts performance, uses more power and is a waste of money.

[DragonFury]

Thank you sir, I was researching that chip when you posted. Wanted to make sure what chip they were using, and only a few websites mention the use of it on that board.

[RogueCylon]

I'm well aware of the PLX chip and its feature set. My question was what booster functionality was Raymond referring to?

[DragonFury]

thats it, it boosts the amount of PCI-E lanes of a CPU. The Ivy bridge CPU is limited to only 16 lanes. In order to gain any more then that it requires a chip that boosts the amount of PCI-E lanes, in this case it is a Lucid PLX 8747.

The 2011 based CPU's do not require any type of PCI-E chip that boosts the amount of PCI-E lanes on to it, because it already contains 40 PCI-E lanes natively.

so the motherboard you listed is using a Lucid PLX chip to gain 16 more PCI-E lanes in order to use 4 video cards at a 8x8x8x8 configuration.

I was not exactly sure the name of the chip that was being used on the newer motherboards, honestly I did not care to know either, because I was not going to go into that particular platform knowing what it required to run more then 2 video cards and more PCI-E expansion cards that require more then a x1 PCI-E port.