As 2011 comes to a close the big name in desktop CPUs is Intel. AMD’s Bulldozer failed to impress the market and while it is not a terrible product it does not have what it takes to grab the CPU performance crown from Intel. The top product for Intel is its new Sandy Bridge E CPUs and the X79 chipset. We have taken a look at Intel’s X79 Desktop board and Gigabyte’s G1.Assassin2. Both of these products let the Sandy Bridge E stretch its legs and run. Now we have our third X79 board in the lab. This one is from Asus and is the upper end of their consumer line. The board in question is the Asus P9X79 Deluxe. This board features the standard Intel LAN (you get dual LAN but only one is Intel in this case) as well as Asus’ BTGO (Bluetooth Go) 3.0. This is a continuation of the Bluetooth that Asus has been putting on their boards since the beginning of the year (we saw this at CES 2011). Now they are also dropping in Wireless (just like most other X79 boards), but wireless and Bluetooth are not all that Asus has packed into this board. So let’s take a look at exactly what you get with the Asus P9X79 Deluxe.
Conclusion – The P9X79 Deluxe looks to be a solid board from what we can tell so far. We have not dived into the performance yet, but just in looking at the component choices along with the design logic we would be very surprised to find that the P9X79 Deluxe does not perform well. We are concerned about the cooling around the voltage regulation, especially with water cooling (which we use in our testing). This is the one area that we can see having an impact on performance and in particular overclocking.All this aside it looks like Asus is working on pushing their enthusiast level mentality into the consumer market. This is not a bad thing at all and means that consumers are getting higher quality components and boards that are designed to be pushed to get the most out of them. It also shows a commitment to Asus’ customers by continuing to bring high-quality products and not just limiting the “good stuff” to the gamers and overclockers. We are looking forward to getting the P9X79 Deluxe on the test bench and running so we can see just exactly how well it does perform.Discuss this in our Forum
