ASUS P9X79 Pro Pro Reviews

The P9X79 Pro is most definitely a solid and well-featured motherboard. However, we’d prefer to have the fan-assisted VRM and Southbridge cooling and awesome Thermal Radar software offered by the Sabertooth X79, which costs just £19 more. Unless you fell in love with the P9X79 Pro at first sight – we’d understand if this is the case – we feel that the Sabertooth is a slightly better buy.

Having recently looked at the Sabretooth X79, it's now the turn of a motherboard a little lower down the food chain, the Asus P9X79 Pro. This board is lower down in relative terms only though, as the X79 is a high-end, enthusiast chipset. That means any motherboard featuring this chipset isn't going to be exactly cheap. The P9X79 Pro is about a tenner cheaper than the Sabretooth X79. And, you'd better sit down for this, nearly a hundred quid cheaper than Asus's flagship Republic of Gamers X79.

Alongside the board’s aesthetics, we have a well featured product on our hands. The P9X79 Pro has six fan headers, all under some of the best controls available on a motherboard; power/reset/clear CMOS buttons; a debug LED; ASUS’ DIGI+ VRM solution for fine tuning; ASUS’ TPU (Turbo) and EPU (Power Saving) processors; a BIOS full of features especially when tuning memory; Bluetooth; and an Intel NIC. No board has ever been perfect, and the nit picking I have to do here is relatively minor. The ‘per-core’ adjust required for fairness in comparison to other boards was a little peculiar, and in terms of what came with the board, I would have preferred a CrossFireX cable rather than one of the SLI cables, to account for the spacing between the first two recommended GPU slots. At ~$330, a USB 3.0 front panel may have been a good addition too, as well as another NIC. Hopefully a lot of people who buy this board will enjoy it as much as I have enjoyed reviewing it. For this, I would like to give ASUS, and the P9X79 Pro, a silver AnandTech Editors’ Choice award, for innovation on such a solid product beyond the standard specifications, as well as having the solid hardware and software backbone that users expect in a motherboard.

When it comes to latest technologies, new chipsets and CPU architectures, ASUS is always ahead of the game in the motherboard industry. Once again they have proven that they can deliver on time and still push the envelope in providing users with the features and essential components a true enthusiast x79 platform should have. The ASUS DIGI+ VRM design has come long ways throughout the past years and has advanced to even control the DRAM. In the past, other manufacturers were very much against digital voltage regulators, while now they are all racing to make the move to digital VRMs. This just shows how ASUS was way ahead the competition in the game in the past few years, and they are still improving. The ASUS P9X79 Pro Motherboard is definitely one of our main picks from the current X79 boards available on the market for several reasons: The well optimized and updated UEFI BIOS, excellent overclocking with high stability, 8 memory slots for up to 64GB of DDR3 - 2400MHz memory, and great performance especially when we use it with 3 GTX 580s in 3-way SLI. All-in-all, the P9X79 is a board that any enthusiast would be happy to play around with, even though it is not ASUS' flagship motherboard.

The ASUS P9X79 Pro motherboard has great potential, and offers more features than any multi-tasking super-user could ever hope to need. P9X79 Pro packs plenty of proprietary features onto Intel's X79 Express LGA2011 platform, making this the ideal motherboard for new Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition Core-i7 processors. Digital voltage regulation modules, performance-boosting micro-processors, and integrated Bluetooth 2.1 functionality are just a few of the items other manufacturers discount as unnecessary - to their own detriment. It's my recommendation that for anyone wanting a well-rounded motherboard with future-proof features, the ASUS P9X79 Pro should be at the top of their list.

A fully-loaded and easily overclockable motherboard for Sandy Bridge Extreme processors

If you are looking for a great motherboard to build an Intel Sandy Bridge-E machine around, the ASUS P9X79 Pro was incredibly easy to work with, was rock solid, and has a feature set that that will make many envious.