Asus X79 Motherboard Preview

It will be three years in November since Intel launched their X58 chipset, a platform dedicated to enthusiasts, overclockers and professional benchmarkers. The platform served its purpose well for a long time and has managed to hold on to the ‘best performance’ crown all this while. The X58 chipset now makes way for Intel’s highly anticipated replacement, the X79 chipset. Why X79 and not X68 or X78 beats us, but it is what it is. Intel has a notorious habit of switching sockets time and again and they haven’t broken that streak this time too. Along with the new chipset, the 2nd Generation Core i7 family of processors will use the new 2011 socket so there’s no chance of any backwards compatibility with existing Z68 chipsets. Now, we can’t go into too much detail about the chipset due to Intel’s NDA but we can talk about Asus’s new line-up based on the X79 chipset.Asus had a little media preview on the 21st of October where a select few journalists (us included) got a first hand look at their upcoming motherboards. Three flagship boards were showcased, each filling up a different segment and first we’ll be looking at the P9X79 mainstream motherboard which also includes a Pro and Deluxe model.Asus P9X79/Pro/DeluxeThe first major change is the 3rd generation Dual Intelligent Processors along with a new DIGI+ Power control system. Asus first launched the DIGI+ VRM on the P67 motherboard last year and this time, there’s a separate power controller chip for the memory modules as well. This dual chip design ensures dedicated power control to the CPU and memory for better stability during gaming or overclocking.Click here for full story