Asus Rolls Out P9X79-E WS LGA2011 Motherboard

[N.Broekhuijsen]

Asus has released its X79-based P9X79-E WS Motherboard.

Asus Rolls Out P9X79-E WS LGA2011 Motherboard : Read more

 

[hardcore_player]

can't wait to compare this one to my rampage iv extreme

 

[shadowfamicom]

Impressive offering. Gonna stick with my MSI Big Bang II though... when they start making more 16gb DDR3 sticks gonna fill it up with 8 of them and make a crazy RAMdisk.

 

[ssdpro]

X79 really does feel like "2011" these days with 2 native SATA 6Gb/s ports and no native USB 3.0. PCIe 3.0 that "might work"? Crippled chipset? NEXT!

 

[JOSHSKORN]

No Thunderbolt?

 

[mapesdhs]

I currently have the normal WS. This new model looks like ASUS' response
to the Asrock X79 Extreme11, except without adding SAS. It's nice that the
E improves the multi-GPU support to be 4-way @ x16 each, not so much for
gaming but for those using CUDA, etc., but a real shame that the 3rd party
6Gbit ports are still by Marvell because their controller is awful. 2 native Intel
ports just isn't enough. Does anyone make a decent SATA3 controller besides
Intel??

The only thing that annoys me with these boards is the locking mechanism
for the PCIe slots. With multiple cards installed and a big air cooler, it's kinda
hard to reach the latch to extract a card.

Performance-wise though, they're very good.

Ian.

 

[purrcatian]

@mapesdhs
As far as I know, the only thing that comes close are LSI SAS controllers. But even then, they are not as good for most applications.

 

[mapesdhs]

I have lots of SAS controllers. It depends what you're doing. SAS cards give
excellent sequential I/O, but 4K random is limited by the card's ASIC, which
can ruin the potential of multiple SSDs connected to such cards. They make
more sense when used with Enterprise SAS/SATA for strong sequential, but
with battery-backed cache to give strong 4K performance aswell (I get 2GB/sec
on one of my PCIe cards) combined with data reliability in the event of power
failure. But yes, multiple SSDs in RAID would work better with a bunch of native
Intel SATA3 ports if only such were available (alas most boards only have two).

Where you are wrong however is if one is just using a normal single mechanical
drive. A SAS card with a 600GB 15K SAS leaves any SATA in the dust when it
comes to general performance, while even just 3 of them will give more than
700MB/sec sequential.

The caveat though is that some SAS cards with 6bit SAS support will link at
only 3Gbit when connected to a SATA3 device. In the case of LSI, one can
user particular firmware releases to solve this issue for specific cards.

Ian.