Monday, May 30th 2011
ASUS C1X79 EVO LGA2011 Motherboard Pictured
With the "entry level" of its socket LGA2011 lineup, ASUS is making a return to its signature gold-colored PCB with the C1X79 EVO. Based on the Intel X79 Express chipset, the board provides a basic feature-set sticking to whatever the chipset provides. The LGA2011 socket is powered by a simple 6+1 phase VRM, the two DDR3 DIMM slots are located on either sides of the socket in groups of two, and are powered by a 4-phase VRM.
Expansion slots include three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 (electrical x16/x16/NC or x16/x8/x8, depending on whether the third slot is populated), two PCI-E x1, and an open-ended PCI-E x4. All 10 of the SATA 6 Gb/s ports provided by the X79 chipset are assigned as internal ports, apart from four additional 3 Gb/s ports. That aside, there's little in terms of connectivity, with just the 8+2 channel HD audio, dual gigabit Ethernet, and a couple of USB 3.0 ports. The board uses ASUS' UEFI setup program with EZMode. We're not entirely sure if the production version of this board sticks to the golden PCB color, let's hope it does.
Expansion slots include three PCI-Express 3.0 x16 (electrical x16/x16/NC or x16/x8/x8, depending on whether the third slot is populated), two PCI-E x1, and an open-ended PCI-E x4. All 10 of the SATA 6 Gb/s ports provided by the X79 chipset are assigned as internal ports, apart from four additional 3 Gb/s ports. That aside, there's little in terms of connectivity, with just the 8+2 channel HD audio, dual gigabit Ethernet, and a couple of USB 3.0 ports. The board uses ASUS' UEFI setup program with EZMode. We're not entirely sure if the production version of this board sticks to the golden PCB color, let's hope it does.
36 Comments on ASUS C1X79 EVO LGA2011 Motherboard Pictured
You go Asus, finally there is competent hardware manufacturers out there.
Hopefully the Intel 2011 cpu's should be available soon, just not in the mood to beta all the drivers and other bugs that a new cpu will come with.
Also, 14 - FOURTEEN - SATA ports on an "entry-level" board? I would've thought the whopping 10 provided by the chipset would be more than enough, but this.... just wow.
Enough with the "entry-level" nonsense.
It's not like this is a H61 chipset for your i3.
It'll cost more than most top-grade Z68 boards and will most likely be used in servers and production workstations. So the 12-14 SATA ports aren't unusual.
And for people saying "not enough memory slots", we are going to see 8Gb sticks soon so 32Gb is enough for most people.
For the average home user, a 4x2Gb (8Gb) kit is plenty and should cost around $100.
If you need more get a 4x4Gb or 4x8Gb.
I see why they would skimp, especially given that these boards are about as far from production as possible while still functioning, but 1366 skimping in the beginning (yes, memory serves well) was just as inexcusable. I'm looking forward to making my 64 bit OS finally do some extreme lifting, and having my disk drives last longer because the paging file is a dedicated segment of my ram (I might have a thing for ram disk...).You read the spec sheets from x79? The thing comes with 14 SATA, of which 10 are capable of SATA III (6 Gb/s) speeds. The pictures were posted a while back in this article: www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=143179&highlight=x79.I second the notion. Enthusiast level is defined as not being budget minded. If I'm going to be spending $200+ to get entry into the low end (notice, I did not say budget) there had better be a compelling reason beyond more PCI-e and SATA. I could purchase two sets of processors and mother boards for the kind of pricing one socket 2011 will get me. Extra SATA is a good first step, but using a chipset to its fullest (~90% initially with improvements down the road) is something I demand from this pricing.
all of the most relaible asus boards I've had are this color.