 Welcome to yet another unboxing video. Today we have a product that I am pretty excited to take a look at. This is the P9 X79 WS. So what we already know about it based on the WS in the product name is that this is a workstation grade board from ASUS. So that means usually in the past tons of PCIe slots, workstation grade features and workstation grade reliability. So this is the kind of thing you might want to use for a rendering machine or if you're like some of ASUS customers even a very very high-end gaming machine because yes while all of that stable you know quality stuff is there this is also a completely overclocking friendly motherboard as well. So let's have a look at what we've got in terms of included accessories. You're really far away. Let's have a look at what we've got in terms of included accessories. We have four SATA 3 6 gigabit per second cables, four SATA 2 3 gigabit per second cables, various colors. That's an interesting strategy. We've got a Molex to 2 SATA power adapter. We have a four-way SLI bridge. BAM! Matte black PCB on that by the way. Looking boss. Three-way SLI bridge also with a matte black PCB. Love it. And then we've got the usual two-way SLI bridge. It's a flexible one. It's an orange one. I sure hope if you buy this board you're gonna go with three or four-way SLI so that you can use one of those instead. We've got a serial riser so that's a PCI bracket that you can plug into the board if you still need serial. That is a very workstation friendly feature. We've got Q connectors for front USB as well as the front panel connectors for power and whatnot. We have an eSATA as well as USB 2 PCI back PCI backplate. And then we've got our I.O. shield and finally the user guide as well as a DVD which you won't use because you're gonna download the latest off the ASUS website for all your drivers and utilities and whatnot. And speaking of utilities and drivers and whatnot, this one needs lots of them because it has a lot of different features that are actually pretty cool. So let's take out the board and then we will get into all of that neat stuff. So the first thing the first thing we see on this board is that it has, yes count them, one two three four five six PCI Express 16x physical slots. So not all of these are actually wired for 16x. In fact only this one and this one are actually wired for 16x. These ones are all wired for PCIe 8x. Now bearing in mind this is a PCI Express Gen 3 board which means that even PCIe 8x is going to have the same bandwidth as PCIe 16x Gen 2. So I'd be comfortable running a graphics card in any one of these slots. No problem. Also remember on x79 there's no funky some of the PCI Express lanes are coming off the chip set and some are coming off the CPU. None of that. Everything is coming out of the same place so there's no additional latency penalty for using a particular slot versus another one. So these are your two main PCI Express 16x slots for two-way graphics card configurations. For three-way I guess I'd probably go with one two three. Then for four-way you don't really have much of an option. It's one two three four. So those are your preferred configurations. What else we got on here? Aha! Like all of Asus' x79 boards this one has eight DIMM slots which means support for oodles and boatloads of memory which is definitely necessary for a workstation environment where you might be doing 3D rendering or heavy video editing heavy photo editing all those kinds of workloads where you need a ton of RAM. So that is built in to this particular board. There is our LGA 2011 socket with our 8-pin power connector. Nothing really excessive on this board like no two 8 pins or anything like that. It's not really necessary anyway but but there you have it. There is our CPU PWM. Of note on this board is the fact that it does use DigiPlus power control so that is digital VRM for both the memory and the CPU. Very very cool thing to have. We've also got a very unique cooling solution on this board. Check this out. So we've got the heatsink up here for the CPU PWM. We've got an additional couple of heatsinks over here that are going to help us dissipate some more heat and then finally we've got your standard low-profile heatsink on the Intel chipset itself. So that one actually isn't cooling a whole lot but these other guys are going to be taking care of most of the cooling which is going to be or most of the heat which is going to be produced by this. So going back to the board what else we got here we got MemOK which increases memory compatibility allows you to get into the BIOS to configure things. We've also got an easy plug so this is additional power for the board in the event that you do need it. This is particularly necessary for boards that have that are intended to have a ton of graphics cards installed in them. 24-pin power connectors in its ideal location along the right hand edge. We've also got an EPU button that's for power saving. USB 3 front panel connector in its ideal location. We've also got SATA 3 6 gigabit per second connectors. These two run off the Intel chipset. These two run off of a third-party Marvell chipset and they also support Asus' SSD caching feature. So remember X79 unlike Z68 does not natively support SSD caching so Asus has implemented that with a third-party chipset. These four are SATA 2 3 gigabit per second so you'll use that for your lower performance or your storage drives or whatever else the case may be. On the front we've got our front panel connectors for your LEDs, your power button, your reset button, all that good stuff. We have an internal USB port. This is handy for you know it's more like server and workstation grade applications so if you have for example a storage device or something that actually connects with one of these internal ports and you don't want to run it through a pass-through out the back of the case this is a very handy thing to have. Two USB 2.0 ports, onboard power button so yes we still have those awesome enthusiast grade features even though it is a workstation board. Asus has really included everything here. More fans. I'll point out all the fan locations afterwards. Clear CMOS but that is not... hold on... Yep, clear CMOS jumper. TPU so that is for... that is more for performance whereas the EPU is more for energy efficiency. Front firewire and we've already covered the PCIe slot so a couple more things. Just want to show you guys where all the fan connectors are on this board because that can often influence whether to go with a particular board for a build, whether it has good access to your fans. So we have one, two, three, four, five, six, six PWM fan connectors so that is uh let's see yeah I'd say that's pretty good placement because a lot of time you're gonna have a chassis fan in the top that you got to deal with you're gonna have a chassis fan in the back you got to deal with you might have a couple of CPU fans that you want to plug in but if you got like a big knock to a D14 cooler that deals with your front fan and that deals with sort of your either your front fan or some other fan pretty well taken care of as far as I'm concerned. On the back of the board we find just an additional metal strip for cooling some PWM components so that means a case like an Antec 1100 wouldn't be a bad idea because it has some cooling that you can direct at the back of the board for additional well cooling. Let me just see if there's anything I'm missing here before we get too far into it so it does support both four-way SLI and four-way crossfire it does have ah this is good dual Intel Ethernet server grade LAN ports so that means no third-party chipsets we are using the Intel Ethernet ports and nothing else it also has an LED a couple different LED buttons here if you want to come closer has a couple different LEDs on it I actually am not a hundred percent sure where they are but I know that one of them turns either green blue or red to indicate whether you're in power saving mode regular mode or overclocking mode and then there's also an additional LED set that hold on let me just find this guy ah indicates whether you have any errors this one sweet so this doesn't happen to me often but I've totally blanked me a sec guys let's do the I oh so we've got our ps2 keyboard and mouse ports dedicated ports I don't know I'm old fashion but I still like them seven regular USB 2 ports this guy is compatible with a su spiles flashback which allows you to throw a USB drive with the red correct bios file in there press this button and without even memory or CPU installed you can flash to the latest bios very cool optical audio out the dual gigabit ethernet dual gigabit ethernet by Intel firewire to USB 3.0 ports remember there's two more supported from the internal header as well as 7.1 analog audio out there's also some cool bios features to go along with this board including pressing f3 or f12 to easily access your frequently used functions as well as take a screenshot of your bios to send to others to help them to achieve the same level of performance that you have once you've tweets things as much as you want there's also fan expert plus which is a really cool way to manage all of these fans that you can plug into the board you can either set profiles or even temperature curves so that means if your temperatures go up the fans will go up if your temperatures go down the fans will spin down which is very very neat this board also supports aha look there's a label right there USB 3 boost which is basically just a way of making any USB 3 drive perform a little bit faster and USB 3 devices that support UASP significantly faster which is cool as well so thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the P9X79WS workstation board don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos crazy Russian found the light that lights up and tells us that the everything is okay light this one right here so blue so you can see we're running in normal mode or as normal as things can be with an extreme edition and 32 gigs of mismatched memory installed so we're just making sure that everything's running okay with this board before it goes into a high-end workstation