 Corsair RM series power supplies are optimized for silent operation. Click now to learn more. Welcome to my unboxing of a product that gets me personally extremely excited. More so than an ROG board or a regular motherboard. Definitely. This is the P9X79EWS. So this is an updated version of the P9X79WS. WS is for workstation, which is not to say that this board is not going to be a highly capable overclocker or able to run a highly capable gaming machine. It just means that it goes beyond that to more like workstation or even light home server grade validation and componentry. So on the front you're going to find the usual Core i7 Extreme and Nvidia SLI and AMD Crossfire X badges and all that stuff. But whoa, hold on a minute, what's this? Xeon 5 support? Yeah, you can chuck a Xeon in here in ECC memory. Nvidia Tesla support is actually validated to run with Nvidia Tesla compute cards. That's something you're not going to find on your typical run of the mill $100 motherboard. Not only that, but check this out guys. So there's a little badge right there you can go have a look at while I open up the box. Four way SLI or Crossfire at a 16x link speed. Now there is some, you know, of course it takes some funny business to make that happen with respect to PLX switches or whatever else. But if you want four cards running at 16x then this is pretty much the only way to go. It's got full support for the latest Ivy Bridge E processors on the LGA 2011 platform. It's also got support for the older LGA 2011 Sandy Bridge E based processors. So anything with that fits in an LGA 2011 socket you can pretty much put in here. And let's go ahead and spread out all the accessories because it comes with absolutely everything. So four way SLI bridge right there. Nice sexy black four way SLI bridge. Four or rather three way SLI bridge right there. It also comes with check this out. Firewire header and USB 2.0 headers. So just in case you still need firewire it's like it's got everything. I O shield is right there. Then we've got regular SLI bridge. Wish that was black, but I guess, you know, whatever. It's not really targeted directly at gamers. Eight SATA cables. So four of them are straight, four of them are right angle. Actually sorry, two more SATA cables as well as a Molex to dual SATA adapter. Haven't seen one of these included with one of their boards in a while. And check this out. A serial port riser. So you can go ahead and throw that in one of your extra PCI slots and a DVD and Q connectors and a quick start user's guide or user's guide, whatever you want to call it. So who is this motherboard for? If it can overclock and it can game, but it's validated with Teslas and all this stuff. Well, the answer is pretty much anyone, particularly people like me where you're doing video editing and you have some pretty exotic weird hardware in what would otherwise be considered a gaming rig. So I'm running a graphics card, which happens to be a dual GPU graphics card. So sometimes there's compatibility issues there. I am running a high end raid controller. So it's an LSI 9268I with eight SSDs on it, so I need maximum throughput to my card. I need compatibility, which I'm not getting with my current Gigabyte X79S UP5. And I was running a 10 gigabit network card. So that's another thing that might be kind of a weird thing. Internally here we run quadros, all that kind of stuff. You might also want to run a high end sound card. It's going to be validated. It's going to actually work. So let's move into what they've actually improved with the EWS. So they've improved the power delivery. It's got their latest digital power for both the CPU as well as the memory. They've also got a newly updated UEFI. So of course full support for Ivy Bridge E, the Xeon based CPUs. Remember those are required for ECC memory support. So if you do want to run ECC RAM, which is basically a more stable, reliable memory, particularly for high capacity configurations. It has the same overclocking options as you'd find on any other board, but because of the quality of the components, it's going to probably do better than most of the other boards with the exception of probably the X79 Deluxe as well as the Rampage 4 Black Edition, just because those ones are really tuned and tweaked for Ivy Bridge E. Now there's some other updated stuff as well. The dual Intel Ethernet solution is probably mostly geared towards the pro users, but basically it's two 210 series controllers that offer better throughput, lower CPU utilization as well as some more pro grade controller options. So it's optimized for things like virtual machines for example. Let's cover the layout. So what you may or may not have noticed about this board is it's a little bit on the wider side and it has some of the most complete I.O. that you will ever see. There's seven full PCI Express slots. There are 10 SATA connectors. There is pretty much everything you could possibly imagine. There's a USB port built in to the bottom right hand of the board. This can be used for things like encryption keys that would normally be just permanently plugged into the system unless you wanted to remove them. All that kind of really cool stuff. You've got your A-Pin CPU connector in its ideal location along the top left. You've got some of the cooling for that advanced VRM over here. And then there's actually a heat pipe that connects it to a secondary set of sort of heat sink fins over here that allows you to dissipate some additional heat with the incidental airflow that's going to come from your CPU cooling solution. So this is also connected via heat pipe to this massive sort of I guess block of metal down here. Hard to call it a heat sink which is then connected by heat pipe to this guy right here. So cooling is actually spread out a fair bit on the board. You've got eight DDR3 memory slots. So these are going to be running at higher speeds than what you'd have seen on the older board particularly because Ivy Bridge's ECPUs have a stronger memory controller than Sandy Bridge ECPUs. The 24-pin connectors in its ideal location along the right-hand edge, you still got things like on-board power and reset buttons as well as their MemOK button which allows you to boot even with sort of weird memory configurations. Gives you a chance to actually configure them. It has an EPU switch over here as well as its USB 3 front panel header in its ideal location along the right-hand edge although I'd like to see a right angle connector if I could have one. You've got two SATA3 6 gigabit per second and four SATA2 3 gigabit per second connectors running off the Intel chipset and four SATA3 6 gigabit per second connectors running off of an updated controller that ASUS has added to this board that has support for their new SSD caching too which allows you to use an unlimited size SSD to cache your mechanical volumes. Remember they do have to all be plugged into the same controller versus Intel's RST technology that limits you to a 60 gig SSD. Your post readout, on-board front panel connectors which of course you have. I explained the USB port here before. Front USB 2, just one header for that. Front firewire as well as there's that serial front panel audio and your TPU switch so that's for optimizing for performance as opposed to EPU which is more about optimizing for power efficiency. Now let's get into that PCI Express configuration. So all the blue slots are capable of running at full 16x speed even with all of them populated so if you were running a four-way graphics card configuration you would plug into all the blue ones. This top blue one runs at 16x regardless but the other blue and black ones will split into 8x 8x mode once you start to populate them so the black ones only run at 8x the 16 ones run at 16x which is pretty fast. Now if you were to populate all those cards and you weren't to plug in any auxiliary power you would actually have a very good chance of burning out your 24-pin connector over here because they particularly high draw graphics cards and things like that draw power not only from the connectors that are plugged directly into them but also from the slot. So you're going to want to plug in this 6-pin PCIe connector right here if you've got any more than probably about two high draw cards plugged into these PCI Express slots that's going to make sure that you don't burn out your board which is going to be a big problem for you. When we move around to the back of the board we find out why there weren't any USB 2.0 headers because there's 10 USB 2 ports on the back, a PS2 keyboard mouse combo port, USB BIOS flashback this is handy because even if you brick the board in the middle of a flash you can usually restore it, optical audio out those dual Intel gigabit Ethernet controllers as well as USB 3 and ah yes dual eSATA 6 gigabit per second so that is fast eSATA 7.1 audio out and I mean realistically what do you use something like this for? For me extremely high end gaming rig with weird hardware in it maybe you're someone who uses I don't know a video capture device in order to run like a really high end camera for your game stream or whatever else you might want to do with it that that is who I see this being a board for or if you're looking to build something like a workstation that is going to be running you know FireGL cards or Quadros or Teslas or you know Quad gigabit Ethernet NICs or any of those kinds of things that require not only the compatibility that is validated for but also the throughput because if you plug some of these cards into you know slots that might look like 16x slots on regular consumer boards but are actually running at 8x or 4x or whatever speed they're running at you might not get the maximum performance that you should be able to achieve with that card so we're going to be using this board for an upcoming ultimate build guide that will be sort of what we'd consider to be the ultimate video editing rig and I'm extremely excited about that so I think that pretty much wraps it up thank you for checking out my unboxing of the P9X79E Deluxe did I say Deluxe because I meant WS it's certainly you know Deluxe enough for you know from my perspective don't forget to like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it and leave a comment letting us know what you thought about the video if you had some feelings that just can't be expressed with a thumbs up or a thumbs down.