 Welcome to my unboxing of the Asus P9X79 Pro. So this is more of a value oriented, although it's very difficult to say that with a straight face, value oriented X79 board. It features most of the same key, key marketing points as the other P9X79 boards, such as their all new digital power control for the CPU and the RAM, so dual intelligent processors. So they've got the EPU as well as the TPU. The TPU is cool. We actually have a showdown coming up on my NCIXCOM channel where I'm going to show you the Asus TPU versus the one touch, one button overclocking efforts that MSI and Gigabyte have come up with. And let's just say the TPU wins by a fairly significant margin. Okay, precise power control, so there's their DigiPlus VRM. One click speed up with their Asus SSD caching, which uses a third party SATA controller in order to enable that rather than the Intel controller because the Intel controller on X79 does not support that even though Z68 does. UEFI BIOS, Asus's UEFI BIOS is excellent. Bluetooth enjoyment, okay. And quad channel DDR3 for more bandwidth and up to eight DIMMs. This is fully SLI and Crossfire X ready and includes support for all the latest 2011 processors including Core i7s and Core i7 Xtreme on the LGA 2011 platform. So I'm going to go ahead and take this board out like that and we're going to show you guys the accessories. So come look at that. Like I said, not really a value board. Still a very pricey board. Comes with a three-way SLI bridge. You won't need that for a value board. Okay, we've got four right angle SATA 3 6 gigabit per second cables and two right angle SATA 2 3 gigabit per second cables. Our front Q connector, so that's for plugging in your front power and reset and all that stuff a little bit more easily. Flexible Asus SLI bridge and IO shield. Hey, look at that. CPU installation instructions in full color. Ha ha. Oh, as well as, oh, this is awesome. This is awesome. USB BIOS flash back. So using that white port and this button right here without a CPU plugged in, without RAM plugged in, with nothing but power and a motherboard, you can just load a BIOS file onto your USB drive, plug it in there and you can flash the BIOS without any components plugged in, which means that say a new CPU gets released and you buy it and you sold your old CPU and oh, it doesn't post because it's not updated for the new CPU. Yeah, it doesn't matter because you can flash the latest BIOS with just a USB key. You don't even need a CPU. So we've got our utilities and drivers disk, which you should not use. You should throw it away and download the latest from the Asus website. And I think that pretty much covers the accessories for the P9X79 Pro. So let's go ahead and get this baby opened up. Don't worry, I'm working on it. I'm trying here, guys. I'm trying. Here we go. All right. So there is our sexy X79 board because which X79 board is not sexy? I would argue that they all are. OK. We've got stickers telling us the same things that were already on the outside of the box. And since at this point, we've already bought the motherboard, I'm not sure why they're still trying to sell it to us, but power to them. OK, what else we got here? Aha, this is a good one. USB 3 boost. Why wasn't that on the box? That's an awesome feature. Let me see if it is on the box. It must be. No way. It's not even. Oh, this is one of the best features on this motherboard. So it supports the upcoming. Well, yeah, upcoming because there's really no devices on the market yet that support it, but it supports the upcoming UASP method of transferring data to USB 3, which means using the same USB 3 ports with updated firmware on your USB 3 devices, you can get much, much better transfer speeds. And even on non-UASP USB devices, you can still get better transfer speeds because you can use the SCSI protocol, which is faster. Cool, right? FanExpert Plus allows you to install AI Suite 2 and set custom fan profiles. See, they've got a little tiny picture there. And you can set fan curves based on temperatures and RPM targets and all that kind of good stuff, which is great. Normally, you have to buy expensive third-party controllers in order to do stuff like that. So what have we got here? We got our LGA 2011 socket, which has 2011 pins and came out in year 2011. Cool. We've also got eight. That's right, eight DDR3 memory slots, which are supporting a grand total of, at this point in time, up to 64 gigs of memory because we only have 8 gig DIMMs as far as unbuffered DIMMs on the desktop go. We got a heat pipe here and a VRM solution that actually extends all the way to the back. Check that out. So we've got a heat sink here on the voltage regulators that are on the back. The thing about these X79 boards is look how much space gets taken up by the sheer size of the socket and all the memory slots around it. So the motherboard manufacturers have had to be very innovative about where they squeeze the voltage regulators because look at this. Here's our 8-pin CPU power capable of sucking up to 200 watts through the socket. They have to build enough digital power regulation modules around it in order to handle that kind of a load without overheating or causing any kind of instability. It's actually kind of a marvel that they can do it at all to be perfectly blunt. Here's our 8-pin power connector in its ideal location at the top edge of the board. Here's our 24-pin power connector in its ideal location at the right-hand edge of the board. USB 3.0 front panel header in its ideal location along the right-hand edge of the board. And check this out. We've got on the Intel controller two SATA 3.6 gigabit per second ports, four SATA 2.3 gigabit per second ports, and on the third party controller with caching enabled, we've got two more SATA 3.6 gigabit per second ports. Front panel connectors are here. The TPU can be enabled or disabled with the hardware switch here, but you can also turn it off and on in the BIOS, so I don't really see the point of that. There's a clear SIMO switch, three front panel USB 2.0 headers. There's the EPU, which is the energy saving version of a TPU, which is a power more go faster button version. So the energy saving version, I would say, is less relevant on a performance platform like this. Front post LED, or not front post LED. There's the actual TPU chip. Here's your built-in power and reset switches. One, two, three, four PCI Express 16x slots, of which two are wired for 16x, two are wired for 8x, so it's going to run a little something like this. 16, 16, 16, 8, 8, or 8, 8, 8, 8. Two PCIe 1.0 slots, or PCIe 1x slots, and no PCI slots. Yes, this is a new high-end performance platform. There are no PCI slots and no PS2 ports. We got one, two, three, actually not sure if this one even works as a regular USB port, but I'm going to count it. So four, six USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, a BIOS reflash button here, gigabit ethernet, optical audio out. That looks like PowerD SATA, cool beans, two of those, and Bluetooth, and 7.1 audio out. So thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the P9X79 Pro from Asus. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.