ASUS P9X79-E WS Review: Xeon meets PLX for 7x
by Ian Cutress on January 10, 2014 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Asus
- Workstation
- X79
- Prosumer
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:
Thank you to OCZ for providing us with 1250W Gold Power Supplies.
Thank you to G.Skill for providing us with memory kits.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU, Corsair H80i CLC and 16GB 2400C10 memory.
Thank you to ASUS for providing us with the AMD GPUs and some IO Testing kit.
Thank you to ECS for providing us with the NVIDIA GPUs.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with the 500W Platinum Power Supply for mITX testing, BlackHawk Ultra, and 1600W Hercules PSU for extreme dual CPU + quad GPU testing, and RK-9100 keyboards.
Thank you to ASRock for providing us with the 802.11ac wireless router for testing.
Test Setup
Test Setup | |
Processor |
Intel Core i7-4960X ES 6 Cores, 12 Threads, 3.6 GHz (4.0 GHz Turbo) |
Motherboards |
EVGA X79 Dark ASUS Rampage IV Black Edition ASUS P9X79-E WS |
Cooling |
Corsair H80i Thermalright TRUE Copper |
Power Supply |
OCZ 1250W Gold ZX Series Corsair AX1200i Platinum PSU |
Memory | 2 x Corsair Vengeance Pro 2x8 GB DDR3 2400 10-12-12 Kit |
Memory Settings | XMP (2400 10-12-12) |
Video Cards |
ASUS HD7970 3GB ECS GTX 580 1536MB |
Video Drivers |
Catalyst 13.1 NVIDIA Drivers 310.90 WHQL |
Hard Drive | OCZ Vertex 3 256GB |
Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 |
Case | Open Test Bed |
Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit |
USB 2/3 Testing | OCZ Vertex 3 240GB with SATA->USB Adaptor |
WiFi Testing | D-Link DIR-865L 802.11ac Dual Band Router |
Power Consumption
Power consumption was tested on the system as a whole with a wall meter connected to the OCZ 1250W power supply, while in a dual 7970 GPU configuration. This power supply is Gold rated, and as I am in the UK on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~75% efficiency > 50W, and 90%+ efficiency at 250W, which is suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading. This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency. These are the real world values that consumers may expect from a typical system (minus the monitor) using this motherboard.
While this method for power measurement may not be ideal, and you feel these numbers are not representative due to the high wattage power supply being used (we use the same PSU to remain consistent over a series of reviews, and the fact that some boards on our test bed get tested with three or four high powered GPUs), the important point to take away is the relationship between the numbers. These boards are all under the same conditions, and thus the differences between them should be easy to spot.
The idle power numbers from the P9X79-E WS are a little higher than the others, presumably due to the large number of extra controllers present.
Windows 7 POST Time
Different motherboards have different POST sequences before an operating system is initialized. A lot of this is dependent on the board itself, and POST boot time is determined by the controllers on board (and the sequence of how those extras are organized). As part of our testing, we are now going to look at the POST Boot Time - this is the time from pressing the ON button on the computer to when Windows 7 starts loading. (We discount Windows loading as it is highly variable given Windows specific features.) These results are subject to human error, so please allow +/- 1 second in these results.
Typically large motherboards with extra features take longer to POST into Windows 7, such as some of our 25+ second tests, but the P9X79-E WS does better than expected coming just under 15 seconds.
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EdB1 - Tuesday, July 29, 2014 - link
There is no driver support for Server 2012 so if you want to run it as a server using that OS then forget it. After all Asus has only had about 2-3 years to make the drivers for it. Using the Windows 8.x drivers doesn't work either, I tried to run them under admin mode and also compatibilty mode without success.EdB1 - Wednesday, July 30, 2014 - link
Just a followup to my previous post, there are drivers out there but not on the Asus site, got some links for the chipsets on another forum site, just need to find one more.lymang - Sunday, December 14, 2014 - link
I know this is old but I have to say, having bought one recently, I did not make the connection on how few USB headers on the mobo this had. I wish I'd caught that it had an internal USB 2.0 connector instead of a header.