ASUS shows off their X79 motherboard lineup

ASUS today lifts a bit of the NDA on theior X79 line of motherboards, and there is some impressive stuff to be found there. 

ASUS Rampage IV Extreme

The Rampage IV Extreme will be the hot mamma of them all, with a finger licking digital PWM circuitry that supports heavy voltage-assisted overclocking with Vdroop control.

To the left of those you can see four switches that are on the board to enable/disable the PCIe x16 slots on the RIVE. Just below those you'll find eight voltage check points along the edge of the motherboard.  These are monitoring CPU, DRAM, PCH voltages among others. The board also has a switch called 'LN2 Mode' and this is for very extreme users who want to use liquid nitrogen cooling. 
 

The LGA2011 socket is wired to eight DDR3 DIMM slots (two per channel). CPU and memory VRM areas are located along three sides of the socket, all cooled by heatsinks that are connected by heat pipes. These VRM heatsinks share heat with the one over the X79 PCH, which is actively cooled by a fan.

Intel X79 platform is capable of supporting 40 PCIe 2.0 bi-directional lanes off the CPU and 8 more PCIe 3.0 lanes that are not bi-directional off the chipset.

This board has eight SATA ports. The four black ones are SATA II and the other four red ones are SATA III, the four black ones are all SATA II and run of the X79 chipset.

ASUS TUF Sabertooth X79

Following the R4E is the SaberTooth, the Sabertooth X79 comes with an ASUS-designed Digi+ VRM to power the CPU, which is spread across two sides of the socket (north and west). The heatsink cooling the VRM components is actively cooled by a 40 mm fan, the one over the X79 PCH is cooled by a similarly sized lateral blower, too. Like with the other two top-tier boards from ASUS' stable, this one provides eight DDR3 DIMM slots supporting quad-channel memory.

This board will feature a five year warranty in some countries and is built to last. We were told by ASUS that the X79 Sabertooth is codenamed 'TANK' internally due to how well this board is built.

ASUS P9X79 Deluxe

The P9X79 Deluxe will be loaded with features and connectivity options. To begin with, the LGA2011 socket is powered by a next-generation Digi+ VRM design by ASUS, driven by Dual Intelligent Processors III (next-generation Energy Processing Unit (EPU) chip and TurboV Processing Unit (TPU)).Among the six expansion slots, there are four PCI-Express x16 slots, and two PCIe x1. The PCH gives out six SATA ports, two 6 Gb/s (white), four 3 Gb/s (blue), the two additional 6 Gb/s ports come from a third-party controller. There are two power-eSATA ports on the rear panel. The eight USB 3.0 ports on this board are spread across as six ports on the rear-panel, and two via standard header. Other connectivity includes 8+2 channel HD audio, two gigabit Ethernet connections, USB 2.0, and Bluetooth.

This series offers an update to ASUS