ASUS 900-series mainboards fleshed out

by Navin Maini on 6 May 2011, 16:19

Tags: ASUSTeK (TPE:2357)

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The M5A99X EVO posed for the camera yesterday, and today, more details have emerged about ASUS' upcoming AMD 900-series chipset powered line-up.

 

 

Briefly returning to the M5A99X EVO - powered by an AMD 990X/SB950 combo - the above slide declares that SLI support will indeed be present. This won't be the case however, with the AMD 970/SB950 powered M5A97 EVO, M5A97 PRO and M5A97 models - even though NVIDIA's extension of SLI support to the AMD 900-series platform, does include the 970 chipset.

As for the flagship AMD 990FX chipset, it looks like ASUS is going premium-only with the TUF SABERTOOTH 990FX and ROG Crosshair V Formula.

The TUF SABERTOOTH model goes for an 8+2 phase Digi+ VRM, and as you'd expect, comes with a hearty complement of PCIe slots. Akin to its ROG sibling, it will support CrossFireX and SLI configurations. ASUS' mix of military-standard components - and its TUF CeraM!X cooling solution - will also be included. Expect six SATA 6Gbps and two SATA 3Gbps ports, together with eSATA connectivity, and a medley of USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports to boot.

The ROG Crosshair V Formula goes with an 8+2 phase Extreme Engine Digi+ VRM and a large dose of ROG features for overclocking exploits. There's also mention of ROG ThunderBolt (not to be confused with Intel's Thunderbolt technology) for selected models, and across the board, it's seven SATA 6Gbps ports and a bucket-load of other connectivity options to top things off.

HEXUS Forums :: 3 Comments

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Posted by AGTDenton - Tue 10 May 2011 16:18
I know these are gamer boards but does anyone else hate transition phases? In the above case SATA 2 to SATA III/6GBs and USB2 to USB3?
Why not just have all ports SATA III and USB3. It then helps future proofing and you dont have to care which port you use to get highest performance. I find 8 ports not enough on SATA, to only have 6 ports on 6GBs is very irritating. You'd think these days it would be very easy to include 10+ ports as standard. And 7 SATA ports? how odd!

Good to see a Creative Labs onboard audio chip for the ROG board. Although its always surprised me that ASUS who make their own audio cards dont put their chips onto their motherboards.

Look forward to some benchies
Posted by oolon - Tue 10 May 2011 16:46
Chipset Bandwidth is the answer. There are not enough PCIe lanes in the chipset to have everything USB3 and SATA3. One way arround this is to added buffering chips, that share bandwidth, so you can have 6 SATA3 connections however they all cannot work at full speed at the same time. The alturnative is to provide some lower and some high speed connectors that way the devices that matter can get the speed.

You can see this effect with PCIe adapters where you can switch the use of lanes in the BIOS, as there are not enough to go round.

Buffering however increases chip count/power use/cost and Latency which is why in general it is considered bad.
Posted by AGTDenton - Tue 10 May 2011 17:31
I'm hanging on til Windows 8 and LGA2011, perhaps some improvement in chipsets will arise by then