ASUS P9X79 Pro - The Board

Moving away from the box and onto the board, we get our first proper look at the P9X79 Pro and you can see we've got that darker black PCB on offer with the typical blue color scheme that's present with other Pro / Deluxe motherboards.

Moving in closer, we start to get an idea of what's going on in the expansion slot department. The first thing is, it's nice to see that legacy PCI is dropped. As for the expansion slots themselves, we've got two PCIe x1 and four PCIe x16. We can't go into detail on the speeds the slots are running at, but if you look closely you can see the wiring setup on offer which will give you a good idea.

Moving to the bottom of the board, we can see all the usual culprits present. Starting from the left, we've got our LED Debug meter, power and reset button, EPU switch, three USB 2.0 connectors, Clear CMOS button, fan header, TPU switch and our front panel connectors.

As we turn the corner, we can see a total of eight SATA ports. On the far left we've got white SATA III ports running off the Marvell 9128 controller, and following that we've got four SATA II ports in blue running off the X79 chipset natively, and next to that we've got another two SATA III ports and these ones also run off the X79 chipset.