Introduction

If you're going down the path of building an absolute beast of a system between now and Christmas, the chances are you're going to be looking at the X79 chipset and the new LGA 2011 CPUs from Intel. At launch we've seen so many motherboards from companies that offer so many different features and hit us at so many different price points.

With such a huge list of boards available at launch, we need to take some time and see what they're all about and we've already had a look at some absolutely awesome boards. The ASUS Rampage IV Extreme is an absolute beast and offered us huge overclocking and just a massive amount of features. Along with that we also checked out the GIGABYTE G1.Assassin2 and MSI X79A-GD65.

Today is all about the ASUS P9X79 Deluxe which is a board we actually previewed the other week alongside the ASUS P9X79 Pro which we'll be looking at soon.

Like the other boards we've previewed, we weren't able to tell you everything about the boards in our original coverage, so what we'll be doing today is looking at the bundle inside the box which is something we haven't looked at yet and we'll also have a look at the PCIe speeds that are on offer from the board here today.

That really covers just about everything, so I think we can get into the package to see exactly what's going on before we take a closer look at the board itself, the bundle and then of course the overclocking capabilities of the board alongside the performance.

The Package

The box isn't anything we hadn't seen before, as we got a chance to look at it in our preview, so let's get into the bundle itself.

Moving inside the package, we've got a manual and driver CD along with eight SATA cables, EZ Connectors, 3-Way SLI bridge, longer CrossFire bridge and our rear I/O panel. Along with all that, we've also got a BT GO 3.0 adapter along with an antenna.