ECS know how to capture one's attention w/ X79R-AX Black

It's not surprising we're sighting so many X79 boards with their final trimmings in place so close to the big launch we're all eagerly anticipating. But on all accounts, not just with launches, it's nice when someone does that little something more to help stand out and ECS have certainly pulled that off with some images they've pumped out of their upcoming X79R-AX Black series motherboard.

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Okay, all eyes to the left... the LEFT! Ummm, hello? Is anyone reading this? ....Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the girl doesn't come with the motherboard....

Now that I have your attention again, here's another image without any evil distractions so we can get down to business.

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As you can see, the motherboard is of typical ECS attire for the most part. You've got your two DIMMS on either side of the CPU, giving the ability to run in quad-channel mode using DDR3 at speeds of up to 2400MHz. The CPUs power is delivered by what looks to be a 14 phase PWM setup, cooled by a low profile heatsink.

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Expansion wise there's four PCI-E x16 slots resident, driven by Sandy Bridge E's integrated 40 lane PCI-E controller. The color coding for these slots is indicative that two run in x16 mode, with the other two each being x8. The board does support both SLI and CrossfireX, of which when all four PCI-E slots are populated, they each run at x8.

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You can see there are also a couple PCi-E x1 slots onboard along with eight SATA 6Gbps and four SATA 3Gbps ports. As for the rest of the features, it's all a fairly standard fare with onboard USB 3.0 pin header, rear USB 3.0 ports, Bluetooth radio transmitter, 7.1 channel audio, clear CMOS switch, and power and reset switches on the PCB near a BIOS debugging display.