News - ASUS 900-series mainboards fleshed out

[HEXUS]

AMD 900-series chipset powered mainboards detailed.

Read more.

[AGTDenton]

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

[oolon]

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.

[AGTDenton]

I'm hanging on til Windows 8 and LGA2011, perhaps some improvement in chipsets will arise by then