When you pay more for a product, you expect a better level of everything - performance, features, support.  In a motherboard, I'd want all the upgrades - top line audio, overclockability, superior software, better USB 3.0 / SATA 6 Gbps controllers, and so on.  The ASRock X79 Extreme9's party piece is the bundled 'Game Blaster' - a PCIe x1 card with Creative Sound Core3D Audio powered by a quad core audio processor and an additional Broadcom Gigabit LAN port.  All in at $360 MSRP, today we review the Extreme9 to see if it fits into the enthusiast of enthusiast price segments.  Read on for the full review.

Llano is still selling strong for AMD, as shown by the relatively recent reports of representing a major aspect of their CPU profit margins. Building on our Llano and A75 review base, ASUS gave us the opportunity to look at their F1A75-M Pro motherboard - e-tailing at the time of writing for around $110.  Here at AnandTech we have reviewed other offerings from ASUS in A75, in full ATX from the F1A75-V Pro, and the mini-ITX F1A75-I Deluxe.  This time, it's the turn of micro-ATX.  Read on for the full review!

Over the past 12 months I have covered a number of ECS boards, from the Sandy Bridge and Fusion range, including one with a Hydra chip.  Looking back on those, there was a distinct running theme – a willingness to offer the consumer perhaps something different. My tour of the ECS headquarters back in June, and a Q&A session with an ECS VP, gave credence to ECS pushing more into the consumer market rather than their roots in OEM.  X79 was a focus for this, and today we are seeing the fruits of that perseverance, in the X79R-AX (Black Extreme) motherboard.  Read on for the full review!

Over the years, Gigabyte has given us some interesting products.  More recently in the past 18 months, Rajinder gave their H55N-USB3 motherboard a well deserved recommendation, and more recently, I have scrutinized their Sandy Bridge range.  For X79, Gigabyte is uncharacteristically launching only a few motherboards, of which we are looking at their cheapest model, the GA-X79-UD3.  We are also for the first time introduced to what Gigabyte believe should be a graphical BIOS compared to their competitors.   Read on for the full review.

In our series of X79 reviews, the next boards to face scrutiny are a pair of ASRock boards – the X79 Extreme4-M, one of the first mATX solutions to X79, and the X79 Extreme4, a full size ATX model.  The main interesting point to consider starts with whether the power consumption and heat generation are applicable to the Sandy Bridge-E platform.  With the socket and quad channel memory taking up serious PCB real estate, it is interesting to see how ASRock have tackled heat dissipation issues.  We also compare the Extreme4-M to the Extreme4, its bigger brother.  Both boards offer amazing value in X79 land, coming in at a recommended retail of $224.99 and $234.99 respectively.  Read on for the full review!

Reviews of Intel manufactured boards are something of a rarity.  They are not marketed in the same way other motherboards are – almost not at all in comparison.  It could be argued that reviews are only seen coming at the start of a chipset release, coinciding with what we as reviewers get in our media kits from Intel itself.  However, to an enthusiast, it is strange to say that they sell well – consumers or system builders wanting to pair a processor with a board without hassle can go straight in at an Intel motherboard/processor combo.  The question is with an enthusiast platform such as X79, would you really want to deal with an Intel board?  Read on for the full review.

In the pursuit of sheer performance, a user should aim to combine the ultimate CPU with the ultimate everything else – motherboard, memory, and so on. The latest enthusiast platform to hit our streets is Intel’s Sandy Bridge-E and X79 chipset, released today.

So to start a series of X79 reviews, we are going to have a look at what the X79 chipset brings to the table over other Intel chipsets, and the first motherboard under our microscope is the ASUS P9X79 Pro, coming in at an RRP of $329.99. Needless to say, this is fairly expensive in the land of motherboards, even when pairing it with a $1000 CPU. However, if previous Intel chipsets are anything to go by, ASUS PRO boards get a lot of attention. So the question becomes ‘Is it worth it?’ Read on for the full review.

With recent reports showing a profit for AMD from Llano, we can safely say that the processors, and thus the chipsets, are selling. As a result, we have taken a full size A75 board each from ASUS and Gigabyte, in the $115-$120 range, and put them through their paces to see which one we would use. Read on for the full comparison.

The low powered AMD Fusion market is still an active one, and although the ASUS E35M1-M Pro has been available for a while, we have been asked to have a look.  By definition, it is a low powered board with a 1.6 GHz dual core and a 500 MHz GPU clock with 80 stream processors.  We clocked a basic system at around 32 W idle, with the APU cooled passively. Read on for our E35M1-M Pro review.

In a world where space is at a premium, the smaller motherboards get, and yet still retain full functionality, never ceases to amaze me.  With desktop Llano processors taking the integrated graphics crown, an all-in-one mini Llano system becomes ever more appealing.  To support this, ASUS have sent us their premium mini-ITX motherboard for review, which I have put through the bench suite.  Read on for the full review!

With every chipset, there's a call to arms in providing the package that everyone needs. Unfortunately there's never one motherboard which can cater for every possibility, but there are some that come quite close. Our review today is on the Zotac Z68ITX-A-E Wifi - a mini-ITX take on the Z68 chipset, which promises to be a winner right from the start, with dual gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, onboard wifi, onboard power/reset buttons, a debug LED, a lot of extras with your motherboard, and all the extras that Z68 offers. For $170, we're looking at a good contender for an award here, as long as the performance and additions compare well to its rivals. Read on for the full review!