During the CES 2013 conference in January two new motherboards were introduced at the ASUS counter. These are E2KM1I and P9X79-E WS, these are great for heavy data intensive work such as playing modern 3d games or for video/multimedia production. Let’s explore both of these ASUS motherboards in detail and find out how these can help you in building a new gaming desktop.
ASUS P9X79-E WS Performance Gaming Motherboard
P9X79-E WS is a powerful desktop motherboard which is ideal for high end video gaming, 3d/ multimedia content creation and more. The most attractive aspect of this motherboard is its easy future expansion. The expansion channels of this full ATX board includes 7 high speed PCIe x16 slots on Compact Electronics Bay Specification (high form factor usually you see that in workstations or servers only) which supports 4-way CrossFireX and four-way GeForce SLI technology, this enables you to get graphics display up to 5 monitors, which makes it a powerful motherboard for multiple monitor display. The high performance memory channels support up to 128 GB through four module communication. Other key features of this gaming motherboard are:
- 4 SATA 3GB/s ports
- 6 SATA 6GB/s ports
- 2 eSATA 6 GB/s ports
- 4 USB 3.0 ports
- 2 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces
- 1 Firewire port
- 1 8-channel high definition audio jack
ASUS E2KM1I-Deluxe Mini-ITX Motherboard for Gaming
The second ASUS star of the CES 2013 was mini-ITX motherboard of E2KM1I-Deluxe which is built to run AMD’s latest dual core APU (accelerated processing unit) E2-2000 which is build to provide parllel data and graphics processing.
APU = CPU + GPU
Since APUs provide a single unit hardware which help to downsize the PC components, this makes it an ideal option for building ultra-portable gaming computer without sacrificing performance. The single unit processing chip is one of the latest innovation in the computer components which is promising technology for desktops and laptops to reduce the overall size of gaming computers. There is a heavy duty large fan to take care of cooling of the mini-ITX case that controls the heating of hardware components and resulting in running a quiet PC. The compact size of the computer makes it ideal for casual gaming, everyday work/office as well as for entertainment PC. APUof this compact board has AMD builtin processor and graphics. Other key features includes the following:
- 5 SATA 6GB/s ports
- 1 eSATA 6GB/s ports
- 2 DDR3 Memory slots
- 1 PCI-Express 2.0 x16 interface
- 1 mPCIe that integrates WiFi 802.11 WLAN card
- Bluetooth 4.0
- Radeon 7300 series GPU
- built-in 7.1 channel HD Audio
- USB 3.0/ USB 2.0 ports
- Gigabit Network Interface
- HDMI display output for larger screens
