ASUS B85-PRO Gamer Unveiled

ASUS has just revealed its newest motherboard: the ASUS B85-PRO GAMER. Nope, this is not a Republic of Gamers (ROG) board. Yessir, ASUS is totally pulling off an MSI here rebranding existing products into a “Gamer” line. We did see MSI eventually transition the line into a dedicated line but in the case of ASUS, they already have the ROG brand for that.

TechPowerUp reports the following specs for the upcoming ASUS board:

…this slim ATX motherboard uses an 8-phase VRM to condition power to the LGA1150 socket. It’s wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots, and a single PCI-Express 3.0 x16 slot. The other long x16 slot on this board is physically PCI-Express 2.0 x4, and wired to the B85 PCH. Three legacy PCI, and two PCI-Express 2.0 x1 make up the rest of the expansion area. Storage connectivity includes four SATA 6 Gb/s, and two SATA 3 Gb/s. Display outputs, include DVI, D-Sub, and HDMI. ASUS worked on the networking and audio of this board. It features a rather premium Intel I217V GbE controller, and SupremeFX audio, with a 115 dBA SNR CODEC, electrolytic capacitors, a simple 300Ω headphones amp, and ground-layer isolation.

The feature-set of the B85-Pro Gamer includes GameFirst II, a network packet prioritization software that’s a carryover from the ROG series, “Gamer’s Guardian,” which is a combination of ESD dampening circuits along the rear panel ports, DRAM over-current protection, and high-grade black solid-state capacitors. Ai-Suite 3 is carried over from the rest of ASUS’ LGA1150 motherboard lineup. Since B85 lacks overclocking features, none of the OC tools from ROG lineup should be available, even if the UEFI BIOS setup should have a more ROG-like layout.

Pricing has not yet been revealed.

Both ASUS and GIGABYTE may have been feeling the bite of MSI’s heavy promotion with its gaming line and priding itself on the red and black scheme, it is now trickling it to its less decked-out offerings.

Why ASUS would use a B85 chipset instead of waiting for the Intel 9-series release is anyone’s guess. Although it can be recalled that MSI also did the same when they revealed the MSI GAMING line during the final month of the Z77 chipset eventually rebranding some of its classic series boards to the new sub-branding.

Source & Images: TechPowerUp