ASUS’ decision to decorate its main line of motherboards with black and gold details may have come to an end, because of the ASUS B85-Pro Gamer, the recently revealed motherboard of the company, and the first one among the “Gamer” series. This new series of motherboards will basically take the best of the main series and add black and red, ROG-style but without being one (and thus being cheaper).
ASUS’ new Gamer series seeks to provide users Gaming-oriented products at reasonable prices. That said, the B85-Pro Gamer is not just a B85-Pro with a different design. Its PCB has been redesigned, it actually looks more like the Z87-A. It’s an ATX motherboard and LGA 1150 socket with an 8-phase VRM. It has four DDR3 slots and a single PCI-Express x16 slot (the PCI-Express you see in the picture is a PCI-E 2.0 x4, linked to the PCH B85).
It has three PCI expansion slots and two PCI-Express 2.0 x1, four SATA 6Gbps and two SATA 3Gbps. As you can see, this is a fairly simple motherboard, but it has enough features for you to build a mid-level or high-end Gaming system. It has some specific features that we will detail below:
- Audio controller Intel I217V SupremeFX with a 115 dBA codec, electrolytic capacitors, headphone amplifier and PCB-level isolation as we have seen in motherboards from other brands like the Gigabyte G.1 Sniper A88X.
- GameFirst II, a program capable of decreasing lag while playing.
- The RAM sockets are fully protected.
The official price and release date are unknown, but it looks like a very nice gaming component, especially for those with a tight budget.