ASUS VANGUARD B85 Motherboard
On Board Peripherals
Contents
The Intel B85 chipset is a single-chip solution, which is also known as a PCH (Platform Controller Hub). This chip has four SATA-600 ports, and two SATA-300 ports, with no RAID support. The ASUS VANGUARD B85 offers all of them.
Figure 4 shows the SATA ports, four of them rotated 90 degrees in order to not interfere with video cards.
Figure 4: SATA-600 (brown) and SATA-300 (black) ports
The Intel B85 chipset supports 12 USB 2.0 ports and four USB 3.0 ports. The ASUS VANGUARD B85 offers eights USB 2.0 ports, two located on the motherboard’s rear panel and six available through three headers located at the motherboard; and six USB 3.0 ports, four available on the motherboard’s rear panel and two available through a header. The two extra USB 3.0 ports are controlled by an ASMedia ASM1074 chip.
The ASUS VANGUARD B85 does not support FireWire ports.
This motherboard supports 7.1 audio format using a Realtek ALC887 codec. This codec has the same specifications as the Realtek ALC892, except that the ALC892 has two extra channels for audio streaming. The main specifications for this codec include 97 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog outputs, 90 dB signal-to-noise ratio for the analog inputs, and up to 192 kHz sampling rate for both inputs and outputs, with 24-bit resolution. These specs are good for the mainstream user, but if you are looking into working professionally with audio editing, you should look for a motherboard that provides an SNR of at least 97 dB for the analog inputs.
The analog audio outputs are independent even if you use a 7.1 analog speaker set, but the motherboard does not come with SPDIF outputs. However, there is a header labeled “SPDIF_OUT”, where you can install an adapter to have SPDIF outputs or to connect a cable to older video cards that required a physical connection to have audio on their HDMI outputs.
The portrayed motherboard has one Gigabit Ethernet port, controlled by an Intel I217-V chip.
In Figure 5, you can see the motherboard’s rear panel with a shared PS/2 keyboard/mouse connector, two USB 2.0 ports, DisplayPort output, HDMI output, VGA output, DVI-D output, four USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet port, and the analog audio connectors.
Figure 5: Motherboard rear panel