14 DAY TRIAL // ASUS has officially announced the latest member of their famous WS-Line of motherboards: the Z9PE-D8 WS. This is a dual LGA 2011 socket monster and packs no less than 7 PCI-Express x16 slots along with eight DDR3 DIMM slots, four for each CPU on the mainboard.
Out of the seven PCI-Express x16 Slots, 4 of them work at full 3rd Generation PCI-Express x16 speed and are colored in blue while two of the 3 black ones are 2nd Generation PCI-Express x8. The bottom one is PCI-Express 2.0 operating at x4.
The eight DDR3 DIMM slots support up to 256 GB of RAM and the seven PCI-Express x16 slots ensure compatibility with AMD’s CrossFire and Nvidia’s SLI technologies.
You need Registered memory for a full 256GB of RAM configuration but if you manage to keep it under 64GB you can even overclock it to 2133 MHz.
The motherboard has 6 SATA III 6Gbps ports along with 8 SATA2 3Gbps ones controlled in part by Intel’s C602 chipset (2 SATA III ports and 8 SATA2 ports with support for RAID 0,1,5 and 10). Also used is Marvell’s PCIe 9230 controller (4 SATA III ports with support for RAID 0,1 and 10). There are two Gigabit Ethernet ports as well, controlled by Intel’s 82574L chip.
An ASMedia controller takes care of four USB 3.0 ports and the rest are likely handled by Intel’s own chips.
Surprisingly the board still carries a PS/2 keyboard/mouse combo connector along with two internal COM connectors and eight FAN headers, six for the chassis FANs and two for the CPU FANs.
The motherboard is quite large and you need a case compatible with the EEB Form Factor to fit its 30.5 x 33 cm size.
