14 DAY TRIAL // Not that much time has passed since we brought you the first details about Asus' upcoming line of LGA 1155 server and workstation motherboards, which were designed to support Intel's Xeon processors based on the Sandy Bridge architecture, and now one such board was listed in an Japanese retail store.
The motherboard in question is the P8B-E/4L and this is one of the most feature rich solutions in the company's server lineup as it is built around the C204 chipset and packs dual PCI Express x16 slots as well as an wide array of SATA ports.
These operate in x8 mode when both are populated due to limitations imposed by the PCI Express controller integrated inside the Sandy Bridge CPUs and are seconded by a PCIe x8 slot, with four lanes worth of bandwidth, and three regular PCI slots.
The last slot that is placed at the bottom of the P8B-E/4L is called a PIKE socket and was designed by Asus to accommodate a SAS add-on card.
When this isn't populated, users have to rely on the SATA subsystem for storage, but Asus has been generous in this department and packed no less then eight SATA 3Gbps ports and six SATA 6Gbps ports.
Moving to the back of the board, we find a limited number of connectors which includes just one VGA video output, dual PS/2 ports, a pair of USB 2.0 ports and no less than five Gigabit Ethernet connectors.
Four of those are controller by Intel 82574L NICs and the fifth one is used to provide KVM-over-IP functionality.
Apart from the P8B-E/4L, Asus' C200-series motherboard lineup includes four other models that use the full-ATX and micro-ATX form factors.
Pricing for the P8B-E/4L has been established at 33,980 Japanese Yen which translates into about $409 US. (via Xfastest)