14 DAY TRIAL // Although Intel has not yet made official the C200-series chipsets designed for Sandy Bridge Xeon E3 processors, details about Asus' upcoming workstation motherboards keep pouring in, and today we can bring you the full specifications of the P8B WS board.
The Asus P8B WS is built around the C206 chipset and could be considered the workstation version of the P8P67 WS Revolution, a board that we had some previous experience with as we used it for testing the overclocking potential of Sandy Bridge CPUs at the beginning of the year.
However, the differences between the two are quite significant as the P8B WS drops all the overclocking features that come standard with most Asus boards and swaps them for a C206 chipset that packs an FDI interface and is compatible with the integrated graphics found in Sandy Bridge and some Xeon E3 processors.
The board also adds ECC memory support (as long as it's used with an ECC-enabled CPU) and features four PCI Express x16 slots.
Of the four, only the first one has 16 lanes worth of PCIe bandwidth as the second one is limited at x8 operation and the last two feature only four lanes worth of bandwidth each.
In addition, the board also packs a single x1 PCI Express slot and a PCI slot as well as six SATA ports, two 6Gbps and four 3Gbps.
Moving to the back, we find a PS/2 port, six USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a DVI port, a FireWire port, a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports driven by Intel 82574L controllers, and 7.1-channel audio jacks with optical and coaxial S/PDIF out.
Two additional USB 2.0 ports are found on the motherboard's PCB and are destined to be used for installing various hardware keys or other USB peripherals.
The board hasn't been made official by Asus until now, but it has been spotted in various European online stores where it’s priced between €170-180 ($240-$255 USD). (via SemiAccurate)