14 DAY TRIAL // The fact that most recent motherboard releases have revolved around either AMD's 8 Series chipsets or Intel's new six-core chip is no mystery. ASUS itself is a prime example of developer of AMD boards, having unveiled its severely overclockable Republic of Gamers motherboards at CeBIT 2010. Now, eager to offer another path towards high performance computing, the hardware maker has outed a platform meant to support powerful systems based on Intel's latest Core CPUs, Pentium processors or Xeon 3400 series chips.
Unlike the ROG motherboards, this new device, aptly dubbed the P7F7-E WS SuperComputer, uses, instead of an AMD 8 Series chipset, the Intel LGA1156 socket, which supports the aforementioned Pentium and Xeon 3400 chips, as well as Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs. The chosen chip can be backed up by up to 16GB DDR3 (6 DIMMs) 2000 (O.C.)/1600/1333MHz, ECC-capable, un-buffered memory. The motherboard also features four PCI Epxress x16 slots, which enable 3-way and 2-way SLI multi-GPU setups, as well as CrossFireX (up to Quad CrossFireX) configurations.
As it has done with most of its new high-end mainboards, ASUS took care to include support for all next-generation interfaces. Besides the unsurprising six SATA 3.0 Gbps connectors, there are two SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, two USB 3.0 ports (alongside a number of USB 2.0 connectors), a pair of FireWire ports and DVI out. Furthermore, the motherboard features 7.1 channel audio and a 16+3 phase power design.
“For extreme gaming enjoyment, up to four ATI® CrossFireX cards or 3-way/2-way NVIDIA® SLI cards can be accommodated to generate smoother and sharper visuals. It also leverages NVIDIA® CUDA™ parallel computing architecture to support up to four NVIDIA® Tesla cards with Clarkdale Processors for intensive high-performance computing,” the press release reveals.
This wide feature set and high number of connectors are enabled by the Ibex peak 3450 chipset and the NVIDIA N200 bridge chip. Unfortunately, pricing and availability details have not been disclosed as of yet.