14 DAY TRIAL // After taking by storm the consumer market, Sandy Bridge has now started to find its way into the server world and Asus has just launched one of the first LGA 1155 motherboard to support Xeon E3-1200 processors, the P8B-X.
The Asus P8B-X is based on the Intel C202 PCH chipset which is the most basic PCH available in the C200 family and comes without support for SATA 6Gbps.
In addition, Asus hasn't installed a third party controller to add this sort of functionality to the P8B-X, so users are limited to using the six SATA 3Gbps ports that are driven be the C202 chipset.
Other expansion features include four DIMM sockets that support up to 32GB of ECC DDR3-1333 (both buffered and unbuffered) system memory, a PCI Express x16 slot, a PCI-E x8 slot that features only for lanes of PCI-E bandwidth, as well as a pair of PCI-E x1 and a two legacy PCI slots.
The P8B-X also features an on-board XGI Z9s graphics card with 64MB of video buffer, a pair of Intel 82574L Gigabit Ethernet controllers, a TPM header as well as a serial port pin header.
Moving to the back of the board, we see that Asus has kept the number of available connectors to a minimum as the motherboard only features two USB 2.0 ports, a VGA video output, one external serial port, a pair of Gigabit Ethernet connectors powered by the Intel NICs mentioned earlier and a shared PS/2 keyboard and mouse port.
The Asus P8B-X is both rack and desktop ready and is compatible with all the Xeon E3-1200 processors models as well as with the consumer Core i3-2100 and Core i3-2120 CPUs.
Just as the company's consumer motherboard models, the Asus P8B-X comes with an UEFI BIOS that supports drives larger than 3GB.
The Asus P8B-X serverboard is available for purchase as we speak and its price has been set at $189. (via OverclockersClub)