14 DAY TRIAL // While there is still some time left until Intel makes official the Xeon E3 series of processors based on the Sandy Bridge architecture, the very first details about Asus' upcoming line of LGA 1155 server motherboards have already made it out into the open and the company plans to release no less than five different solutions based on the C200-series chipsets.
Some specifications as well as blurred out pictures of the motherboards were available for a short while on the company's website, but these appear to have been taken down by now.
Fortunately, SemiAccurate managed to get the most important specs right before Asus did this, so we know quite a few details about these upcoming boards.
Starting with the P8B-M, the board is designed around the Intel C204 chipset and features four DIMM sockets with ECC support, a PCI Express x16 slot, two PCI Express x8 slots, both with four lanes worth of bandwidth, a single PCI slot and three Gigabit Ethernet ports (one for KVM-over-IP).
These are accompanied by four SATA 3Gbps and two SATA 6Gbps and it supports Intel’s RST technology, that allows for the drives to be setup in a RAID 0, 1, 10 and 5 array, while also packing a LSI MegaRAID solution that offers software RAID 0, 1 and 10 support.
Next in line is the C202-based P8B-X that sports six SATA 3Gbps ports, four DIMM sockets, a single PCI Express x16 slot and one x8 slot with four lanes worth of bandwidth, two x1 slots and two PCI slots.
Graphics is handled by an integrated XGI Z9s GPU with 64MB of dedicated graphics memory and the P8B-X also carries two Intel Gigabit Ethernet ports.
Asus uses the same graphics core and chipset for the P8B-C/4L as for the P8B-X, but the motherboards drops all but the PCIe x16 and the PCIe x8 slots in favor of five regular PCI slots and it now features no less than four Gigabit Ethernet ports.
The next board in Asus' arsenal is the P8B-C/SAS/4L and this is almost identical with the P8B-C/4L except for the addition of an LSI 2008 SAS controller which adds a set of eight SAS 6Gbps ports to the mix.
Finally, the last Asus Bromolow server board is the P8B-E/4L that is built around a C204 chipset and it packs dual PCI Express x16 slots (operate in x8 mode when both are populated), an x8 slot with only four lanes of bandwidth, three PCI slots and an Asus PIKE slot.
This allows for a SAS add-on card to be installed that provides eight channels of SAS 6Gbps connectivity with either software RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 , 1E and 50 or hardware RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 6, 50 and 60 support.
No details regarding pricing and availability have been disclosed at this time, but the boards are expected to launch together with the Xeon E3 processor family.