ASUS working on dual socket LGA 2011 board

At CES ASUS has been showing off its dual socket LGA 2011 Z9PE-D8-WS motherboard designed to support Sandy Bridge-EP 8 core Xeon processors in a workstation environment. Each socket is powered by a 14 phase Digi+ VRM, which cannot directly compete with EVGA’s SR3 in terms of power delivery but it makes up for that with bundles of connectivity. The motherboard draws in all its power through two 8pin EPS connectors, the 24pin motherboard connector and a supplemental molex 4pin power connector.

The sockets are each wired to four DDR3 DIMM slots, giving this board the ability to hold up to 256 GB of RAM. There are seven PCI-Express 3.0 x16 expansion slots, from which four (blue) are x16 capable, and three (black) x8 capable. There are as many as 10 SATA ports, of which six appear to be 6 Gb/s capable. In terms of connectivity, an ASpeed AST2300 provides basic display and management over IP functions; there are two gigabit Ethernet interfaces driven by Intel-made controllers, two USB 3.0 ports, 8-channel HD audio, and a number of USB 2.0 ports. ASUS demonstrated this board by running two 2P capable unknown processors, three latest NVIDIA Tesla GPU compute cards, and an ASUS-made graphics card. Unlike with EVGA SR3, which is technically a workstation motherboard designed for enthusiasts, the Z9PE-D8-WS is intentioned to be a workstation motherboard only.

Source: VR-Zone