ASRock Announce X99 WS-E/10G Motherboard – 22 Gbps NIC

Large scale motherboard manufacturer ASRock has just released their new X99 motherboard, the X99 WS-E/10G – featuring an amazing on-board network interface capabilities of 22 Gbps.

It’s able to achieve such speeds due to its two included Intel I210AT Gigabit Ethernet controllers, coupled with a dual 10-GIGE network interface provided by a single-chip Intel X540. This brings to mind a popular ‘Xzhibit meme’ which would read something like – “Yo dawg, I heard you like NIC’s, so I put a NIC on your NIC so you can network while you network.” This amalgamation of chips result in a blisteringly fast transfer peak speed of 22 Gbps, which will out-match your data drives and internet connection in an instant – it’s time for them to catch up!

ASRock has reportedly released some tests showing the fast transfer speeds in action, likening it to Google Fiber’s 1 Gbps offering and claiming its superiority to this service.

Alongside this NIC offering, ASRock’s new X99 motherboard gives you seven expansion slots (supporting Quad CrossFire and SLI configurations), 12 SATA ports and the ability to utilize up to Xenon Processor models E5 v3 (Haswell-EP) and 128GB of ECC memory.

Given this information, it seems that ASRock has provided us with a solid server option – however there is no mention of retail price, so don’t hold your breath just yet. Even though the 22 Gbps NIC offering is a bit of a gimmick and will vastly outmatch most, if not all, hardware in your possession – it’s nice that the NIC is no longer a bottleneck on our networks. Remember the days of a 10 Mbps card? We do, it sucked.

Image courtesy of Chiphell