Asus shows dual socket motherboard at CES

Asus did not show Series 7 motherboards for Ivy Bridge processors at CES, but stuck to boards for processors that are already on the market. It did show a workstation motherboard for two Sandy Bridge EP processors.

The dualsocket workstation motherboard is compatible with Intel’s latest Xeons from the Sandy Bridge EP series. The board is reminiscent of EVGA’s SR-2 board, which was suitable for 1366 processors. In addition to the two CPUs, the Z9PE-D8 supports a maximum of 128GB DDR3 memory in its slots and has seven PCI Express x16 slots. Three of them are electrically executed as x8 slots. Furthermore, fourteen SATA ports and four USB 3.0 ports are available. Prices and availability of the extensive board are not yet known, but Asus did run a system with two quad-core Xeons, good for sixteen threads.

In addition to the extra-large workstation motherboard, Asus also showed its matx board with X79 chipset on board: the Rampage IV Gene from the RoG series. Given the limited space, four memory slots are present, but the board still has three x16 slots for video cards and one x4 slot. There are six SATA ports available, as well as a header for two USB 3.0 ports and two more USB 3.0 ports on the I/O shield. There are also eight regular USB ports, a gigabit network port, audio connections and an esata port. The Gene board features a SupremeFX III sound chip and Intel network chip.

Finally, Asus is working on RoG Exchange, which will allow uefi settings to be shared with other RoG owners. Via a Windows application, the settings of another person, with which, for example, a high overclock was achieved, can be loaded automatically.