ASUS has introduced two W790 motherboards to house the new generation of Intel Xeon processors announced yesterday by our colleagues at MCPRO.
The new Intel Xeon are intended to motorize professional workstations desktop and reach the market in two series, W-2400 and W-3400. The new CPUs build on the same foundation as the Sapphire Rapids for servers and data centers, are built on the Intel 7 node (10nm Enhanced SuperFin) and maintain the multi-chip module design with interconnected blocks.
ASUS W790 Motherboards
If you need to set up a workstation, pay attention to the new Intel platform because it covers all the needs, also the basic workstations for content creation, development or editing of photography, video or audio, with entry versions of the platform that are equal to or cheaper than the CPUs we use in machines for general computing or gaming.
ASUS has been one of the first manufacturers to present motherboards to support the new Xeons and it does so with two different models for each of its series: Pro WS W790-Sage SE and Pro WS W790-Ace. Both use the LGA-4677 socket and the W790 chipset.
The ‘Ace’ version It is intended for entry-level workstations and is ideal for mounting Intel’s W-2400 processors. It has five PCIe 5.0 x16 slots and eight DDR5 memory slots, working in quad channel and supporting a capacity of up to 2 Tbytes.
It offers two M.2 PCIe 4.0 slots to mount two solid-state drives, plus four SATA ports and three SAS ports to cover any internal storage needs. It has two Ethernet LAN ports, a Marvell 10 Gbps and an Intel 2.5 Gbps. The board has the usual USB (version 3.2 Gen2) and a Realtek S1220A chip for the audio section.
The ‘Sage’ version it is intended for the high-end for use with the Intel Xeon W-3400. It includes more PCIe 5.0 slots than the previous one (seven x16) and the same slots for RAM memory, 8 quadruple channel DIM slots and capacity of up to 2 Tbytes.
It includes three M.2 connectors for SSD-based storage, two of them PCIe Gen5. It supports 8 SATA and 2 SAS ports, and features two 10Gbps Ethernet ports with Intel hardware, plenty of USB ports, as well as another M.2 connector for an optional Wi-Fi 6E wireless connectivity module. ASUS has added an Aspeed AST2600 remote management controller, with its own dedicated VGA and Ethernet port.
No price has been provided for the new ASUS W790 motherboards, which we assume will be available from the month of March when the new Intel processors reach the retail channel. Very interesting for creating professional work machines from the most basic, with models like the Intel Xeon w3-2423 that has a retail price of $359 and is ideal for entry to workstations.
