First look: ASUS KFN32-D SLI

Remember the days of the dual Athlon MP? Things are about to get crazy again.

This imposing beast is the ASUS KFN32-D. It’s AMD’s latest addition to its arsenal in the ongoing computer power arms race, a 4-processor motherboard. It arrived in the labs a few days ago and we’re still testing it, but we wanted to give you the lowdown.



It’s based around the Nforce Professional 3600 and Nforce 3050 chips, specifically an MCP 550 Northbridge and an IO55 Southbridge. There’s an Intel 7602 PXH bridge that connects to the expansion slots in there too. Three low profile fanless heatsinks cover these, which don’t obstruct the expansion cards. While we’re on the subject, you can get two dual-wide graphics cards in and still have a PCI, PCI-X and an 8x PCI-e slot available. There’s also an LSI Logic controller next to the Intel bridge that manages the SAS interface.

There are two new 1207-pin socket F connectors. They house a new FGA based Opteron each, which have two cores on die, bringing the total up to four. There are a total of 8 DIMMs, split between the processors. To cram all this power onto a single PCB, it’s wider than it is tall. It’s like Kim Beasley really, except this wields real power.



This is a workstation board, but there’s nothing -- other than the price when it's fully loaded -- stopping you using it for normal computing. If your general use doesn’t involve hardcore multi-threaded applications, then you can always just run a lot of single-threaded tasks in parallel. For instance, say you wanted to render some graphics, convert video from one format to another, game and host a dedicated server at the same time. That’s four intensive tasks, and provided you have the RAM and hard-drive throughput to sustain that workload, you can throw them all at a processor each and have no problems whatsoever.

Keep your eyes on the magazine in the upcoming months for the complete lowdown. In the meantime however, here's a quick report of what's on and around the board, starting with the most interesting and/or fear-inducing features.

Two 1207 pin Socket F LGA connectors
4 DIMM slots for each processor, totaling 16GB of RAM
2x PCI, 2x PCI-X, 2x PCI-E x16 and 1x PCI-E x8 slots
Dual gigabit Ethernet through Broadcom chips
6 SATA ports with RAID 0,1 and 10
SAS (Serial Attached SCSI)
Realtek HD audio through an ALC880 chip
Headers for more USB, two FireWire and -- believe it or not -- a joystick port.