More expansion slots than you'd know what to do with.
X58 boards have been a great thing for enthusiasts who want a huge amount of choice - after all, who doesn't enjoy being able to pick and choose between Crossfire or SLI?
We've had a look at quite a few boards so far, and the trend seems to be that there are three PCIe X16 slots, perhaps one PCIe X1 slot and two PCI slots, leaving you with the capability to run three graphics cards max, even if they are single slot.
But what if you want more? Well, ASUS have a new board called the P6T7 WS Supercomputer (the WS stands for WorkStation) that has seven PCIe X16 slots. Three of the seven run at only 8X electrical, but all of them are PCIe V2.0, and the amount of choice here is pretty insane.
Want to run yourself a nice gaming rig? Just chuck in a few graphics cards. Want yourself a massive server? Throw in RAID cards. Throw in sound cards, TV tuners and wireless cards - you've got seven slots here to play around with. Even a mix of Crossfire/SLI with a nice sound card and RAID card is great, and it really is quite freeing.
The P6T7 WS can do this thanks to the X58 chip onboard, and two NVIDIA N200 chips giving plenty of extra bandwidth (as well as more heat, but ASUS are on top of that). It's also got the usual X58 options, like six DDR3 slots and plenty of other expansion options, but there's also SAS here too!
If you've a burning need to get number crunching, this is pretty much the perfect board - load up seven graphics cards with a beefy enough power supply and airflow, and you've got yourself the best performance you could possibly get right now, especially with Core i7 there too.
We haven't got a local price here, but considering the Rampage II Extreme is about $650 we're expecting it around the $800-odd range.
Head over to Fudzilla for more, and see a pic of the board too.
Issue: 111 | April, 2010