Not entirely unexpected, Asus will be launching a WS or Work Station version of its P9X79 motherboards which is simply called the P9X79WS and the first picture of the new board has now appeared online. This model shares some basic design elements with the Pro and Deluxe boards, but its pretty clear that its not intended for the same market.
The most obvious difference between the WS model and the consumer models is the slot configuration and the different heasink design. The P9X79WS has no less than six x16 PCI Express slots, although were not sure about the exact configuration here, but were guessing that the two blue slots are both actual x16 slots, with the black slots sharing bandwidth with the blue slots whereas the white slots are limited to four lanes or something similar. The board supports four-way SLI and CrossFireX according to the box, so were guessing were close to the actual slot configuration.
The board has the standard two SATA 6Gbps ports and four SATA 3Gbps ports provided by the chipset, as well as a pair of additional SATA 6Gbps ports courtesy of a Marvell chip. Theres also a pin header for two front USB 3.0 ports as well as two pin headers for four front USB 2.0 ports and one pin header each for a FireWire and serial port. The top right corner appears to have a Molex connector for additional power and theres also a POST 80 debug LED display and a power and reset button on the board. As we mentioned, the heatsinks are quite different, with a fairly peculiar design where the chipset heatsink is connected to a smaller heatsink fitted to what appears to be the power regulation for the memory by a heatpipe and this heatsink is then in turn connected via a second heatpipe to the MOSFET heatsink.
Around the back were looking at a pair of PS/2 ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, a FireWire port, a pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports of which at least one is connected to an Intel chip, 7.1-channel audio with optical S/PDIF out and a “Easy BIOS Flashback” button that judging by the box allows you to flash your BIOS from a USB dongle connected to the white USB port at the back of the board. No word on pricing, but at least we only have to wait until Monday to find out.
Source: Sweclockers (in Swedish)
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