Wednesday, March 4th 2009
Seven PCI-Express Slot X58 ASUS Motherboard Shown at CeBIT
Yes, you read the title correctly, on their stand at CeBIT, ASUS has a motherboard on show featuring seven full length PCI-Express slots. Four operate at full x16 speed, whilst the remaining three are at 8x speed. This has been achieved through the use of Intel's X58 chipset and the addition of two NVIDIA NF200 chips. Dubbed the P6T7 WS Supercomputer, it has been said to be the, "best choice for intensive parallel computing demand." Although no details yet on availability or pricing, the board is confirmed to support up to 24 GB RAM through six DDR3 slots, six SATA ports, two SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) and two eSATA ports and the usual 7.1 onboard sound and gigabit ethernet. The featured shot shows the board "naked" so to speak but due to this, you can see how ASUS have crammed the northbridge, southbridge and two NVIDIA chips into the bottom right corner of the board. This has given the space for the seven PCI-E slots, though it will require some sort of low profile cooling solution so as not to obstruct the installation of any graphics cards.
Sources:
TechConnect, Computerbase
80 Comments on Seven PCI-Express Slot X58 ASUS Motherboard Shown at CeBIT
Perfect for SLI/Crossfire PLUS RAID controller PLUS PCIeFLASH monster.
2x (2 slots) + 1 + 1 + 1 spare for audio or i/o of some kind = 7
I had three video cards, a NIC, and a sound card. Back then, onboard was s*** and cards were the only way to go (for an enthusiast).
Having 6 or 7 physical x16 slots = going back to being able to install whatever we want again. I know, that only represents so many people... but those people are grateful!
Though, 7 slots gives you 7 individual single slot cards, while you would really only need 4 to get 8 using the GTX295's. But flexibility is always nice.
This thing would be rocking with 7 9800GT's.
But then you have see that who will actualy get this? I mean, what will you be doing, running SLI and Crossfire at the same time? I think it will be a waste, and to expensive.
yes... i will have one of these.
my main concern is how the EFF are they going to cool the chipset with out being in the way of the Gpus?
Now, you could technically fit 7 HD 4870 X2's in there with water cooling, but I've heard that, sadly enough, ATI's folding isn't as efficient as Nvidia's folding. :(
on a more serious note, that does like it is dedicated to folders, no-one else is going to buy that for gaming.
7 slots ain't not enough slots for no man! Show me 8 slots .... then I might be impressed!
:toast:
8 dual-slots will fit comfortably on this board (for a 16 GPU Folding max out). Your SBC options are anything from a single P4 to dual quad-core Xeons. It would occupy that large slot on the edge.
not going to go into detail on how though.