Thursday, August 29th 2024
ASRock Intros Xeon W-3500 and W-2500 series Support for its Intel W790 Motherboards
Leading global motherboard manufacturer, ASRock has announced that its W790 series workstation motherboards, including the W790 WS and W790 WS R2.0, now support the newly released Intel Xeon W-3500 series and Xeon W-2500 series processors. This enables consumers to experience the superior performance of the latest Intel Xeon series processors.
The ASRock W790 WS series workstation motherboards feature up to 2 TB DDR5 ECC RDIMM support, PCI-Express 5.0 expansion slots, USB4/Thunderbolt 4 and Dual 10 Gbps Ethernet. A flagship-class 14-layer PCB and 20+2 phase CPU VRM ensures ultimate performance and superb reliability, even when subjected to the most demanding sustained workloads.For more information on ASRock Intel W790 chipset motherboards, visit this page.
The ASRock W790 WS series workstation motherboards feature up to 2 TB DDR5 ECC RDIMM support, PCI-Express 5.0 expansion slots, USB4/Thunderbolt 4 and Dual 10 Gbps Ethernet. A flagship-class 14-layer PCB and 20+2 phase CPU VRM ensures ultimate performance and superb reliability, even when subjected to the most demanding sustained workloads.For more information on ASRock Intel W790 chipset motherboards, visit this page.
11 Comments on ASRock Intros Xeon W-3500 and W-2500 series Support for its Intel W790 Motherboards
Also board has 3x PCIe power inputs which will be bit for most PSUs.
There are other differences between those models like significantly reduced VRM heatsink area of the latter model.
Then, even more wasteful is the fact that 16 of those beautiful CPU PCIe 5.0 lanes are "wasted" by being tied to M.2 slots, slots which are sitting underneath any PCIe cards and will be terribly cooled and can't be used with M.2 22110 SSDs.
Motherboard vendors need to understand that pure PCIe slots are way more useful (and cheaper to make), as they can be used for anything. I.e. there are plenty of options to turn a PCIe 16x into four M.2 slots with cooling. If you were to buy something like this, you'd buy a powerful PSU.
Just for fun, using Seasonic's calculator, putting in a fairly "basic" workstation with a w5-2455X (12-core), RTX 4070 and some drives yields about ~650W of power draw, so the least people should buy is 850W (and probably Platinum rated too…). I wish they cut away all gimmicks.
Like the 10G Aquantia NIC, it's not like this is anywhere close to a Intel X550 or X710, which is what workstation users would want if they want 10G Ethernet.
And the WiFi? Come on, let's be serious.
Luckily they have introduced the slightly cost reduced WS 2.0 board which at the very least cut away one 10G NIC and the WiFi.
For those living in the US, this board can be bought for as little as $500 (compared to $900-1000 for comparable boards), which if anything is a very fair price (not as cheap in my area, but still cheaper than most others). That is, assuming the quality, reliability and long-term support of these are comparable to the likes of Asus and Supermicro.
Apparently it's impossible to design an ATX or EATX board with a LGA4677 socket and a PCIe slot in position #1, closest to the CPU. This is quite a constraint for those who need three 3-slot-wide or four 2-slot-wide GPUs.
Anyway Xeon W 2500/3500 is basically 2022 technology refreshed in 2024 at ludicrously high price compared to TR7xxx + TR9xxx on the horizon.
Shame on Intel :mad: for not giving users access to Gen5 Emerald Rapids which would at least be actual, big improvement given tripled cache subsystem and vastly better power efficiency with medium core counts for workstation segment.
Xeon W has a lower bar of entry, and you have to remember that Sapphire Rapids' cores are much faster. And if I'm not mistaken, the next gen Granite Rapids will be using Redwood Cove(used in Meteor Lake) rather than Lion Cove, right?
So, when the Xeon W version launch probably next year, it will still be a generation behind where it should be…