Asus Shows Off Dual Socket 1366 Motherboard

[Guest]

While at CeBIT in Germany, Asus unveiled its new LGA1366-based dual socket motherboard.

Asus Shows Off Dual Socket 1366 Motherboard : Read more

 

[Guest]

How do I keep this thing cool? This looks like generating a lot of heat!

 

[AndyYankee17]

raid software included on the board? don't you mean raid hardware? for anybody that uses raid that's a big difference

 

[Guest]

software raid emulation....

 

[ravenware]

Be interesting to see how it performs in games and other apps, maybe games have evolved?

The Skull trail and quadFX setups from the past were not very impressive.

 

[AndyYankee17]

wow, just realized this, 16 virtual CPUs, that keep rendering and encoding apps happy, albeit for a very time lol

 

[Gazz]

But you still only have 6 ram slots
What happened to the 8 or 12 you have two cpu's you should have doubble the ram slots only half baked if you ask me

 

[dconnors]

[citation][nom]Gazz[/nom]But you still only have 6 ram slotsWhat happened to the 8 or 12 you have two cpu's you should have doubble the ram slots only half baked if you ask me[/citation]

My bet is that they went with six RAM slots due to space constraints. There isn't exactly a lot open real estate on that board. Besides, 24 GB over six slots is more than enough for anything, as evidenced by our VM story yesterday: http://www.tomshardware.com/news/kingston-core-i7-crysis,7194.html

-Devin

 

[Pei-chen]

At least it will be cheaper than the $16,000 AMD rendering machine featured recently. I bet it is cooler too.

 

[eddieroolz]

The lack of a second PCIe hurts it as a gaming platform though..

 

[AndyYankee17]

[citation][nom]eddieroolz[/nom]The lack of a second PCIe hurts it as a gaming platform though..[/citation]
makes it nice for 3d animation as those cards (fireGL, and the nvidea equivalent, forget what it's called) don't used sli/crossfire. meaning you can use the other slots for raid controller cards and other workstation type things

 

[EQPlayer]

Actually nVidia workstation cards can use SLI.

 

[pocketdrummer]

Why is it cost so much more money to add a second CPU socket to the board? I would see many more people interested in this if the performance advantage actually reflected the cost.

 

[thejerk]

the performance advantage is handicapped less by diminishing returns and more by apps which aren't programmed to be multi-threaded.

factor in the cost of r&d spread out over fewer units sold, and you've got yourself a bigger price tag.

 

[WINTERLORD]

prolly not much R&D to it. looks like a basic server board with 2x 1366 sockets stuck on it to boost asus stock in a time of depression

 

[grieve]

If this board is only $100 more then the normal 1366 boards I would get it for sure… the i7 920 itself is not too expensive…. Be awesome to have 8 cores!

I do suspect overclocking heat would be an issue as it would be difficult to fit two aftermarket heatsinks … Watercooling I guess.

All this sounds rather pricey, but damn it be sweet if ya had the cash!

 

[Shadow703793]

[citation][nom]winterlord[/nom]prolly not much R&D to it. looks like a basic server board with 2x 1366 sockets stuck on it to boost asus stock in a time of depression[/citation]
You need to realize this is a new socket/architecture so quite a bit of money must have been spent on the R&D.

 

[hairycat101]

[citation][nom]Shadow703793[/nom]You need to realize this is a new socket/architecture so quite a bit of money must have been spent on the R&D.[/citation]
Shadow, please don't assume that anyone posting here has applied any reasoned thought to their posts. I know I don't.

 

[curnel_D]

[citation][nom]hairycat101[/nom]Shadow, please don't assume that anyone posting here has applied any reasoned thought to their posts. I know I don't.[/citation]
Lol, I guess that sets shadow appart as one of the good guys on this forum.

 

[Guest]

Actually if anyone care to really look the picture closely, that one memory slot next to the PCIe-16 is a bit too close to comfort to me.

Also after I saw the other boards in the family, I kinda felt that Asus had not put much effort into the design of this board. I mean if they basically just cut down the memory slot and by doing so reduce the overall footprint of the board.

Personally I would rather see they drop that hardware (RAID?) controller that add those extra SATA ports on the bottom left, and instead use that spot for the SATA ports provided by the chipset, and since from the looks of things they have dropped both floppy and IDE connector, they can move the chipset (assuming the chipset is indeed the one that is covered by that huge heatsink) further away, and thus providing more space a second (or even third) PCIe-16 as well as moving the first PCIe-16 further away from that memory slot.

Honestly even if this is somewhat a breakthrough, it's not really a very well designed board in my opinion. Not nearly close to what Supermicro has done with X7DCA-L, grated that's still use the older Core based Xeons but you get the idea.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

Cool ! 14 sata ports, and possibly a version with floppy connector available too .... too bad it's asus .... I imagine if it'd been a quality brand board, it'd be worth the investment. If it supports crossfire at least.

What are the lower two slots - below the last pcie slot?

 

[neiroatopelcc]

[citation][nom]toby_w[/nom]Honestly even if this is somewhat a breakthrough, it's not really a very well designed board in my opinion. [/citation]

Forgot to quote!

Ofc board design isn't brilliant. It's asus. The only thing worse than their homepage is their board design. But at least their boards usually work.

 

[Dmerc]

I currently have a i7 920 CPU. Did some of my own tests like to see how much cpu usage apps uses and how many of the cores are been used. Far Cry 2 peaked at about 30 % cpu usage. The software is holding the hardware back and that will always be the case. \r\nThis will be useless for playing games unless it is been used to hosted 4 or 5 game servers.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

I think it's just a matter of software developers adapting really.
I see the same problem on my system. Supreme Commander FA starts lagging on big maps with enough AI's and mods after about 45 minutes - but my taskmanager only shows approximedly 60% cpu utilization. I tried clocking my 4870 down to 500/500 and it didn't make any significant impact on the behavour, so it's definetly a cpu limitation - but simply so because the software appearently doesn't use both cores properly. I assume it has to do with the detail that most graphics engines can't split up the rendering to run on multiple cores.

 

[Dmerc]

Neiroatopelcc

Had the same problem with Supreme Commander when played over a lan. 4 Human vs 4 pcs. The problem has to do with the AI, there is a bug in it.
Was running on a 2.4GHZ quad core with 4 GB ram.