ASUS X99-E WS

Flying_Hellfish

Flying_Hellfish

Flying_Hellfish

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So, what's the deal/limitations with this board?

Other than not having fancy/bulky cover for the backplate area, and presumably no chance of a waterblock, it actually looks pretty decent? I'm thinking a gimped BIOS and piddly VRM cooling perhaps. But at $499 it should be pretty stable you'd have thought?

ASUS X99-E WS @ TechPowerUp

ASUS X99-E WS Motherboard Pictured and Priced
by Cristian_25H Thursday, August 28th 2014 22:03 Discuss (8 Comments)
Among ASUS' soon-to-be-released line of X99-based motherboards workstation users will be able to find one product made specifically for them, the X99-E WS. This new ATX board offers support for both Core i7 5xxx Series and Xeon E5 processors and includes no less than seven PCI-Express x16 slots for SLI or CrossFireX setups.

The X99-E WS also has eight DDR4 memory slots, one SATA Express connector, eight SATA 6.0 Gbps ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet, Crystal Sound 2 7.1-channel audio, ten USB 3.0 and two eSATA ports, a Q-Code logger button, 12K solid capacitors, and ProCool power connectors. ASUS' motherboard is said to have a MSRP of $519 but it can be found listed at $499.
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ASUS_X99_E_WS_01.jpg
 
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As I said in the other thread. I use a lot of the Asus WS boards and they certainly do not have a "gimped" bios. To be honest they have pretty much most of the features and settings that the ROG boards have.
 
Don't the WS boards usually just have better Xeon & ecc memory support as well as better pci support too?

iirc the x79 ws was one of the only boards capable of doing 16/16/16.

Certainly not crippled anyhow. A lovely looking board, 7 full pci lanes crammed into eatx, lovely :D
 
Simple differences are:

XEON support.
ECC and Reg memory, possibly multi ranked DIMMS.
High compatability with RAID and high speed NIC cards, server grade.
The BIOS is less frequently updated versus other boards so features/updates take a lot longer to appear.

I can't find the manual yet for the WS board.
 
They only support ECC up to the same level as the non ECC memory. So it only supports 64Gb. I have not noticed that there is less frequent BIOS releases but I tend to have stick to one.

It was the WS-E version of the X79 board that supported 16x16x16x16.
 
ZXSpectrum said:
As I said in the other thread. I use a lot of the Asus WS boards and they certainly do not have a "gimped" bios. To be honest they have pretty much most of the features and settings that the ROG boards have.
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That's interesting and good to hear (actually saw posts in the other thread after starting this one).

It looks like a good all round board then, less of the 'bling' as well which is a bonus IMO.
 

I think this is the board I want, looks sick just hope it has as good a clocking options as the ROG without the dodgy looks.
 
I like the idea of this board. Not sure where they get the extra lanes from to do 16x/16x/16x/16x from but I was disappointed to find out the Rampage V Extreme only does 16x/8x/8x (well and 8x/8x/8x/8x but that was expected).

Need to find somewhere that sells it now and see what the price is.
 
Correct me if I am wrong but I believe the extra lanes are due to the two PLX chips?
From what I have been reading though currently there is a limitation in games as to the maximum amount of lanes that can be activated even if 16/16/16/16 is supported for say computational work it would only run at 16/8/8/8 (or 8/8/8/8 I'm not sure) in games with 4 GPUs and a 40 lane cpu as the PLX chips add lag which you wouldn't want in gaming.

The full WS manual is up on the Asus site now if you go to the support page, will have a read through that.
 
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^JP^ said:
Correct me if I am wrong but I believe the extra lanes are due to the two PLX chips?
From what I have been reading though currently there is a limitation in games as to the maximum amount of lanes that can be activated even if 16/16/16/16 is supported for say computational work it would only run at 16/8/8/8 (or 8/8/8/8 I'm not sure) in games with 4 GPUs and a 40 lane cpu as the PLX chips add lag which you wouldn't want in gaming.

The full WS manual is up on the Asus site now if you go to the support page, will have a read through that.
Click to expand...

The lanes are multiplexed, think of it as a virtual 16x/16x/16x/16x, the GPU's will think they are running at full speed, the PLX chips handle the rest.
 
Maybe.. ;) But we buy a lot of workstation boards from Asus. It looks production sample but not boxed as such but the main bits are there. Board and I/O Shield.
 
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