ASUS introduced two W790 motherboards for the new generation of Intel Xeon processors, announced yesterday by our colleagues at MCPRO.

The new Intel Xeons are intended for motorization professional workstation desktop and hit the market in two series, W-2400 and W-3400. Building on the same foundation as the Sapphire Rapids for servers and data centers, the new CPUs are built on the Intel 7 (10nm Enhanced SuperFin) node and retain the design of multi-chip modules with interconnected blocks.

ASUS W790 motherboards

If you need to set up a workstation, pay attention to the new Intel platform, as it covers all needs, including basic workstations for content creation, development or editing of photos, video or audio, with the basic versions of the platform being equivalent. or cheaper than the CPUs we use in general computing or gaming machines.

ASUS was one of the first manufacturers to introduce motherboards to support the new Xeons, with two different models for each of its lines: For WS W790-Sage SE and For WS W790-Ace. Both use the LGA-4677 socket and the W790 chipset.

‘Ace’ version It is designed for basic workstations and is ideal for mounting Intel W-2400 processors. It has five PCIe 5.0 x16 slots and eight DDR5 memory slots that work in quad-channel mode and support capacities up to 2 TB.

It offers two M.2 PCIe 4.0 slots for connecting two SSD drives, plus four SATA ports and three SAS ports to cover any internal storage needs. It has two Ethernet LAN ports, Marvell 10 Gbps and Intel 2.5 Gbps. The board has the usual USB (version 3.2 Gen2) and a Realtek S1220A chip for the audio section.

‘Sage’ version it is designed for high-end for use with Intel Xeon W-3400. It includes more PCIe 5.0 slots than the previous one (seven x16) and the same slots for RAM memory, 8 four-channel DIM slots and a capacity of up to 2 TB.

It includes three M.2 connectors for SSD-based storage, two of them PCIe Gen5. It supports 8 SATA and 2 SAS ports and includes two 10Gbps Ethernet ports with Intel hardware, plenty of USB ports, as well as an additional M.2 connector for the optional Wi-Fi 6E wireless module. ASUS has added an Aspeed AST2600 remote management controller with its own dedicated VGA and Ethernet port.

No price has been given for the new ASUS W790 motherboards that we expect to be available from the month of March when the new Intel processors hit the retail channel. Very interesting for building professional workstations from the very basics, with models like the Intel Xeon w3-2423, which has a retail price of $359 and is ideal for entry into workstations.