so today I'm going to be doing a quick unboxing of a very high-end board from
ASUS now the Ws series of boards is a little bit different from their extreme
Republic of Gamers branding so it's more of a workstation WS workstation oriented
board but what you will find here is actually I'll wait till we get inside
okay first of all let's tell you what it says on the front this is a core i7 or
Zeon board so it's an LGA 1366 board it
supports Tesla with Cuda of all things okay again a workstation feature it
supports SLI and Crossfire X so it's perfectly gaming ready all right it has
5,000 hour vrm blah blah blah 100%
Japanese made Solid capacitors it has SAS on board again a very workstation
oriented feature because you do need a SAS controller if you want to run, 1500
15,000 RPM drives for example 16 plus 2phase power for your CPU epu 6 engine
and seven Gen 2 PCI Express 16x slots
that is what I was going to give away which is the the seven in the name but I
guess they uh spoil the surprise on the front okay they have Express gate super
Hybrid engine okay what do we got inside first
we have support for three-way SLI and Crossfire best choice for intensive Cuda
parallel Computing so those seven PCI Express slots you could theoretically
install as many as seven single slot GTX 260s which do exist which would be a
folding machine on a board like this okay so 16 plus2 face power sass on
board okay this is all the same stuff from the front I'm not going to bother
to list it again this is the same stuff
from the front again thank you for that okay so let's have a look at the board
itself in terms of accessories first so we've got one of those fire wire and USB
2.0 combo back plates okay thank you for that then we have an SLI Bridge remember
you don't need a crossfire bridge to come with your motherboard because it should come with your video cards then
we have what is this I'm going to have to open this to find out what it is
because I haven't seen this before okay it's some kind of small PCB
okay oh cool all right neat okay so this
has the onboard power and reset switches as well as a um a diagnostic LED display
okay so I'm assuming that plugs in somewhere on the board and well I'll put
that aside for now so that hopefully I can show you later where it plugs into
then we have a three-way SLI Bridge hopefully you've seen one of those before you know what that looks like
okay SATA cables we
have six SATA cables three of which are right angle and three of which are
straight then we have one Molex to two SATA power
adapter then we have oh we've got a
couple of those neat um okay so these are these are kind of
these are SAS cables basically this is designed to be a more secure connector
I've seen people use them for SATA as well because remember a SAS cable is
pretty much the same thing as a SATA cable so it plugs right into both the
power and the data and then off the back of it you've got the power cable and
then a data cable so the whole thing is built into one unit supposedly makes it
a little bit harder to dislodge then you got the assus Q connector okay most
cases they come in blocks now anyway so it's not that big of a deal there's your
IO Shield here is your users manual
which is which is uncharacteristically thick you've also got your assus case
badge as well as your driver DVD don't use this download the latest off the
ASUS website all right here we've got a
lot of information in probably a few different languages no it's wow it's all
English check that out this is one thick
all English manual that's impressive okay let's get the board itself out ooh
this is very shiny I like it already all
right there you go so like all LGA 1366
boards this does support an LGA 136 CPU
you've got a Lo socket there in case anyone cares uh there was some rumors
going around about Lo sockets being Superior so ASUS has not skimped on the
socket right off the you've got support for triple Channel
DDR3 memory up to 24 gigs of memory serves then you have your power
connector in its ideal location along the right hand edge of the board now
these heat pipes I can't even begin to tell you exactly what they're cooling
but I'm going to go ahead and start taking some guesses uh first of all I'm
going to guess that this is cooling the power delivery mechanism for of the RAM
okay so that heat pipe is coming out of the chipset area where I'm assuming
they're using some some sort of PCI Bridge chips probably n f200 in order to
provide all of these PCI Express Lanes because the x58 chipset does not support
this many PCI Express Lanes natively okay so then moving on down the board
we've got six SATA connectors which are
powered from the x58 chipset as well as two SAS connectors which are powered off
a third party chipset so you can see they're labeled here say to 1 2 3 4 5 6
and SAS 1 and two then over here we have
our seven PCI Express connectors now I
haven't done my research ahead of time to be able to tell you which ones are
running at which speed let's see if they've been nice and labeled them for
me no they haven't so let's just assume they're all running at some kind of
mixture of 16x and 8x down here we've
got our USB headers as well as a fire wire header and front audio header then
we have the cooling solution for is that
even attached to anything oh yeah it is attached to something that's attached to
a Marvel chipset okay and then it comes all the way up here and we have more
cooling ra radiators for the voltage delivery system for the CPU then we have
our 8 Pin power connector up at the top of the board exactly where it belongs
top left and then let's move on to the aisle at the back so you got one of
those PS2 keyboard mouse combo ports I love those then you have one 2 3 4 5 six
USB 2.0 ports this is a bit of an older board so it doesn't have support for USB
3.0 you have both uh coaxial and optical
digital audio out 2 GB Lan 2 e sat which
is is really nice to see and 7.1 audio on the back you've got your standard LGA
1366 back plate and they've got the little stack cool 2 label here which is
basically allowing the PCB to dissipate
heat more effectively throughout Itself by using more copper so it's a way of
keeping things a little bit cooler so thank you for checking out my unboxing
of the ASUS p67 workstation
supercomputer motherboard