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

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

software raid emulation....

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.

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

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

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/k [...] ,7194.html

-Devin

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

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

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

Actually nVidia workstation cards can use SLI.

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.

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.

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

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!

You need to realize this is a new socket/architecture so quite a bit of money must have been spent on the R&D.

Shadow, please don't assume that anyone posting here has applied any reasoned thought to their posts. I know I don't.

Lol, I guess that sets shadow appart as one of the good guys on this forum.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well we were playing 4 people on lan vs 3 AI's (2 alx turtles and 2 ai tech) on a map with no more lagging than in single player. And one of the systems even ran a german copy of the retail game, while the other 3 ran english with no-cd cracks. So it definetly isn't a problem with the game engine, but something with the scripts or handling of the engine parts. But the overall verdict is, that software developers aren't quite there yet. It's not hardware limited except for the fact that scaling up mhz moves the barrier until the graphics card is satiated.

I hope the next board comes with more ram options and 8 places to put high graphics cards. like come on at least 2... maybe 4. i am just wondering if they will have any bottle neck issues. Be interesting to test.

Well there's an obvious one for 8 places to put cards at least. If they want to conform to the atx standard, they've only got 7 slot positions available. So at most they can supply room for 7 single slot cards. And at present there's no chipset available with so many pcie pathways to do it properly. They'd have to limit the slots to x4 or something to not run out. And run everything they can on legacy pci

I am very intrigued to see how this will turn out. I am not too worried by only x16 slot as there isn't a huge performance gain to have SLI/Crossfire as games will still often hit similar minimum framerates. But that may also be an issue with the CPU or the chipset.

I know this will be expensive though cause I don't see a very large market for this. Very few can afford to build a single processor i7 let alone a dual.

LOL @ Asus bashers (the only manufacturer that hasn't shipped out a board that needed to be flashed in order to POST)

LOL @ Overclockers (I'm fairly certain this would provide enough power to run $whatever)

LOL @ myself (for bothering to comment on this thread)

Everyone makes mistakes - includnig asus. Asus is the only company I know of who consistently aim at it though. ECS boards just don't work properly because they aren't engineered properly. But I believe Asus actively engineer their boards to be sub par. The intentionally make the layout as complicated as they can, so people remember they have asus every time they have to find a longer cable for this or that, or have to return a piece of hardware because there's a cap or heatsink blocking an expansion port, or that they intentionally make sure a piece of onboard electronics can't be turned off in order to hamper overclocking.

Asus is fine for housewife use. It has all the features needed. But it's no good for people like me who expect everything to work at the same time, and without having to wait days for a download from the homepage to work.

ps. and my opinion on asus has been the same for over 10 years, and I doubt it'll chance, cause they simply don't want to provide quality that works.

Hi,

Sorry for the ignorant question, can this motherboard take two i7 920?

Lawrence