With Intel’s 10th-Generation processors heavy in their launch, vendors are also unveiling their new motherboards for these chips. One rolling out this week is the Asus Pro WS X299 Sage II, a powerful offering for workstation users, as spotted by TechPowerUp.
This board is a huge CEB-size board based on the X299 chipset, at the heart of which we find an LGA2066 CPU socket. Surrounding the socket are eight DDR4 RAM slots, which work together to offer quad-channel memory support with speeds of up to 4,266 MHz.
Following feedback on its original Pro WS X299 Sage motherboard, Asus has changed a few things for the Sage II variant. The differences mainly reside at the rear I/O, where the dual 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports have been swapped for 2.5 gigabit ports and heaps of USB ports have been added.
Other connectivity includes a sevenfold of PCIe x16 ports; although not all are able to run at the full 16 lanes. The black ports use eight lanes, and the gray ports can run at up to 16 lanes. The latter are linked to the CPU with a PLX PEX8747 chip to ensure all four ports can run at their full 16-lane bandwidth if no other PCIe slots are occupied.
Power comes from a 24-pin connector along with two eight-pin EPS connectors. Thanks to the plethora of PCIe ports, there's also a 6-pin PCIe power connector. Due to how busy the board is, the CMOS battery has been moved all the way up to the top right of the board, as there simply isn't space anywhere else.
For cooling, the chipset has a large heatsink, which is linked to two smaller heatsinks through a pair of heatpipes. The VRM circuitry is also cooled with a hefty heatpipe-fitted heatsink.
A pair of M.2 slots, three U.2 ports, a rear USB Type-C, port and a Crystal Sound 3 audio system wrap up the board.
For now, there is no word on pricing or availability, but we expect to learn more soon.
