The Asus ROG Dominus Extreme and Gigabyte C621 Aorus Xtreme are about to get some new company. Graphics card and motherboard manufacturer EVGA revealed to Gamer Nexus during a facility tour posted on YouTube recently the naked PCB for its upcoming LGA 3647 motherboard, tentatively called the SR-3 (Super Record 3) Dark.
Unlike Asus and Gigabyte's larger EEB form factor offerings, the EVGA SR-3 Dark motherboard sticks to the more common E-ATX standard. EVGA chose the form factor so the motherboard can fit easily into the majority of full tower cases. Nevertheless, the limited landscape led to a few compromises in terms of features. For starters, the EVGA SR-3 Dark is only equipped with six DDR4 memory slots, as opposed to the 12 slots found on the Asus and Gigabyte model.
The SR-3 Dark looks quite unique and doesn't follow the conventional motherboard design. EVGA rotated the LGA 3647 socket by 90 degrees, and the memory slots are on the top and bottom of the socket. The power delivery subsystem has been moved to the right side of the PCB, rather than its traditional position, the PCB's upper area. A combination of one 24-pin power connector and four 8-pin EPS power connectors can be seen right on the right edge of the motherboard. Therefore, it only requires one power supply.
Although EVGA didn't reveal the motherboard's power delivery subsystem, there seems to be space for 20 power phases on the PCB. This might sound underwhelming when compared to the 32-phase power delivery subsystems on the Asus ROG Dominus Extreme and Gigabyte C621 Aorus Xtreme; however, more doesn't always mean better. It's all about the design. It'll be interesting to see how far the SR-3 Dark can take Intel's latest unlocked 28-core Xeon W-3175X processor.
In terms of storage, the prototype PCB shows traces for six SATA III ports, which are probably connected directly to the Intel C621 chipset. There are also spaces for two U.2 ports in the same area. Apparently, EVGA plans to place the two M.2 ports on the left side of the motherboard. One is positioned vertically on the left of the expansion slots, and the other is sandwiched between the first and second PCIe 3.0 x16 slots. The SR-3 Dark seemingly features six PCIe 3.0 slots whereby four of them operate an x16, and the remaining two are wired as x8. The motherboard will also support 10G networking, which means it'll probably come with a 10-Gigabit Ethernet port.
EVGA didn't reveal the pricing for the SR-3 Dark motherboard, but the company expects to have a working product around the time of the Computex conference, which starts on May 31. We'll be at the show so will be sure to keep you posted.
