Gigabyte is preparing its C621 Aorus Xtreme motherboard to house Intel's overclockable 28-core Xeon W-3175X processor. The Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer showed off the C621 Aorus Xtreme, among other products, at an event in Beijing.
The Gigabyte C621 Aorus Xtreme, like other motherboards in this segment (such as the Asus Dominus Extreme), is based around Intel's C621 chipset and respects the EEB form factor. The motherboard sports a gargantuan 32-phase power delivery subsystem to squeeze every megahertz out of the Xeon W-3175X. In fact, Gigabyte had a live demo with the processor running at 5GHz across all 28 cores with a liquid chiller.
The motherboard draws power from two 24-pin power connectors and four 8-pin EPS connectors. It features an LGA 3647 socket that's sandwiched between 12 DDR4 memory slots that accommodate an amazing amount of memory, such as G.Skill's and Corsair's 192GB hexa-channel DDR4 memory kits.
In terms of storage options, the Gigabyte C621 Aorus Xtreme comes equipped with eight SATA III ports and one U.2 port (PCIe 3.0 x4). Two of the eight SATA III ports support SATA DOM (Disk on Module) for embedded system storage. The motherboard doesn't seem to have any M.2 ports.
The Gigabyte C621 Aorus Xtreme has up to seven PCIe 3.0 x16 expansion slots flaunting Gigabyte's Ultra Durable design and PCIe Armor. The motherboard supports multi-GPU configurations (up to four graphics cards in an Nvidia SLI or AMD CrossFireX arrangement). A pair of 6-pin PCIe power connectors are present to provide extra power when needed.
The Gigabyte C621 Aorus Xtreme is expected to have dual Ethernet LAN ports. One is based on Intel's I210-AT controller, and the other hails from the I219-LM controller. Gigabyte built the audio solution around the Realtek ALC1220-VB audio codec and incorporates Hi-Fi grade WIMA capacitors. The motherboard also supports Intel's Thunderbolt 3.
Gigabyte didn't reveal the pricing or availability for the C621 Aorus Xtreme. However, the Xeon W-3175X itself costs $2,979 and rival solutions like the Asus Dominus Extreme has a whopping $1,800 price tag. We expect the C621 Aorus Xtreme to command a similar premium.
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Zhiye Liu is a news editor, memory reviewer, and SSD tester at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.