ASUS launches motherboard with 7 PCI-e slots

During the CeBIT back in March, ASUS showed a special version of one of its X58 motherboards. This board -known as the P6T7 WS SuperComputer- has now officially been announced by the company on its website. The special motherboard has six DDR3 memory slots and is compatible with Intel's Core i7 processors.

The remarkable thing about this motherboard is the addition of two extra nVidia nForce 200 chips to generate more bandwidth for the seven graphics card slots. This makes it possible for a single PCI-Express 2.0 slot to have the full 16x lanes, while three more slots can be configured in a 16x or 8x configuration and the remaining three can be placed in an 8x configuration as well. The board supports both ATI's CrossfireX and nVidia's SLI technologies.

The ASUS P6T7 WS SuperComputer motherboard.

The board is predominantly designed for GPGPU calculations; it's an ideal option for Folding@home projects and other intensive scientific computing. By combining seven heavy-duty graphics cards, it should become possible to approach the calculative power of a super computer.

The motherboard is designed for workstations.

Apart from the added graphics card slots and GPGPU applications, the board has a 16+2 phase power design for respectively the processor and the memory, twelve USB ports, six SATA 3 GB/s connectors, two eSATA ports and another two SAS connectors. Also present are the conventional Gigabit Ethernet connectors and 8-channel audio. The motherboard comes budnled with a 'G.P. Diagnosis Card' which allows users to easily find out problems during the booting.

The motherboard will become available soon at a still undisclosed price.

Tags: cebit corei7 crossfire ddr3 esata gpgpu nforce sata sli usb x58

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