Monday, January 11 2010

EVGA showed of its almost-ready dual LGA-1366 high-end workstation motherboard at the ongoing CES event. The motherboard pictured sports a component cooling covering all its vital areas except for one of the CPUs' VRM areas, it gives a fair idea about what the final product could look like. The board itself was detailed in earlier.

The chipset cooler design borrows heavily from single-slot graphics cards. A monolithic baseplate covers the northbridge Intel 5500(?), ICH10-class southbridge, and the two NVIDIA BR-03 bridge chips. The heatsink becomes taller over one of the CPU sockets' VRM area. Air is drawn in from the round intake, and pushed out near the expansion slots. the gaps between the expansion slots will do their part in directing the hot air away.






Monday, January 4 2010

The recently surfaced high-end dual socket LGA-1366 motherboard is pictured in full, without its cooling assembly. The picture reveals quite a bit about EVGA's new monstrosity. To begin with, the motherboard is neither ATX, nor EATX in the truest sense. Like the recently announced X58 Classified 4-way SLI which was based on the "XL-ATX" form-factor, this motherboard seems to be 13.58 inches (344.93 mm) long, and about as wide as EATX (330 mm, 13 inches), or maybe a little more.

Each LGA-1366 socket is wired to six DDR3 DIMM slots for triple-channel memory, and is powered by an 8-phase digital-PWM circuit. Each socket further has a 3-phase power circuit for its DIMM slots. The CPU VRM for each socket takes input from an 8-pin ATX, and what appears to be a 6-pin +12V (PCI-E?) connector. The motherboard further takes power from a 6-pin PCI-E power connector apart from the usual 24-pin ATX power connector. Some of these inputs may be redundant and needed only for additional electrical stability to support competitive overclocking.



At the heart of the board is what appears to be an Intel 5500 "Tylersburg" or Intel X58, paired with an Intel ICH10-class southbridge. All of its SATA 3 Gb/s ports are located next to it, while a Marvell-made SATA 6 Gb/s controller provides two additional ports. There are seven PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots in all, driven by four x16 links over two NVIDIA nForce 200 bridge chips. The exact lane distribution is not known. There seem to be two gigabit Ethernet controllers, 8-channel audio, eSATA, USB 3.0, and EV-Bot support. More about the board may surface during the CES event.

As a 3d software designer I can't begin to explain how happy I am to see EVGA doing this and will certainly be picking one up for my next build.  The fun of course will be finding a case that fits this setup nicely and also finding out how much memory it can actually hold (my current workstation at the office only holds 24gb).

LOL, there you go, dual Gulftowns with 96 gigs of memory!

"I'll be happy with 48gb ;) "   I would hope so,, lol

LoL!!!

UPDATED

burning_kittins

well this seems like the LGA 1366 board to end all boards... lol...

THE HOLY GRAIL

there is still Quad socket boards, 4 CPU sockets with a red/black color scheme, i am sure it would sell.

trs32505

I can see it now. Dual 5580s with 96gig os system mem. 4x GTX 285 Classified with Win 7 Ultimate benching Vantage, LinX, SuperPI. But still not able to run Crysis maxxed out settings.

LMAO!

chump7431 forget 3-4k for a pc, we are now talking 5-6 :-/

>.<

cercle
Until now , I haven ' t seen any EVGA motherboards ECC  compatible ! Should this one  be the first ?

Since the memory controller is now in the CPU, and all Xeons have ECC support, then this board would too. 
 

Moltenlava

burning_kittins
well this seems like the LGA 1366 board to end all boards... lol...
THE HOLY GRAIL

there is still Quad socket boards, 4 CPU sockets with a red/black color scheme, i am sure it would sell.

Oh but of course, by several orders of magitude less than this board.  Even the cheapest CPUs will be +$1k, and these have 4xQPI + 4x channel DDR3 each.  I mean, damn; though same logic, cheaper to get a regular board.  
 

burning_kittins
but a Quad socket board that suports 6 core CPUs with 12 threads each and 4  16x slots?!?! D:

I don't know about lanes, but this picture sure implies many slots (though mostly x8, the slots near CPU are actually for RAM cards capable of 32GB DDR3 each).  Upcoming Beckton 8-core flagship willi be going in that board, so 32-core-64-threads total.

 

A question about Dual socket, as you appear to more about this beast than I do, can you OC each chip independantly, or is your total OC limited by your slowest chip, since each chip is diferent and your OC seems to depend on the chip you get, how does haveing two chips play into this ? 

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=243356

 Check this out.

cercle
??? Not Sure ! Kingston , the memory maker , plus A.z.u.s , plus Gagabite .... , they all say no ... !? Many X58 motherboards can 't use  ECC !?

Like I said, ECC support will be linked to the CPU's memory controller, not the chipset.    If you found an X58 with official support for at least Xeon W3500 CPUs, then only with those CPUs will the board support ECC DDR3.  Boards supporting only Core i7 branded CPUs won't be ECC-able, so to speak.
 

cercle
will be better with a two 32Nanometer CPUs and about ECC memory? Is this possible with a two Xeon ?

mulitple Xeons with ECC support have existed for years, yes it is possible.
 

KMoore4318
can you OC each chip independantly, or is your total OC limited by your slowest chip, since each chip is diferent and your OC seems to depend on the chip you get, how does haveing two chips play into this ?

Even if you could have them run at separate speeds, it could cause problems (timing is one, countering the point for ECC RAM, etc).  The whole reason for multiple CPU is to take advantage of two equally performing CPUs, not two of varying performance.   For example, what are the benefits of running both GPUs in a GTX295 or HD5970 at different speeds (one bottlenecking the other)?  In my mind, why have the graphics card if it can't even run both cores equally especially when we can't swap out one of PCB's?  Sure with dual-CPU, one can be swapped, but it's a hassle.
 
Like cercle says, multi-CPU overclocking isn't common (mainly AMD Opterons with nForce professional chipsets), and usually both CPUs are running the same speed.  If one is of an inferior batch, yes, it will set the bar for both.  That's why dual-CPU overclocking is pain worse than single.

sylon

So who's going to be some of the first ones to jump on the first release of broken boards to support the guys who wait for the one's that won't be broken.?

What makes you think the first release will be broken? What makes you think the ;ater releases won't be broken?