ASUS has launched their flagship Xeon workstation motherboard, the WS C621E SAGE. The board is designed solely for premium workstation users and supports dual Intel Xeon class processors to deliver the best professional level performance.
ASUS WS C621E SAGE Is The Flagship Dual Xeon Workstation Motherboard With Overclocking Support
There's a lot to talk about regarding this motherboard so let's start off with the CPU support. ASUS WS C621E SAGE has two LGA 3647 sockets which can support the new Intel Xeon Scalable family of processors. The motherboard is rated to support chips with up to 205W TDP which means that the motherboard can support all the way up to the flagship 28 core, 56 threaded Xeon Platinum 8180 processor. The Xeon scalable family should however not be mistaken with the Xeon W family that is the single socket optimized platform and comes in the LGA 2066 socket. Some general features of this motherboard as listed by ASUS include:
- Up to 4-Way NVIDIA SLI and AMD Crossfire X on demand
- Two-way Xeon CPU OC tuning for extreme performance
- Superb scalability and connectivity with onboard U.2, M.2, and USB 3.1 Type-C and Type-A
- Built with premium components for excellent power efficiency
- Easy Management and maintenance with ASUS Control Center (ACC) management software and USB BIOS Flashback
Moving forward, the motherboard has the two large LGA 3647 socket close to the 14 phase power supply (7 phases per CPU) and power is supplied through dual 8 pin connectors and a single 24 pin atx connector. The motherboard comes in the EEB form factor which is what all dual socket work-station boards come in. Both PWM areas are fitted with a decently sized aluminum heatsink that should be enough to keep the heat load to a minimal. The thing to note here is that ASUS is first to offer support for Intel Xeon Scalable Family processor overclocking. Their motherboard can clock up both chips housed in their respective sockets and includes a unique BIOS mechanism dedicated to boosting CPU performance.
Scattered around the socket are a total of 12 DDR4 DIMM slots. The CPUs support hexa channel memory so that is 1 DIMM per channel and 6 DIMMs per CPU. The memory slots can support up to 768 GB of RDIMM orLR-DIMM memory at speeds of 2666/2400 MHz. The motherboard is made to be ECC compliant which is a must to have on an workstation class motherboard. At the bottom of the socket is a large array of PCIe 3.0 x16 slots, a total of 7 of them which ASUS mentions can allow quad way NVIDIA and AMD graphics support. The memory slots deliver full x16 bandwidth on each slot.
In terms of storage, ASUS WS C621E SAGE offers 10 SATA III ports, four U.2 connectors (32 GB/s) and a single M.2 Socket 3 connector. There's also out of box support for NVMe PCIe SSD RAID 0 which is very impressive to hear. And don't you worry, ASUS has the VROC HW Key included in the package so you could unlock it without the need to purchase it from Intel. Other essential features are the Intel I210-AT, 2x Gigabit LAN controllers, Realtek S1220A 7.1-Channel audio and a multitude of USB 3.1 Gen 2/Gen 1 and USB 2.0 ports. There's no word on pricing or availability but we expect this motherboard to be out by the end of this month.
