This is a badass motherboard if you ask me. The EVGA W555, which was shown off at CES 2010, is a dual-processor motherboard that is designed for overclocking unlike most workstation motherboards. The board is larger than the E-ATX standard meaning that you may not be able to fit it in your standard case, but you should expect that when it has two CPU sockets on the one board.
On the board are two LGA 1366 sockets, mainly used for Intel’s upper-end Core i7 range of processors. However, you can’t just chuck in any old Core i7 CPU in this board because they lack a pair of QPI links, instead you’ll need to grab a processor from the Xeon W5000 series which has that pair of QPI links to talk to the northbridge and the other processor at the same time. Unfortunately these Xeons are much more expensive than the standard Core i7s thanks to them being more suited for the workstation computer.
For each processor socket, there are six DDR3 sockets for your favourite triple-channel DDR3 RAM, totalling 12 DIMM sockets overall. It is advised that you put in the more expensive, but less error prone ECC registered DDR3 for the best stability, but if you’re looking to overclock then standard unbuffered DDR3 will do the job just fine.
Another big feature of this motherboard are the seven 16x PCIe 2.0 slots that are controlled by two nForce 200 chipsets and one Intel 5520. The rig supports both ATI’s CrossFire technology and Nvidia’s SLI, however unless you’re a super software hacker we don’t see these seven slots being used together for gaming; maybe four GPUs, but not seven. Bit-tech suggests a better use for all the slots would be Folding@home. You’d also need to choose your coolers carefully because there is only single-slot room on the board.
Other features on the W555 include eight SATA ports (six 3Gb/s ports and two 6Gb/s), a single IDE port and a ton of power ports to power the two processors and seven graphics cards. This board is definitely a beast, so hopefully we can get some performance benchmarks on this board in the not too distant future.
interesting post. I hope you continue writing such interesting articles