Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The ASUS Pro WS W790 ACE Is… Kind Of Weird”.
W790, why you got to be weird, and it is so dang weird, but we’re gon na dive in okay. The most critical thing you got to understand here is that there are 2000 series and 3000 Series xeons that fit in this socket. Big old socket right here is it horizontal or vertical? I think, but I’m not 100 positive, that portrait CPU orientation effectively designates this motherboard as designed for 2000 series CPUs and a landscape orientation. Cpu socket, such as on the w790 other motherboards from Asus uh, designated 3000 Series, Xeon CPU, CPU orientation for the same CPU socket as an indicator of things. That’S got to be weird. These uh two families Xeon are similar but they’re different 2000 series. Cpu support, 64-ish lanes and ddr5 registered ECC is four Channel, whereas the 3000 Series have 128 ish pcie lanes and eight ddr5 memory channels and that CPU orientation kind of tells you that well just so happens and there’s overclockable xeons in both the 2000 and 3000 Series. As well, which is the interesting bit overclockable Yeah, but again it’s sort of a little bit bananas. We got to dig in gee, that’s weird.
I mean all this power, the overclocks and everything else. This gives us a little bit of Hope for interesting stuff. The 2000 series xeons what this motherboard is meant for, was meant to be the return of high-end, desktop CPUs, and yet there’s not really a lot of coverage they launched with a whimper. Last month I mean all this power on this motherboard.
That does give us a lot of Hope. Doesn’T it I mean pcie, Gen, 5 and ddr5. The next clue for insanity is right here.
In plain sight, we have uh, you know some physical stuff. We can look at right off the bat. We see that there’s dual 8-pin CPU power, plus our 24 pin power, but wait is that another 24 pin power plus two additional eight pin at the top. That’S weird this motherboard can dual wheeled power supplies yeah you bet, and what okay well? What case you need for that? Well, the lean lean Dynamic 011 XL uh pull out some Drive Bays mount a second power supply, you’re good to go. Yeah pop those North American Breakers shut up loser we’re Computing Pi.
This is a ceb form factor motherboard, that’s 12. Inches by 10.5 inches or 30.5 centimeters by 26.67 centimeters as motherboards go. That’S actually not weird. The the weird isn’t always bad, but motherboard runs a lot of uh.
Well, I mean it just this motherboard just it runs contrary to what you’d expect. Okay, CPU power delivery is a 12 plus one plus one power delivery. Even with all of that – and I really didn’t want to push the CPU past – a thousand Watts, but supplemental CPU power, connectors and supplemental actually 24 pin connectors.
Well, there is actually another eight pin. Connector for more gpus, if you want to run more than one GPU, I highly recommend that 8-pin connector, and not only is it optional. You really only need that second power supply, if you’re going to overclock with the x-series xeons and all the xeons for this socket in the 2000 series support overclocking.
Some of them do four exactly so yeah. Let’S take a look at the memory slots on this LGA. 4677, eight memory channels right, nope, four memory channels in this configuration it has eight memory slots, but it’s four channel so two dims per Channel. This is ideal for our 2000 series, xeons and while Asus has more than a 2000 series xeons on their compatibility list. For this motherboard, I would strongly encourage you to check out asus’s compatibility list and only use CPUs explicitly on their compatibility list for this board and understand that some CPUs that you might be able to plug into this motherboard like if you plug a 3000 Series CPU Into this you’re not going to be able to use eight channel memory or all your pcie lanes for rear, i o we’ve got a 10 gig Marvel a two and a half gig Intel i225v bios flashback and CMOS reset great for enthusiasts update the boss without a Cpu we’re using a single type c port at the back, which is a two by two 10 gig connection: 20 gigabits, total and four 10 gigabit type, A ports. We also have eight more USB 2.0 ports, gee, that’s weird, eight USB 2 ports.
At the back I mean I have a lot of USB 2 peripherals. I mean I’d rather have that than nothing, but that’s a little weird there’s five audio jacks connected to our Realtek 1220a codec, plus an optical spdif out, there’s also two onboard m.2, which are Gen 4 Gen, 4 yeah gen. Four, that’s a little weird in the PCI five platform in it. Well, maybe I mean the Gen 5 storage is not it’s kind of lackluster, so maybe that’s not weird, but you do have five pcie5 x16 slots full x16 supporting the full x16 laser yeah, except for the bottom two, which can be x0 x16 or X8 X8. This is great because your GPU can hang off the bottom and not block any of the other four slots while being connected by 16 Lanes uh. It does block the Q code, readout though, which is maybe a little dumb, and then you can’t use the slot above it.
That’S not physically blocked, which is a little weird seems like a design oversight, but hey it’s not bad, and we have three three different slim SAS connections, which all do different things. The first one is a four pcie three lane connection, so you can run PCI three. The second one is pcie4 or SATA, depending on which cabling you choose and cabling can be a huge pain and the bottom one is pcie three or four, only there’s no SATA capability again, if you can run into pcie four speeds, you’re gon na need a redriver And the appropriate connections for the USB headers on this motherboard. You have two two Port, usb2 headers and a single 30 pin USB 5 gigabit header and a type c header that is capable of 2x 10 gig 20 gig total. Now there does seem to be Provisions for a thunderbolt header, but I saw no documentation about actually being able to use that anywhere I’ll have to revisit that in a future. Build video also on board is full ipmi remote control facilities, at least Provisions for them, but to actually turn that on and take advantage of it you’re going to have to use an add-in expansion card.
Nothing really weird about any of that and the pcie card may be, but not bad. Now this motherboard uses registered error. Correcting ddr5, unlike with ddr4 registered air, correcting ddr5, is physically incompatible with regular, normal ddr5.
That’S weird, and it’s also available in overclockable formats yeah. It kind of launched with a whimper, but you can get overclockable error, correcting register ddr5, that’s weird, but understand that this is really just a way to provide more voltage and frequency. It’S a little bit more doable on the platform and that’s the weird part. It’S not exactly an overclock, it’s been tested for instability, but it’s more of a beta testing new stuff in the ddr5 platform than really an overclock or really something out of specs. So that’s a little weird when we’re talking about having both error, correction and overclocking capabilities and it seems really kind of moronic on the surface. But then, when you dig under the hood, it’s well. The jet X standards for error, correcting registered ddr5, haven’t caught up with the reality yet, and the reality is that memory, vendors and motherboard makers are qualifying faster speeds than the jet X standard really supports, and so you’re able to use that on this motherboard, which you Definitely need to do if you are an Enthusiast, and this is a high-end desktop platform that you want to be able to overclock and do stuff with it’s a total of seven four pin fan headers, one of which is like the CPU combo. So you get a water pump, CPU fan so six seven, depending on how you count that seven, that you can count on so not bad and the Thunderbolt header is so strange. They took the time to put a tiny little sticker over the silk screen label.
On the circuit board, that’s weird, and then you notice this little header at the bottom. That looks kind of like it might be a thunderbolt header. Well, it turns out it’s not a thunderbolt header, it’s a v-rock header, but Asus put a sticker over it because probably v-rock’s not gon na be a Thing. Future versions of this board is probably not even going to populate that connector I mean it does only have two onboard m.2. It doesn’t come with a card to give you more m.2, that’s weird, so here’s where it gets really weird. This is actually a pretty solid board and it delivers a lot of really cool stuff, but it doesn’t outperform current generation threadripper Pro.
Let’S take a look at our Xeon support table a little closer and our 2000 series Xeon CPUs. The Intel recommended MSRP pricing on these CPUs is really extremely aggressive. You can get a 350 dollar CPU to light this platform and bring you ddr5 memory and storage. Now, that’s not an overclockable Xeon. It’S just a low core count. Xeon that’ll get you to the platform.
A 24 core CPU, on the other hand, is more threader for esque threader for light. If you will – and I would have bet that four channels of ddr5 would give an 8 channel threadripper pro on ddr4 a run for its money, but the reality is it. Doesn’T the performance from this – and I suspect this is why Intel hasn’t really seeded these or done anything with them has not been super impressive in the 2400 series xeons.
But that’s okay, if there’s competing platforms and the performance is close and you’ve got some options, just keep keeping the platform alive is good, and so this is high-end. Desktop and high-end. Desktop comes roaring back after x299 in a high-end socket. This is a represents a little bit of sea change from Intel think about it. We had the desktop processors in the past on the desktop chipset, and then we had x299, which was a slightly upgraded socket.
It was a sort of a modern version of one of their older Xeon sockets, like the the V3 V4. You know Broadwell type xeons, but at the same time, almost simultaneously Intel launched their 3647 Xeon socket, which is six memory channels, and everything else is that why Intel is a little gun shy about putting these systems into the hands of enthusiasts? It is a little weird. It’S kind of a lot weird. Actually, it’s sort of different than Intel’s past Behavior they’re, just sort of launching these into the channel oems are going to buy these there’s a lot of people who would never consider an amb system that will buy these just because of their own bias or anything else. The performance of the 2000 series xeons really honestly, isn’t bad. I am surprised that it doesn’t match older threadripper systems, given how good the golden Cove cores are, that we see in Alder Lake, in the slightly upgraded versions in Raptor Lake, even with an overclock on this platform. So I want to take a closer look at the 3000 Series: xeons, I’m still trying to get my hands on some more parts and some more configurations to do more thorough testing of the 2000 series xeons with error correcting registered ddr5. But mostly this has been an oem only event you’re going to have to buy a system from somebody.
Okay, let’s pick up a system from Falcon Northwest, that’s going to be in the next article. So if you want to see that and get subscribed and do some fun stuff and sort of compare the horizontal versus the vertical socket we’ll do it I’m Wendell this is level one I’m signing out. You can find me in the level one forums .