Created by a design team led by Peter 'Shamino' Tan, the W555 was first unveiled at the CES show a couple of weeks ago.
a closer look at how this monster motherboard is shaping up.
As you can see, the W555 isn't exactly small. As we haven't had a chance to play with a board yet, the exact dimensions are unknown, but EVGA has confirmed that it is larger than either the E-ATX or SSI standards. Then again, any motherboard with two LGA1366 processor sockets, 12 DDR3 DIMM slots and seven expansion card slots isn't ever going to be small.
As several eagle-eyed readers already spotted, the W555 has two LGA1366 processor sockets, however, that doesn't mean you'll be able to chuck in a pair of Core i7s and start overclocking. This is because Core i7s only have a single QPI link, which is used to talk to the motherboard X58 chipset. To run a pair of processors in SMP, you'll need a pair of Xeon W5000-series CPUs, each of which has a pair of QPI links, one to talk to the motherboard chipset, and one to talk to the other CPU.
The good news is that there is a whole range of Xeon W5000-series CPUs to choose from, but the bad news is that they're all considerably more expensive than the equivalent-frequency Core i7. That said, the prospect of being able to overclock a pair of 8-thread CPUs (four physical cores, four logical cores) is more than a little exciting for performance enthusiasts. What's more, you should be able to drop in a pair of Xeon-branded 12-thread Gulftown cored CPUs when they are launched later this year; that's 24 threads from one box if you're salivating so much you can't read your monitor anymore.
Each CPU socket is provided with its own bank of 6 DIMM sockets, just crying out for some high-speed triple channel DDR3. Generally speaking, Xeon 5500-systems are equipped with ECC registered DDR3, which although far less prone to errors than standard unbuffered DDR3, is a lot more expensive and is only available up to PC3-10600, i.e. 1,333MHz. However, the memory controller in the CPUs can support standard unbuffered DDR3 - something you'll almost certainly need to use for big overclocks.
we know that the seven 16x PCI-E 2.0 slots that take up nearly half of the surface area are powered by a combination of the Intel 5520 chipset and two nForce 200 controllers hidden underneath the massive black heatsink/fan.
Apparently the lanes are configured so that slots 1, 3, 5 and 7 each provide the full 16 lanes, or alternatively the first six slots each have 8 lanes and slot 7 has 16 lanes.
A side effect of using the nForce 200 controllers is that, unlike traditional Xeon workstation/server motherboards, the W555 will also be certified for both CrossFire and SLI.
However, given the dire state of both ATI and Nvidia's quad-GPU drivers, we really can't see much use for this capability, unless you buy a W555 just to try and get the fastest 3DMark score in the world. A far better use for the W555 would be as an all-in-one folding farm, running a combination of the bigadv clients on the CPUs in Linux and several GPU clients on whatever graphics cards you have to hand. This would yield a titanic number of points per day, as Folding@home, unlike CrossFire and SLI, scales efficiently across multiple GPUs.
We can also see that the First Look: EVGA W555 dual-Xeon motherboard Up close and personalW555 is equiped with eight SATA ports, allegedly six running at 3Gb/sec and the two red ports at 6GB/sec. Unfortunately, at this stage we don't which SATA controllers EVGA is planning on using on the final production model.
The real curiosity though is the IDE port lurking at the edge of the PCB. While your first reaction might be 'what on earth is an IDE port doing a dual-processor/multi-GPU motherboard launching in 2010?' it's not a completely daft choice.
This is because some extreme overclockers still favour IDE hard drives over SATA, as many benchmarks aren't affected by the speed of the drive, and IDE controllers are less sensitive to big overclocks than SATA controllers.
Those living in the real world will still want to stick on a SATA hard disk or SSD however.
With so many PCI-E slots on-board, EVGA has clearly put some thought into how to provide sufficient power to so many graphics cards.
First Look: EVGA W555 dual-Xeon motherboard Up close and personal
Thus, in addition to the 24-pin ATX and two 8-pin EPS12V power sockets dotted around the PCB, the W555 also sports three 6-pin PCI-E power sockets. This is a far better choice than sticking a load of Molex connectors on, like early multi-GPU motherboards had.
However, we're not quite sure how strictly necessary all this effort is. This because one of our folding rigs has six GeForce 9600 GTs and an overclocked Core i7-920 and has been happily running 24/7 at full load for the last six months without a hitch. There's also a question of which PSU could possibly power such a combination, or it'll take jump-starting a second alongside to provide the necessary connectors.
That's about all we can say about the EVGA W555 for now.
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