Thursday, February 1st 2024
ASUS X690E Workstation Motherboard SKUs Listed in ECC Registration
Everyone's favorite PC hardware tipster, momomo_us, has spotted a bunch of interesting SKUs registrations—the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) portal is normally a good source of pre-release information. ASUS appears to have submitted (on January 30) a wide range of AMD and Intel chipsetted mainboards with the Customs Union of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Russia. The presence of Pro WS X690E-SAGE SE and Pro WS X690E-SAGE SE WIFI models attracted the most attention—fellow tipster HXL/@9550pro proposed that AMD's incoming X690 tech could be an X670 offshoot. They made reference to an AORUS BIOS screenshot showing a "common options" setting for AM4 generation X570 and X590 chipsets. The latter was a workstation solution that never reached finalized retail form.
Team Red has not officially announced the X690 chipset, so we know little else beyond this week's SKU filings. ASUS has produced a number of Pro Workstation Series for AMD platforms—the most recent examples being very fancy WRX90 and TRX50 motherboards for the mighty "Storm Peak" Threadripper 7000 processor family. VideoCardz reminds us that ASUS has not updated its Ryzen and Ryzen PRO "consumer and business" mainboard product range since the X570 days, so it is encouraging to see some potential new AM5 options on the horizon. On occasion, EEC SKU registrations do not lead to finalized retail products, so plans are subject to change.
Sources:
ECC Portal, momomo_us Tweet, 9550pro Tweet, TweakTown, VideoCardz
Team Red has not officially announced the X690 chipset, so we know little else beyond this week's SKU filings. ASUS has produced a number of Pro Workstation Series for AMD platforms—the most recent examples being very fancy WRX90 and TRX50 motherboards for the mighty "Storm Peak" Threadripper 7000 processor family. VideoCardz reminds us that ASUS has not updated its Ryzen and Ryzen PRO "consumer and business" mainboard product range since the X570 days, so it is encouraging to see some potential new AM5 options on the horizon. On occasion, EEC SKU registrations do not lead to finalized retail products, so plans are subject to change.
10 Comments on ASUS X690E Workstation Motherboard SKUs Listed in ECC Registration
As for example my old motherboards had 32 PCIE lanes (it was about 40x PCIE lanes in total), that were solely dedicated to PCI slots, and didnt even hamper either USB, SATA, etc, as the rest lanes were dedicated to these connectivity. And that was back in 2006/2008. Yes, I know, that the PCIE 2.0 was not as demanding as e.g PCIE 4.0, or 5.0. But still. And that was possible, because AMD was fighting their place in the chipset market, against intel, nVidia, VIA, SYS, etc. These AMD/ATi chipsets were best I've used, and the were cool enough, with only small Alu/Copper heatsinks.
Now... just gauging, as there's no chipset competition for AMD CPUs and platforms.
Sorry, just some random thoughts.
As about ECC. There I've watched some efforts to run ECC RAM on X470. But, I've not following past that, since there honestly were zero movement on from the board vendors end. It would be great though, since even 5750G can be paired with ECC, if just MB companies would put some efforts. But given how they were cutting BIOS features, due to their 16MB chips... This is even bigger concern, in the wake of recent merciless cutdowns of motherboard features.
It's shame, because this would be really marketing advantage over intel's products. Even ancient AMD/ATi chipsets used to support ECC out of the box. And this is double shame, because the consumer Ryzen silicon still can do it. However I'm somewhat doubt that even X690 will get ECC support, as AMD reserved that feature solely for their HEDT and EPYC.
Apart from that, if there's one thing I laud AMD for is that they've included support for ECC memory on practically all of their processor lines since the Athlon 64 (regular Athlons didn't have a built-in memory controller AFAIR) and, even better, that they haven't actively disabled it on their "consumer" SKUs (looking very stern at you here, Intel).
Zen 4 AM5 CPUs provide 28 PCIe 5.0 lanes, of which 16 are reserved for a PCIe slot, 2x 4 are reserved for M.2 slots, and the remaining 4 are reserved for the CPU <=> chipset link. "Reserved" means "AMD decrees that you must use these lanes for this purpose and if you do not they will not allow you to sell that motherboard". This means that it is impossible to provide dual x16 slots; while x16 + x8 slots could be provides, AMD literally doesn't allow this.
The Prom21 chipset provides at most 12 PCIe 4.0 lanes per chipset, which means there's no way for it to offer an x16 slot except by using two of them, and there's no reason to believe that AMD would ever implement the kind of lane aggregation that would be necessary to make that work. Due to being connected to the second chipset some of those lanes would implicitly suffer from higher latency, and overcoming that is not a trivial task. That is on top of the fact that each chipset has a mere x4 link to its brethren or the CPU, which imposes additional latency penalties if you are trying to request more than 4 lanes worth of data at once.
In short, AMD dictates exactly what the CPU PCIe lanes may or may not be used for in a way that precludes any novel use of them, and the chipset links are simply insufficient for driving anything more than an x4 device. You got one thing right though: this is worse than AM4, and that's entirely due to AMD intentionally stripping choice from consumers to force them to pony up the big bucks for HEDT to get that choice back. Because AMD is nobody's friend but its shareholders'.
With AM4 it was possible to get creative, it didn't happen often but for example this board was interesting www.asus.com/pt/motherboards-components/motherboards/workstation/pro-ws-x570-ace/
As for the lack of PCIe lanes, or I would say all IO in general (including memory), it is something that's certainly annoying. I've long suggested that the upper models of mainstream sockets should be moved/duplicated to the HEDT platforms, like in the old Sandy-Bridge-E days, to solve this issue where professionals currently have to choose between a fast and responsive system and lots of IO.
But, this doesn't disqualify a platform from being workstation grade, as the wast majority of "professional" users who needs reliability doesn't actually need all that IO (even though I would want it).
If I were to set up a bunch of workstations for either developers, graphics designers, 3D-modellers/CAD, video editing, etc. in a business, I would certainly go for a "workstation" grade motherboard to avoid hassle and downtime (for a business, time matters). And for the mentioned workloads, faster CPU cores is usually preferred over a high-core HEDT CPU with slower cores.