Monday, July 24th 2023
ASUS Sneaks Out Intel W680 Based mATX Motherboard for LGA-1700 Workstations
For those looking to build something more professional than your average run of the mill PC, ASUS new Pro WS W680M-ACE SE motherboard might be the thing you've been looking for. The Intel W680 chipset based board sports a mATX form factor and packs in a range of rather unusual features that you more often would find on a board from Supermicro or Tyan than ASUS. One such feature is onboard BMC remote management via an ASpeed AST2600 SoC which features a pair of Arm Cortex A7 cores and a Cortex M3, as well as a dedicated 2D graphics chip. The board also sports a SlimSAS port which supports either four SATA drives or a single PCIe 4.0 x4 storage device, although ASUS doesn't support any cables in the box for the port.
As this is a workstation motherboard, it obviously supports ECC memory and in this case we're talking DDR5 with full transactional ECC support, rather than the on-die ECC that all DDR5 features. Other more common motherboard features include a pair of PCIe 4.0 x4 NMVe M.2 slots, a single PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, a PCIe 4.0 x4 slot and a PCIe 3.0 x1 slot. The board also has a pair of 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port and a third 1 Gbps Ethernet port which is connected the AST2600, a 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, as well as a DisplayPort and HDMI port, plus a VGA port which again is connected to the AST2600. ASUS promises 24/7 reliability at ambient temperatures of up to 45 degrees C and a relative humidity of up to 80 percent. The board also comes with ASUS' Control Center Express, which is ASUS' IT management software. No word on pricing, but the ATX sized version retails for around US$330, suggesting that the mATX version should be somewhat cheaper.
Sources:
ASUS, via @momomo_us on Twitter
As this is a workstation motherboard, it obviously supports ECC memory and in this case we're talking DDR5 with full transactional ECC support, rather than the on-die ECC that all DDR5 features. Other more common motherboard features include a pair of PCIe 4.0 x4 NMVe M.2 slots, a single PCIe 5.0 x16 slot, a PCIe 4.0 x4 slot and a PCIe 3.0 x1 slot. The board also has a pair of 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port and a third 1 Gbps Ethernet port which is connected the AST2600, a 10 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, as well as a DisplayPort and HDMI port, plus a VGA port which again is connected to the AST2600. ASUS promises 24/7 reliability at ambient temperatures of up to 45 degrees C and a relative humidity of up to 80 percent. The board also comes with ASUS' Control Center Express, which is ASUS' IT management software. No word on pricing, but the ATX sized version retails for around US$330, suggesting that the mATX version should be somewhat cheaper.
13 Comments on ASUS Sneaks Out Intel W680 Based mATX Motherboard for LGA-1700 Workstations
- All actual workstation GPUs are dual slot so it's not really a problem unless you're trying to use a full sized gaming GPU.
- I agree they should have integrated 10gb on the MATX model since there should be room by the BMC and it has the lanes available.
- I don't think it'll be too big of a problem unless you're trying to use a giant air cooler. At least there's a good reason why they did it and it's to fit the BMC in MATX whereas Gigabyte did it on their ATX board.
- I'm not sure why Asus uses SlimSAS and I would love to know why they do as they seem to be the only ones.
- This is another area where they should have changed from the ATX model and added in another 4 SATA ports since they're not using the PCIe lanes.
- It's going to be the i226 (I have the regular ATX model).
I think a lot of the more practical shortcomings are probably due to savings on the manufacturing side sadly. That being said I gotta believe the market for MATX on the workstation side is pretty small so it's possible these won't really matter.www.asus.com/us/motherboards-components/motherboards/workstation/pro-ws-w680m-ace-se/techspec/
I see the valid points in everyone's thoughts.
The only thing I would have liked to see is 2 - 5.0 X 16 PCI at full loads. I am not sure why brands do not offer Intel i or AMD motherboards with Dual PCI slots with full load.
Does anyone know if this will work with the LGA1700 for the 14th Gen Processors?
Also, it would be nice to see the Intel i series of processors supporting ECC-registered RAM. That could have been a strong plus. Especially when dealing with a workstation board.
I haven't come across any regular Intel or AMD motherboards that have PCIe 5.0 x 16 slots. If you use more than one PCIe slot, both slots will operate at 5.0 x 8.
I'm curious as to why a "workstation" board like this doesn't allow for full ECC-Registered memory. After researching online, I couldn't find any 48GB RAM with ECC support. Everything I found only went up to 32GB of RAM per stick.
Thanks.
Thank you so much!