ASUS Launches the Pro WS W790 Series of Workstation Motherboards

Yes, you read that correctly, ASUS didn't launch just one, but two W790 based LGA-4677 motherboards today, namely the Pro WS W790-Sage SE and the Pro WS W790-Ace. The main difference here is that the Sage supports up to seven PCIe 5.0 x16 slots—one is a x8 slot electrically—and is designed for the Xeon W-3400 series, whereas the Ace supports five PCIe 5.0 x16 slots and is in turn designed for the Xeon W-2400 series. One downside of these boards is that they might not fit in a standard ATX case, as the Sage follows the SSI-EEB form factor and the Ace the SSI-CEB form factor, both of which are a fair bit wider than an ATX motherboard and with different mounting holes.

The Pro WS W790-ACE also sports eigh DDR5 DIMM slots that operate in quad-channel and supports up to 2 TB of RAM if ECC R-DIMMs are used. Furthermore, ASUS has kitted out the Ace with a pair of PCIe 4.0 M.2 slots, one 2280 and one 22110 slot, four SATA ports, three slim SAS ports, a Marvell 10 Gbps and an Intel 2.5 Gbps Ethernet interface, a single USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20 Gbps USB Type-C port around the back and an internal header for a second, case mounted port. Finally the board has four USB 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbps Type-A ports around the back and a header for a further two., as well as eight USB 2.0 ports around the back and audio courtesy of a Realtek S1220A based solution with optical S/PDIF out.
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