Intel W890 Platform: ASUS Pro WS W890E-SAGE SE
Alongside the Xeon 658X processor we are reviewing today, Intel also sent over ASUS’s Pro WS W890E-SAGE SE motherboard to run the chip on. We will have a full review of the motherboard in the near future, but here is a quick rundown of that board.
One of two W890 boards being offered by ASUS, the W890E-SAGE SE is an EEB form factor workstation motherboard that exposes the full functionality of the Xeon 600 chips as well as the W890 chipset.
At the heart of the board are the LGA4710 socket and 8 DIMM slots. ASUS has gone for speed (and compactness) over capacity here, so the SAGE only supports 1DPC, but it means you can run all 8 DIMMs at full speed.
Otherwise, this is fairly typical for a Xeon workstation-level motherboard – and what you would expect for a motherboard with a price tag of $1200. ASUS has equipped the board with a comprehensive power delivery system not just to keep high-TDP chips powered, but also to handle the additional headroom required for overclocking. To that end the board is designed to take advantage of multiple power supplies, which can be necessary when heavily overclocking a Xeon CPU.
Next to memory bandwidth and the number of DIMMs, I/O bandwidth is the workstation Xeon’s other forte, and ASUS has decked out their motherboard to match. There are no fewer than 7 PCIe Gen5 x16 physical slots on the motherboard, and when used with a high-end Xeon chip, all but one of the slots run at x16 electrically, with only one slot running at x8. Otherwise, when paired with a low-end Xeon chip, only four of the PCIe slots are active, though each of them gets a full x16 connection.
The rest of the Xeon platform’s extensive I/O bandwidth is allocated to numerous internal and external expansion ports. The SAGE has four M.2 Gen5 x4 SSDs slots, four more SATA ports, and a pair of SlimSAS PCIe Gen4 x4 ports for larger SSDs. For that matter, when a high-end Xeon is installed, there is also a single MCIO connector, which carries a pair of PCIe Gen5 x4 connections for use with newer SSDs.
For external I/O, ASUS offers a pair of 40Gbps USB-C ports on the rear, as well as 6 10 Gbps USB-A ports. There are also internal headers for 20Gbps USB-C, 5Gbps USB-A, and 480Mbps USB-A ports. Finally, ASUS has equipped the SAGE with a pair of 10Gbps Ethernet jacks (Intel controllers, of course). A third 1Gbps Ethernet jack is on the system as well, as part of the board’s ASPEED AST2600 BCM.
