Proposed X99 ASUS Rampage V Gene specs

[vladnik]

First off: This is by no means anything official, confirmed or otherwise true. I'm just fantasising about what MY personal perfect Rampage V Gene would be like.

Intel X99 Express Chipset specifications can be found here (bottom half of page). I'm not sure if these are 100% legit, though.

I'm just gonna put this here and share my excitement about the new X99 chipset. I'm planning to build a SFF workstation later this year. Below you find my proposed specs for a Rampage V Gene.

CPU: Socket 2011-3 Haswel-E obviously. Supporting upcoming Xeons (Haswel-EP) would also be nice, but not mandatory in my book

Chipset: Intel X99 Express Chipset (duh)

Memory: 4 DIMM slots, 2 on either CPU side, max. 32GB DDR4 2800(?)

Power Delivery System: 8+2 phase CPU power, 2+2 phase memory power

Expansion Slots: (from top to bottom) PCIe 3.0 x16 (wired x16), PCIe 2.0 x2 (from chipset, shared with M.2/SATA-Express), PCIe 3.0 x16 (wired x8), PCIe 3.0 x16 (wired x16), PCIe 2.0 x2 (from chipset, shared with M.2/SATA-Express)

Multi-GPU-Support: Nvidia 2-way SLI and 4-way SLI (with dual GPUs), AMD Crossfire and Quadfire (with dual GPUs)

Storage: 2x M.2 slot (PCIe 2.0 x4, shared from chipset, support for M-key 2240, 2260 and 2280), 2x SATA-Express (PCIe 2.0 x2, shared from chipset), 4x SATA 3.0 6Gb/s, no additional controller

Network: 1x Intel LAN with all the ROG features. Possibly Wifi 802.11ac and bluetooth, but not mandatory in my book

Audio: SupremeFX technology (Realtek 1150 or better)

USB: 1x USB 3.0 internal header (equals 2 ports, from chipset), 2x USB 2.0 internal header (equals four ports, from chipset), 4x USB 3.0 rear I/O ports (from chipset), 4x USB 2.0 rear I/O ports (from chipset), no additional controllers

Special features: Dual-BIOS, USB BIOS Flashback, Power/Reset/ClearCMOS/MemOK! buttons, POST code readout, ASUS Q-LED

Rear I/O panel: 1x PS/2 combo port, 2x USB 2.0 ports // ClearCMOS and ROG Connect button // 4x USB 3.0 ports // 2x eSATA 3.0 6Gb/s ports, 2x USB 2.0 ports // 1x LAN port, 1x optical S/PDIF port// 6x Audio jacks

I would love to see high memory clocks supported, but given that we know very little about DDR4 as of now, we'll have to wait and see.
The 5-slot PCIe layout would be ideal in order to be able to put an additional card between two GPUs. But I guess the second x16 slot and the x8 slot could be swapped for better case compatibility. The PCIe x2 slots could be omitted for all I care, I guess most people won't use them anyway.
The storage side pf things is very interesting. Because we have 8 lanes from the chipset, I would love to see two M.2 x4 slots (for using dual Samsung XP941 for example), but I guess there will only be one x2 slot. I hope the board will also have two SATA-Express ports for compatibility with upcoming SSDs. Sharing the chipset lanes between M.2 and SATA-Express, everyone could configure their storage based on their needs. I just hope no lanes will be "blocked" by, in my opinion, unneccessary third party SATA/USB controllers.

Finally, I hope the board will be layed out in such a way that it will be possible for water cooling vendors, such as EKWB for example, to produce a full-cover block or at least a nice looking VRM and chipset block 😛

Please feel free to comment and discuss. I would love to hear your thoughts 🙂

Cheers,
~nik

PS: Spread the ROG love 😄

[Myk_SilentShado]

SATA Express is a marketing scam, have you heard about the ASUS Hyper Express? all it is, at this point is a case that can hold 2 mSATA drives in a RAID0 config to get around 800Mbps read speeds....you can still get 1Mbps by putting a pair of SSD's in RAID0.

Putting 2 M.2 drives might be a tight squeeze on a Gene, unless the cards were mounted on their side, rather than flat to the motherboard. And since the cards are PCIe compatible, i'm not sure if they can be RAIDED without an attached chipset say from ASMedia.

[vladnik]

Myk SilentShadow wrote:
SATA Express is a marketing scam, have you heard about the ASUS Hyper Express? all it is, at this point is a case that can hold 2 mSATA drives in a RAID0 config to get around 800Mbps read speeds....you can still get 1Mbps by putting a pair of SSD's in RAID0.

Putting 2 M.2 drives might be a tight squeeze on a Gene, unless the cards were mounted on their side, rather than flat to the motherboard. And since the cards are PCIe compatible, i'm not sure if they can be RAIDED without an attached chipset say from ASMedia.

At this point in time, you're right. There are no SATA-Express devices on the market. However, I believe that only the widespread integration of SATA-Express into motherboards will boost its development. PCIe based storage is the future. And as much as i like M.2, I think SATA-Express is just as valid.

Mounting the M.2 slots at a 90 degree angle is a very interesting concept. However, I think there is enough room between two PCIe x16 slots to mount even a 2280 compatible M.2 slot, depending on the dimensions of the PCH heatsink. I'm not neccessarily after a M.2 RAID setup, individual drives should suffice, as the XP941 for example is pretty darn fast as is. But I think we might nonetheless see M.2/SATA-Express RAID integration into RST at some point.

[Myk_SilentShado]

Computex will most likely see an announcement by Intel and other companies involved with SATA Express. Though at the moment, only ASUS has it by exclusive on their boards.

[vladnik]

SATA-Express is not an ASUS exclusive feature. They have the only available storage solution at the moment, but SATA-Express ports are present on Gigabyte, AsRock and MSI boards as well.

And you're right, until Computex the only thing we can do is speculate.