Asus W790E and W790 Workstation Motherboards Released – Is HEDT Back?

With the release of AMD’s Ryzen CPU and the ever-increasing CPU core count, the HEDT market has been nose-diving these past few years. By now, Intel’s HEDT motherboards and CPUs are like a thing of the past, overshadowed by AMD’s Threadripper platform. Even then, I don’t think the Threadripper is as popular and in demand compared to the Ryzen desktop CPUs. But recently, Asus announced its new W790 Series Workstation motherboards designed for Intel’s new Xeon W-3400 and W-2400 processors. Codenamed Sapphire Rapids, the Xeon W-3400 offers up to 56 cores and 112 threads, while the W-2400 offers up to 24 cores and 48 threads. Asus’ Pro WS W790E-SAGE SE and Pro WS W790-ACE Workstation motherboards are specifically designed for these new CPUs. Check out more details about these motherboards from the official news release below.

ASUS Announces W790 Series Workstation Motherboards

ASUS recently announced two new Intel® W790 workstation motherboards – the Pro WS W790E-SAGE SE and the Pro WS W790-ACE. Each are built for the latest Intel Xeon® W-3400 and W-2400 processors and deliver breakthrough overclocking capability to unlock even more performance potential from CPUs and DDR5 R-DIMM memory modules.

The new Pro WS W790 series includes expandable graphics, extensive storage, impressive connectivity and reliability. This series is ideal for empowering professional creators, data scientists and architecture engineers as they deal with complex designs, simulations, rendering and AI inferencing workloads.

Server-grade remote management

The Pro WS W790 series offers comprehensive hardware and software-level remote management to keep IT on track. The Pro WS W790E-SAGE SE uses a dedicated gigabit Ethernet controller assigned to the onboard AST2600 BMC for the connection of IPMI architecture, allowing for BIOS updates, hardware resets, or critical issue fixes via a web UI. Users can access similar functionality with the Pro WS W790-ACE with ASUS IPMI expansion card. Additionally, the Pro WS W790 series comes with ASUS Control Center Express ― a real-time IT monitoring and management software designed to help IT administrators improve efficiency and protect digital assets from unauthorized access and data leaks.

Proven performance and productivity

The Pro WS W790E-SAGE SE is empowered to overclock Intel Xeon W-3400 or W-2400 processors, and it features eight memory module slots supporting up to 2 TB of ECC R-DIMM DDR5 RAM, which may also be overclocked. The seven total PCIe® 5.0 x16 slots deliver flexible configurability to support multiple performant GPUs in creation, architecture or data analytics. Meanwhile, ultrafast dual Intel X710-AT2 10 Gb Ethernet ports make short work of data transfers with low latency. Creators working with massive video files can set up multiple NVMe® storage devices in a RAID formation for massive I/O bandwidth and seamless playback in their editing bays. To add even more high-speed storage, two onboard SlimSAS slots let you connect industrial SSDs — not to mention server and networking equipment.

For those who need to build a workstation for businesses, AI development, or for running data analytics in finance and science, the Pro WS W790-ACE supports Intel Xeon W-2400 and W-3400 processors with eight RAM slots supporting up to 2 TB of ECC R-DIMM RAM in a quad-channel configuration. With its five PCIe 5.0 x16 slots, multi-GPU arrangements are once again on the menu. Three SlimSAS slots provide advanced storage options, and a 10 Gb Marvell® AQC113CS Ethernet port is ready for network-attached storage (NAS). In addition, one 2.5 Gb Intel® I226-LM Ethernet port is ready for streaming or file uploads.

Asus Pro WS W790E-SAGE SE Motherboard Specifications

Asus Pro WD W790-ACE Motherboard Specifications