First W790 Motherboard Breaks Cover, Supermicro E-ATX Design With 16 DDR5 DIMM Slots, Huge LGA 4677 Socket & Six PCIe Gen5 Slots
Last week, we reported that Intel was going to announce its Sapphire Rapids-WS ‘Xeon Workstation’ lineup by February 2023 with a launch planned for April 2023, Now, the first W790 motherboard by Supermicro has leaked out by Videocardz. The picture might be of a low-quality but it still provides us a good insight into what the new Fishhawk Falls platform has in store for workstations & HEDT PC builders. Starting with the design, this motherboard is specifically the Supermicro X13SWA-TF that was listed just a few days ago with a pricing of around $960 US. The motherboard features the new LGA 4677 socket (Socket P) which will support the latest Xeon CPUs branded under the Sapphire Rapids-WS family. The CPU gets power from an 8+2 phase power delivery which is juiced up by a dual 8-pin power connector layout. As for the memory layout, the Supermicro W790 motherboard features a total of 16 DDR5 DIMM slots, supporting 8-channel memory (2DPC) for up to 1 TB of memory (64 GB modules). Since the DDR5 memory moves the voltage regulation to the DIMMs rather than being housed on the board itself, we can’t spot any DRAM VRMs on the sides of the motherboard like the previous-gen design. Moving forward to the expansion, the Supermicro W790 motherboard features a total of 6 PCIe x16 slots which should be using the Gen5 protocol since Sapphire Rapids Xeon chips offer PCIe Gen 5.0 capabilities. One thing to note is that the Sapphire Rapids-WS Xeon CPU lineup will come in two line of flavors, the Xeon W-3000 line will feature 8-channel DDR5 & 112-lane support while the Xeon W-2000 line will feature 4-channel DDR5 & 64-lane support, as reported by OneRaichu. There are also three M.2 slots on the board which should be Gen5 compliant too. There are 8 SATA III ports, two U.2 ports, and a good selection of I/O at the back. Supermicro, just like many other manufacturers will be offering this and several other W790-class motherboards close to launch.
