ASUS announces three new Workstation-grade WS series X299 motherboards

X299 performance with enterprise-grade features

| Source: ASUS Author: Mark Campbell

ASUS announces three new Workstation-grade WS series X299 motherboards

ASUS has officially revealed their new WS-series X299 SAGA, X299 Pro and X299 Pro/SE series motherboards, offering users with an additional level of validation and management features that are often only included on enterprise motherboards.



These motherboards are designed to blend together the features of enthusiast-grade and enterprise-grade product lines, offering both overclocking features and enhanced expandability, offering an experience that cannot be found elsewhere.



To start off with, we will look at ASUS' X299 SAGE, a motherboard that is designed to offer extreme levels of GPU/expansion-slot density. Offering support for a maximum of seven full-sized PCIe 16x/GPU expansion slots, which will be extremely useful for those that what to train neural networks with a large bank of GPUs or crunch other highly scalable compute workloads.



This motherboard will come with a support for ASUS Control Center (ACC), which will allow users on the same network band to monitor the system and schedule tasks and utilise remote desktop features.



When looking at ASUS' X299 SAGE, it comes with the most PCIe, U.2 and SATA ports and ethernet connections, making it the most well-equipped of the bunch, though the motherboard does lack the ASMB0iKVM module that is included in the Pro/SE.

ASUS' X299 Pro is designed to come in a smaller ATX form factor, making it usable with a much wider range of systems than the larger X299 SAGE, though this comes with a few sacrificed like fewer U.2 ports, SATA connections and PCIe 16x slots. This does give the motherboard a lower price tag, with this version easily being ASUS' most affordable X299 WS series motherboard.

With a standard ATX form factor, WS X299 PRO fits where larger workstation motherboards cannot. Its appeal extends deeper into the prosumer space to content creators, yet it easily makes the crossover into enthusiast territory for builders who want one machine for both work and play.





The WS X299 PRO/SE is easily one of the most interesting motherboards in this lineup, coming with features that are almost identical to ASUS' WS X299 Pro, aside from the addition of an ASMB-iKVM module, which will allow this motherboard to support out of band management.



This upgraded chip allows this motherboard to send a direct video feed to a remote user without any installed client software, though sadly this feature does break other features like ASUS FanXpert 4 and 5-Way Optimisation.





WS X299 PRO/SE offers similar specs to WS X299 PRO, but adds extensive remote management capabilities. In addition to supporting ASUS Control Center for in-band communication, it has an

ASMB9-iKVM module for out-of-band management. The board can receive keyboard and mouse input remotely while sending a live video feed, all without any client software installed. Additional information, product images and specifications of each ASUS WS X299 motherboard can be found at http://edgeup.asus.com/2017/ws-x299-sage-pro-skylakex-workstation/





All three of these motherboards will become available at retail sometime this month. ASUS has not released any official pricing for these motherboards.



You can join the discussion on ASUS' three new WS series X299 motherboards on the OC3D Forums.

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