ASUS X99-E WS
As more and more X99 motherboards leak, it only made sense to release a portion of the trove of boards that haven’t already been announced or leaked.
The Asus X99-E WS, a Bright Side of News* exclusive, is a particularly interesting one because it is Asus’ (TPE:2357) latest high performance motherboard for workstation users. Because X99 is an entirely new platform there are very likely going to be a lot of people searching for new workstation boards like the X99-E WS to upgrade their workstations.
In terms of features, you get all the expected things like Haswell-E support, a plethora of PCIe 3.0 slots, which includes support for 4-way CrossFireX and SLI with X16 links. This board is specifically designed to support both Core i7 and Xeon E5 class chips (including the E5-1600, thanks to retailer leaks) thanks to being only a single socket workstation board. Because this is a workstation board, ASUS also talks about the boards overall power efficiency focusing on their Dr. MOS, 12k hour capacitors, ProCool power connector and beat thermal choke.
The Asus X99-E WS also has a Q-code logger and Dr. Power, even though it also has a plethora of connectivity which make it all the more attractive. That includes dual Gigabit NICs, a whopping 10 USB 3.0 connectors on the rear IO alone, not to mention the standard audio connectors, eSATA and the expected IO. You will get the full 8-slot DDR4 configuration, which is to be expected even though you very likely won’t get much memory overclocking support like the Rampage series of boards.
Asus X99-E WS IO
In addition to all of this, you will be getting backed by an Asus 3 year warranty which brings the MSRP price of this board to a whopping $519. Yes, this is a fairly high price for a single socketed board that isn’t an overclocking board, but X99 is a performance platform and this is a workstation board which should mean you are paying for higher quality components and reliability.
In fact, some retailers already have it available for pre-order but don’t really have any details or pictures of the board. So, you can already get it for $499 via some retailers, already lower than the $519 MSRP.
