You're right. For whatever reason the manual wasn't available when I checked just now - it could be that I'm directed to the UK page and something isn't synchronizing right? I've updated the text and will upload the chipset diagram when I get to a PC.
How is that we've had 10Gbps Thunderbolt ports and 5Gbps USB3.0 ports using copper wiring for aoens in our cheap consumer grade battery powered tiny little Chinese built devices, but we don't get 10GbE ports even in relatively expensive mid-range motherboards?
Is it really just the difficulty of driving the electric load (impedances / inducatances) of 100M cable at needed frequencies (250 / 500MHz frequencies) instead of 1-5meters that is reasonable spec for Thunderbolt 2.0 / USB3 cables?
Because otherwise I don't really understand what is the problem in modulating voltage to 2-4 pins of RJ45 connector?
"Is it really just the difficulty of driving the electric load (impedances / inducatances) of 100M cable at needed frequencies (250 / 500MHz frequencies) instead of 1-5meters that is reasonable spec for Thunderbolt 2.0 / USB3 cables?"
That's hardly a merit. If it was, then everyone outta have a sports car, or better off - a helicopter, because when you are in a hurry, a regular car is easily the bottleneck.
10 gibt network - that's already too slow, on the odd chances you copy "a file" (let's say data) from one pci-e ssd to another pci-e ssd. Or what if you wanted to copy data from ram to another system's ram?
Big data transfers are a rarity in consumer usage, but are common in enterprise, which is the market which merits 10gbit and more. For 99.9% of what consumers do 99.9% of the time, 1gbit suffices.
10gbit internet? That activates my hilarity unit :D
If technological progress brought the price of helicopters into the realm of regular consumer cars, then you bet I would buy one. Of course the skies might get a bit crowded with all those helicopters, but the cool thing about wired communications is you don't have to worry about interference from anyone else.
Can I assume WiFi protocols capable of exceeding 1 Gb/s also activate your hilarity unit? Can I also assume you don't use Thunderbolt (of any form), USB 3+, or HDMI 2.0+ either, so as to avoid continuous activation of said hilarity unit?
Well "genius" you finally got it. It is not there because it is too expensive, it is too expensive because it is not mainstream, it is not mainstream because it isn't necessary and because your beloved industry would rather milk it.
You couldn't even get why "10gbit internet" is stupid - my hilarity unit's activation has nothing to do with bandwidth, but with the stupidity of those who fail to make a distinction between network connection and internet connection.
The most laughable thing however is that of all the things you actually need badly and are completely clueless about, yet you whine about the industry not giving you something you practically don't need.
i'm pretty sure most of the consumer sector is gonna need speeds faster than 100 MB per second for 4K media, hell even some high quality Blu Ray rips exceed that bandwidth. These features are for future proofing as well. As more homes get acces to Gigabit fiber/coaxial, the need for better wired bandwidth increases.
I/O is always the bottleneck, in pretty much any chip or device design.
Then your hilarity unit's going to just explode when you find out that it's 10 Gbps *symmetric*. It's the real deal, I've seen it in action myself. Granted, it's only in a few neighborhoods at the moment, but it's a sight to behold.
you could store your steam collection on a noisy RAIDed box elsewhere in the house connected via 10gbit and run a wickle box with a single or double SSD (balls to the wall fast OS drive and midrange secondary drive for capacity) in your gaming box
Yeah, it's funny the comments that tell you don't need x tech coming from posters on an enthusiast site. You often wonder if they're trolling or just don't care for the latest and greatest. I can't always afford that, but start planning on adopting new technologies as they become more affordable. Of course, it's often hit or miss. I can't begin to tell you of the tech that I never or rarely used.
To suggest there's no need for this is a bit ridiculous IMHO. We're already starting to see phones with USB 3.1 and >100MBps read speed. Even with current gen tech, if I use a PC to transfer photos and videos from my phone to my NAS, Ethernet is the bottleneck. Okay, it's a small bottleneck and certainly wouldn't justify a costly upgrade, but the point is that 1Gb Ethernet is already the bottleneck copying from my phone(!) to a mechanical HDD.
At the moment this is still high-end niche gear (the only motheboards which include it are $500+). By the time it gets to mainstream we'll have UHS-II cards (already available with >500MBps reads) and USB 3.1Gen2 devices. All you need then is a NAS with Flash storage, or a flash-based write cache to dump large amounts of data off a device in a fifth to a tenth of the time. That nothing to scoff at.
You could, of course, argue that consumers don't "need" this tech. But I'd suggest that in a few years time, wanting to copy tens of gigabytes of 4K video and photos off a device to a NAS with some form of flash based write cache will not be at all unusual. The tens of seconds it would take over 10GBase-T vs minutes over 1Gb would absolutely be tangible.
>I don't need it and don't have the infrastructure to take advantage of the benefits in additional network and transfer speeds it offers, therefore nobody else does, either!
It's not a need. In fact you don't even NEED a computer. This is about speed, whether you need it or not. You don't need an electric car that does 0-60 in 2.5 seconds, but yet they make it. There's no benefit except the joy of using it. Same when you have a 10gb network.
It's consumer driven by those that have the money and want the top 1% AND find ways to benefit from it. What's funny is your lack of comprehension on how this could make people happy by saving time. Not unlike how some people disclaimed you didn't NEED an ssd. Nope you don't. And most consumers could care less saving a few seconds. But now it almost seems pointless not to have an SSD. Same thing with 10gb.
Not much yet but they will come. This is already an issue with some Wi-Fi access points/routers as they can exceed beyond 1G. TP-Link has 802.11ad and its performance is limited by the Gigabit connection. NAS devices will eventually have SSDs in them.
10Gbe is completely useless without large framing. Even if you managed to generate, say, 900 MegaBytes per second from Ethernet to Disk (SSD) somehow your system would actually be a laggy steaming pile while handling all those interrupts and high processor usage + the interrupts generated for the disk activity.
This is like mounting a jet engine on a car, facing forward, and then using said jet engine as a 'selling point'. Suckers gunna buy it and then when it fires up, the car is fighting against itself.
Lame. Leave it on server platforms where it belongs for now, consumers/gamers aren't ready for it.
Havin to use "large framing" for 10G has not been a issue for several (5+?) years. Not only are the CPUs faster, but OS/drivers have become much better at handling it, with things like bundling up smaller packets into giant packets before processing them, fetching/sending them in batches from/to the networking hardware using a single interrupt and so on.
non-ECC RAM in workstation? This is no go. IMHO this is yet another gaming board. Otherwise board is really nice so I guess they will find some buyers...
You can plug a Xeon and ECC memory in an X99 board just fine. If the UEFI is built right, it'll even enable the ECC functionality and work fine.
Source: put an E5-1630v3 and 4x8GB of Registered DDR4-2133 in an Asus X99-A. The shipping UEFI worked fine, but the ECC functionality was deactivated. One UEFI update later to the latest (something like version 04xx to 12xx) and ECC was fully enabled according to AIDA64 on windows.
Asus specifies clearly in the board description that non-ECC RAM should be used. If Asus tells this clearly I'm afraid nobody puts any hope into Asus releasing the right UEFI for the board which would magically switch ECC feature on. If Asus does not care about this, I don't have problem with it and go and purchase board from another vendor since other vendor may care and clearly state that ECC RAM is supported and if it is and I do have any issue with this support then I can use warranty to solve this or return the board which I can't in case of Asus since the feature is not advertised nor officially supported. I simply like to have workstation board and supported by the vendor. I'm not interested in gaming boards...
For a do-everything gaming workstation, it's tough to choose between ECC and overclocking. I don't think it's an oxymoron to want both, though like you, I'd probably opt for ECC. And IPMI for that matter; my desktops tend to become servers over time.
Come to think of it, who's the target user for this board? It seems like an engineering exercise in overkill rather that the best option for any particular purpose.
As far as I can tell, it supports ECC with Xeons and non-ECC for the enthusiast platform chips, and that's standard fare for just about any 2011-v3 socket motherboard I can name.
Oops! I stand corrected! And thanks for the lesson. :-) I just used description provided by the article and not searched for it on Asus site. Good, if they officially support ECC and their BIOS is up to line and enable it too, then indeed, this may be called workstation board without shame. Thanks!
Doesnt help that this is a very bling bling board - 10G is not the only thing adding to the cost on this thing. Even some server boards with two sockets and 2x10G are cheaper than this one.
Now if I could only get this motherboard with built-in SPF+ connectors instead of RJ-45's, I'd be waiting with CC in-hand. To those that believe 10G is unnecessary, anytime you have data transfers between systems equipped with SSDs, 1G ethernet is a significant bottleneck. Although, 10G is overkill for most scenarios. In the testing I've done, the most I was able to get was right around 900MB/s (that's bytes, not bits, an entire DVD in around 5 seconds, lol), with about 700MB/s sustained for large transfers. That was about 2 years ago. I'm sure some of the newer SSD drives will outperform that.
Looks like a good board, but personally I'd like to see a less bling-y version with 10G on it. It is not helping the price with expensive PLX chips and whatnot. 10G with PCIe shifting down to x8/x8/x8/x8 when needed (it's plenty!), yes please.
Today with 1Gbit/s broadband, TB and TB of data, Neural Network or Coin mining, you reach a step where that kind of motherboard makes sense.
If someone says he cannot afford it, I would say go learn any programing language so that you can both afford a card like that but also use it more deeply. When I do web crawling at 1gbi/s + gpu data mining, I would say a 700€ card (900 including VAT :( ) is cheap with so much features !
Even with my old high end rig (2013), I need to reconsider a new rig because my new broadband
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40 Comments
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RaistlinZ - Monday, August 29, 2016 - link
Do want. Can't afford.ltcommanderdata - Monday, August 29, 2016 - link
"The board has full support for PCIe graphics, using a PLX8780 high-end PCIe switch."Are you sure it uses a PLX8780? The manual below shows 2 PLX8747 switches instead in the Appendix A-1 block diagram.
http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/Socket2011-R3/...
Ian Cutress - Monday, August 29, 2016 - link
You're right. For whatever reason the manual wasn't available when I checked just now - it could be that I'm directed to the UK page and something isn't synchronizing right? I've updated the text and will upload the chipset diagram when I get to a PC.RaichuPls - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
What's the difference between the PLX chips?zepi - Monday, August 29, 2016 - link
I have one question in mind:How is that we've had 10Gbps Thunderbolt ports and 5Gbps USB3.0 ports using copper wiring for aoens in our cheap consumer grade battery powered tiny little Chinese built devices, but we don't get 10GbE ports even in relatively expensive mid-range motherboards?
Is it really just the difficulty of driving the electric load (impedances / inducatances) of 100M cable at needed frequencies (250 / 500MHz frequencies) instead of 1-5meters that is reasonable spec for Thunderbolt 2.0 / USB3 cables?
Because otherwise I don't really understand what is the problem in modulating voltage to 2-4 pins of RJ45 connector?
Gigaplex - Monday, August 29, 2016 - link
"Is it really just the difficulty of driving the electric load (impedances / inducatances) of 100M cable at needed frequencies (250 / 500MHz frequencies) instead of 1-5meters that is reasonable spec for Thunderbolt 2.0 / USB3 cables?"Essentially, yes.
ddriver - Monday, August 29, 2016 - link
What merits 10 gbit network in consumer products?Capissen38 - Monday, August 29, 2016 - link
Parts of south Minneapolis have 10 Gbps residential FTTH: http://fiber.usinternet.com/peterfares - Monday, August 29, 2016 - link
If you're trying to copy a file between two computers with SSDs the 1Gbps Ethernet link is easily the bottleneck.ddriver - Monday, August 29, 2016 - link
That's hardly a merit. If it was, then everyone outta have a sports car, or better off - a helicopter, because when you are in a hurry, a regular car is easily the bottleneck.10 gibt network - that's already too slow, on the odd chances you copy "a file" (let's say data) from one pci-e ssd to another pci-e ssd. Or what if you wanted to copy data from ram to another system's ram?
Big data transfers are a rarity in consumer usage, but are common in enterprise, which is the market which merits 10gbit and more. For 99.9% of what consumers do 99.9% of the time, 1gbit suffices.
10gbit internet? That activates my hilarity unit :D
chaos215bar2 - Monday, August 29, 2016 - link
If technological progress brought the price of helicopters into the realm of regular consumer cars, then you bet I would buy one. Of course the skies might get a bit crowded with all those helicopters, but the cool thing about wired communications is you don't have to worry about interference from anyone else.Can I assume WiFi protocols capable of exceeding 1 Gb/s also activate your hilarity unit? Can I also assume you don't use Thunderbolt (of any form), USB 3+, or HDMI 2.0+ either, so as to avoid continuous activation of said hilarity unit?
ddriver - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
Well "genius" you finally got it. It is not there because it is too expensive, it is too expensive because it is not mainstream, it is not mainstream because it isn't necessary and because your beloved industry would rather milk it.You couldn't even get why "10gbit internet" is stupid - my hilarity unit's activation has nothing to do with bandwidth, but with the stupidity of those who fail to make a distinction between network connection and internet connection.
ddriver - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
The most laughable thing however is that of all the things you actually need badly and are completely clueless about, yet you whine about the industry not giving you something you practically don't need.Morawka - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
i'm pretty sure most of the consumer sector is gonna need speeds faster than 100 MB per second for 4K media, hell even some high quality Blu Ray rips exceed that bandwidth. These features are for future proofing as well. As more homes get acces to Gigabit fiber/coaxial, the need for better wired bandwidth increases.I/O is always the bottleneck, in pretty much any chip or device design.
Capissen38 - Monday, August 29, 2016 - link
Then your hilarity unit's going to just explode when you find out that it's 10 Gbps *symmetric*. It's the real deal, I've seen it in action myself. Granted, it's only in a few neighborhoods at the moment, but it's a sight to behold.plonk420 - Monday, August 29, 2016 - link
you could store your steam collection on a noisy RAIDed box elsewhere in the house connected via 10gbit and run a wickle box with a single or double SSD (balls to the wall fast OS drive and midrange secondary drive for capacity) in your gaming boxNotmyusualid - Monday, August 29, 2016 - link
< long rant deleted >So 10Gb/s internet surprises you, and lurk on Anandtech? Come on....
bigboxes - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
Yeah, it's funny the comments that tell you don't need x tech coming from posters on an enthusiast site. You often wonder if they're trolling or just don't care for the latest and greatest. I can't always afford that, but start planning on adopting new technologies as they become more affordable. Of course, it's often hit or miss. I can't begin to tell you of the tech that I never or rarely used.rhysiam - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
To suggest there's no need for this is a bit ridiculous IMHO. We're already starting to see phones with USB 3.1 and >100MBps read speed. Even with current gen tech, if I use a PC to transfer photos and videos from my phone to my NAS, Ethernet is the bottleneck. Okay, it's a small bottleneck and certainly wouldn't justify a costly upgrade, but the point is that 1Gb Ethernet is already the bottleneck copying from my phone(!) to a mechanical HDD.At the moment this is still high-end niche gear (the only motheboards which include it are $500+). By the time it gets to mainstream we'll have UHS-II cards (already available with >500MBps reads) and USB 3.1Gen2 devices. All you need then is a NAS with Flash storage, or a flash-based write cache to dump large amounts of data off a device in a fifth to a tenth of the time. That nothing to scoff at.
You could, of course, argue that consumers don't "need" this tech. But I'd suggest that in a few years time, wanting to copy tens of gigabytes of 4K video and photos off a device to a NAS with some form of flash based write cache will not be at all unusual. The tens of seconds it would take over 10GBase-T vs minutes over 1Gb would absolutely be tangible.
JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
Quality shitposting! 👌>I don't need it and don't have the infrastructure to take advantage of the benefits in additional network and transfer speeds it offers, therefore nobody else does, either!
Keep it up, proud of you, ddriver!
Dug - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
It's not a need. In fact you don't even NEED a computer.This is about speed, whether you need it or not.
You don't need an electric car that does 0-60 in 2.5 seconds, but yet they make it. There's no benefit except the joy of using it. Same when you have a 10gb network.
It's consumer driven by those that have the money and want the top 1% AND find ways to benefit from it.
What's funny is your lack of comprehension on how this could make people happy by saving time. Not unlike how some people disclaimed you didn't NEED an ssd. Nope you don't. And most consumers could care less saving a few seconds. But now it almost seems pointless not to have an SSD. Same thing with 10gb.
stux - Tuesday, September 20, 2016 - link
10gbe is about saving HOURS not seconds.As I type this I'm waiting for 10TB to transfer from one system to a new system... It should be done in a day or two.
zodiacfml - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
Not much yet but they will come. This is already an issue with some Wi-Fi access points/routers as they can exceed beyond 1G. TP-Link has 802.11ad and its performance is limited by the Gigabit connection.NAS devices will eventually have SSDs in them.
testbug00 - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
prosumer. QEDprisonerX - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
"640K should be enough for anyone..."WinkDinkerson - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
Hilarious.10Gbe is completely useless without large framing. Even if you managed to generate, say, 900 MegaBytes per second from Ethernet to Disk (SSD) somehow your system would actually be a laggy steaming pile while handling all those interrupts and high processor usage + the interrupts generated for the disk activity.
This is like mounting a jet engine on a car, facing forward, and then using said jet engine as a 'selling point'. Suckers gunna buy it and then when it fires up, the car is fighting against itself.
Lame. Leave it on server platforms where it belongs for now, consumers/gamers aren't ready for it.
alexdi - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
Yes, hilarious. My 10GbE systems had no idea they were supposed to be so terrible. Please tell us more from your extensive experience.atomt - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
Havin to use "large framing" for 10G has not been a issue for several (5+?) years. Not only are the CPUs faster, but OS/drivers have become much better at handling it, with things like bundling up smaller packets into giant packets before processing them, fetching/sending them in batches from/to the networking hardware using a single interrupt and so on.Samus - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
Well, this is pure pornography.kgardas - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
non-ECC RAM in workstation? This is no go. IMHO this is yet another gaming board. Otherwise board is really nice so I guess they will find some buyers...ZeDestructor - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
You can plug a Xeon and ECC memory in an X99 board just fine. If the UEFI is built right, it'll even enable the ECC functionality and work fine.Source: put an E5-1630v3 and 4x8GB of Registered DDR4-2133 in an Asus X99-A. The shipping UEFI worked fine, but the ECC functionality was deactivated. One UEFI update later to the latest (something like version 04xx to 12xx) and ECC was fully enabled according to AIDA64 on windows.
kgardas - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
Asus specifies clearly in the board description that non-ECC RAM should be used. If Asus tells this clearly I'm afraid nobody puts any hope into Asus releasing the right UEFI for the board which would magically switch ECC feature on. If Asus does not care about this, I don't have problem with it and go and purchase board from another vendor since other vendor may care and clearly state that ECC RAM is supported and if it is and I do have any issue with this support then I can use warranty to solve this or return the board which I can't in case of Asus since the feature is not advertised nor officially supported. I simply like to have workstation board and supported by the vendor. I'm not interested in gaming boards...alexdi - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
For a do-everything gaming workstation, it's tough to choose between ECC and overclocking. I don't think it's an oxymoron to want both, though like you, I'd probably opt for ECC. And IPMI for that matter; my desktops tend to become servers over time.Come to think of it, who's the target user for this board? It seems like an engineering exercise in overkill rather that the best option for any particular purpose.
JoeyJoJo123 - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
Care to provide a link on this supposed board description?___________________
https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/X99-E-10G-WS/spe...
Memory
8 x DIMM, Max. 128GB, DDR4 3333(O.C.)/3200(O.C.)/3000(O.C.)/2800(O.C.)/2666(O.C.)/2400(O.C.)/2133 MHz Non-ECC, Un-buffered Memory *1
8 x DIMM, Max. 128GB, DDR4 2400/2133 MHz ECC, Un-buffered Memory *2
8 x DIMM, Max. 128GB, DDR4 2400/2133 MHz ECC, Register Memory *2
...
*1 When installing Intel® Socket 2011-v3 Core™ i7/i7 X-Series Processors
*2 When installing Intel® Xeon® E5-2600/1600 v4/v3 Processor
___________________
As far as I can tell, it supports ECC with Xeons and non-ECC for the enthusiast platform chips, and that's standard fare for just about any 2011-v3 socket motherboard I can name.
kgardas - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link
Oops! I stand corrected! And thanks for the lesson. :-) I just used description provided by the article and not searched for it on Asus site. Good, if they officially support ECC and their BIOS is up to line and enable it too, then indeed, this may be called workstation board without shame. Thanks!The_Assimilator - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
The cost and power consumption of these 10GbE chips are going to keep them out of the mainstream for a lot longer.atomt - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
Doesnt help that this is a very bling bling board - 10G is not the only thing adding to the cost on this thing. Even some server boards with two sockets and 2x10G are cheaper than this one.ludikraut - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
Now if I could only get this motherboard with built-in SPF+ connectors instead of RJ-45's, I'd be waiting with CC in-hand. To those that believe 10G is unnecessary, anytime you have data transfers between systems equipped with SSDs, 1G ethernet is a significant bottleneck. Although, 10G is overkill for most scenarios. In the testing I've done, the most I was able to get was right around 900MB/s (that's bytes, not bits, an entire DVD in around 5 seconds, lol), with about 700MB/s sustained for large transfers. That was about 2 years ago. I'm sure some of the newer SSD drives will outperform that.atomt - Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - link
Looks like a good board, but personally I'd like to see a less bling-y version with 10G on it. It is not helping the price with expensive PLX chips and whatnot. 10G with PCIe shifting down to x8/x8/x8/x8 when needed (it's plenty!), yes please.Avlin - Monday, September 26, 2016 - link
Milfboard...More seriously they did achieve near perfection !
Today with 1Gbit/s broadband, TB and TB of data, Neural Network or Coin mining, you reach a step where that kind of motherboard makes sense.
If someone says he cannot afford it, I would say go learn any programing language so that you can both afford a card like that but also use it more deeply. When I do web crawling at 1gbi/s + gpu data mining, I would say a 700€ card (900 including VAT :( ) is cheap with so much features !
Even with my old high end rig (2013), I need to reconsider a new rig because my new broadband