EVGA was revealed to have been working on a dual-socked motherboard at the start of January, but other than a few pictures nothing more could be heard from EVGA. The W555 was also Unveiled at CES a few weeks back at Las Vegas, and now finally some specifications coming in with a lot of probabilities of course!

Looking at these first images one can say for sure that the board is not very small, also EVGA has confirmed that it is larger than the E-ATX or SSI standards. And any motherboard with two LGA1366 processor sockets, 12 DDR3 DIMM slots and seven expansion card slots isn’t ever going to be small!

The W555 has two LGA1366 processor sockets, however the bad news is that Core i7 chips will be unusable, as they each have a single QPI link, whereas the EVGA W555 architecture depends on these processors’ respective pairs of QPI links. One link will communicate with the chipset, while the other will enable the communication between the two processors. So people out there, stop dreaming about overclocking with a pair of Core i7’s! The good news is that there is a whole range of Xeon W5000-series CPUs to choose from, but the bad news is that they’re all considerably more expensive than the equivalent-frequency Core i7.

Each CPU socket is provided with its own bank of 6 DIMM sockets, just crying out for some high-speed triple channel DDR3’s. Generally speaking, Xeon 5500-systems are equipped with ECC registered DDR3, which although far less prone to errors than standard unbuffered DDR3, is a lot more expensive and is only available up to PC3-10600, i.e. 1,333MHz. However, the memory controller in the CPUs can support standard unbuffered DDR3 i.e something you’ll most certainly need for the use of big overclocks. We can also see that EVGA W555 dual-Xeon motherboard is equiped with eight SATA ports, allegedly six running at 3Gb/sec and the two red ports at 6GB/sec. Unfortunately, at this stage we don’t which SATA controllers EVGA is planning on using on the final production model. And, what may seem rather awkward to regular consumers but perhaps convenient to overclockers is the existence of an IDE connector. While rather outdated, overclockers sometimes prefer IDE drives over SATA because most benchmarks are not affected by drive speed and SATA controllers are generally more sensitive to big overclocks.

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