I've picked up a few VERY flimsy rumours about a dual-socket 2011 board from Asus, to go head-to-head with the SR-3 from EVGA. Is there anyone that can shed any light at all on this? *throws a hopeful glance in Bindi's general direction* Before anyone mentions this: i'm not talking about the 'Danshui Bay' 2011/1366 hybrid abomination that was shown at Computex
There's an article (posted on Tuesday this week) at VR-Zone that mentions "likely competitors from Gigabyte or Asus". They are usually pretty reliable in the news they publish, although as you say it is pretty flimsy at the moment. That's all I've seen so far about any competitor to the SR-3.
Right now, unless you're talking server, we've no interest of making an SR-3 competitor. A 6GHz 12 thread CPU and 64GB of memory rarely holds people up. I know we've got dual socket 2011 servers with 8 PCI-E slots EDIT: Read the VR-Zone article. I'm sure the ROG team will evaluate the position come this time next year (i.e. it's far too early now!), as LGA2011 is a multi-year platform like X58 there will likely be another revision of ROG boards further down the line (ala Rampage II, III and III BE). We've still got rumored 22nm ones due too at some point. Whether it's a dually, who knows at this point - they did previously make Danshui Bay for a laugh so the tech is there, but generally given the almost unanimously positive reviews I think we're very happy with the demand for R4E atm.
Cheers Bindi for clearing that up. It kinda made sense to me that Asus would not let the pinnacle of performance go uncontested, but the rumours were so thin, i'd basically written them off on people misunderstanding what Danshui Bay is. Still, there is a niche there, the SR-2 seems to have done pretty good, or there would not be an SR-3 in the works Maybe Gigabyte will make something with a UD9 sticker on it? Hehe, it's always nice to speculate
Well the pinnacle of performance is questionable: how many people want the R4E and then how many people want to bother with xx-times more expensive Xeons and xx-times more expensive E-ATX mobo? There's always an ROI factor. CPU threads only benefit if you're going after niche WPrime or Cinebench results, and ROG boards are built for extreme gaming/OCing. If that's the case we'll seed enthusiasts with an 4 or 8-socket server board Last time I checked (before I started working here) Gbt had the same opinion as us, which is why they made the UD9.
That's absolutely true, but I would argue that for very nearly every single desktop user, after the overclocked 2500K ROI just falls flat on it's face. Sure, the extra two cores on the 3930K help a bit, but you pay threefold, plus a premium on the motherboard. So many people want to own the most powerful simply for the sake of owning it. The UD9 was first commissioned as a very limited run, but they were all gone in no-time, and so was the bigger second run. When i still worked for GBT i got about two or three calls a month from people who were still looking to buy one. These boards are rediculous, but there is a market for the rediculous And I KNOW Asus agrees with me: Or, even more rediculous: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/motherboards/2010/05/28/first-look-asus-rampage-iii-gene/2
