EVGA's W555 motherboard gets a once over, can hold seven GPUs
By Darren Murph 
posted January 28th 2010 8:39AM
posted January 28th 2010 8:39AM
posted January 28th 2010 8:39AM
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got it
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/motherboards/2010/01/27/evga-w555-dual-xeon-motherboard/1
@V g e r
Why did you post that here, when you could have clicked on the source link in the article...
EVGA is the king of overkill.
But my EVGA x58 LE (sounds like a baby compared to this) is the best mobo I've ever owned.
EVGA has awesome build quality, tech support that makes Apple's look bad, and they are even an American based company.
Can't go wrong with these guys.
So not all of them are x16... 'cause I've been trying to think of a chipset that does that.
That popping sound you just heard was the collective heads exploding of the GPGPU geeks out there. Can you imagine the rendering engine you could put together with one of these things? This is like a one-board Lucasfilm in the making.
dammm, check out that sexy ps2 port
macpro who????
Well for those of you stuck on video cards, I'll give you one scenario where this would be useful. I want to use multiple Blackmagic Intensity Pro capture cards to create a video switching environment for a video studio. With most of the motherboards out now, if I use three capture cards (to drive three camera angles), then I'm out of slots, or at best I only have one left. With this board, I can do three (or even four) cameras with two video cards (the software does GPU encoding, so that helps), plus still have one expansion slot. I will absolutely be looking at buying this, when available.
Ahhhhhhh GPU heaven. Although I worry that it will break my wallet.
I'll wait for next iteration of this badboy, W666
I just came in my pants.
The question for me is can each x16 slot run 16 lanes each concurrently?
@Fuzzball The lanes are configured so that slots 1, 3, 5 and 7 each provide the full 16 lanes, or alternatively the first six slots each have 8 lanes and slot 7 has 16 lanes.
@puny
Still, are there many (any?) other motherboards that can provide 16 lanes to even four slots?
I bet this thing with 48gb of ram, dual Xeons E7450s, septuple 5870s would fold like there is no tomorrow! I will take a dozen for my farm!
@sethmo my thoughts exactly the GPU-FAH people are gonna crap their pants.
@sethmo you wont get anywhere with those processors.
though a pair of w5590's, and 7 watercooled hd5970's would be a burner indeed.
Mmmmmm... dual processor.
@Alex
I can't help but wonder what two i7s on there would be like.
@Agent00J Considering that the i7 is designed for single CPU use only I would suspect it would perform about the same as a single i7 at twice the price. Going with Xeon's on the other hand would be extremely fast.
1 gpu = California during the summer
2 gpu = a warm bed.
3 gpu = boil water.
4 gpu = oven.
5 gpu = microwave.
6 gpu = first xbox360 without a fan and calling for a rrod.
7 gpu = say what?
I'll stuck with my Macbook Air, thanks..
That's wayyyy to overkill.
All you need now is a 1 gigawatt ATX power supply,
Then you use it to play solitaire.
Wonder how many people could afford to buy 7
super expensive graphics card.
@dmax Considering that if you wanted to make the most use out of it you could use Four Radeon HD 5970's for 8 GPU's in four cards and leverage all 16X lanes. Trying to stuff 7 Discrete cards would slow the lanes down to 8X for all but one of them.
As far as people affording multiple High End Graphics cards, the people who would make full use of this motherboard as a HPC workstation (Personal Supercomputer) would certainly justify the money going into it. I can certainly think of a few Universities that would buy a bunch of these and make a very powerful GPGPU/CPU Cluster for research purposes... Makes the OpenCL standard more appealing all the time.
@dmax
Does this mean my 1.21 jiggawatt PSU will suffice?
i think the point is being missed. although this could be used in may different applications.
This idea has already being proposed for a computer management system in an infotaiment environment (i.e. carputer). Wherein a single system will have shared resources to provide multiple user with individualized content.
Imagine in your car you already have a computer, you want your nav system, you want your ODB II system link to this, also from the entertainment perspective you want your (little ones) to have individualized content. This allows for the management of this system and provides the horsepower to drive it. Remember in the future your motor vehicle will be the most powerful computer you own.
@xracer Are you nuts... fully built up this system would cost about the same or more as the average car... let alone be a computer in it.
You could build a cluster of Atom/ION systems for use an "infotainment" environment at a much much lower cost, and it would take up a lot less space.
I wonder who makes a power supply that can run 2 overclocked cpu's, 12 sticks of ram, and seven graphics cards? That thing would put out insane amounts of heat.
would 2 i7's know how to work as one ?
@JTD No, i7 processors only have 1 QPI link. This board will require Xeon processors because to run dual processors you need each processor to have a pair of QPI links. One to talk to the motherboard and the other to talk to the second processor.
an over-clockable WorkStation board??? It's cool and useless at the same time...
"because six is not enough and eight is just too many"
This was designed by EVGA and PSEG.
Looks like a server board. You could do some killer virtualizing on this thing, but it would waste the expansion ports...
48 gb of RAM using 2gb sticks also sounds pretty good. Or even just 1gb sticks would give you more than enough.
I'd personally have uses for 4 of those slots, but 3 of them would be filled with cheap cards just for monitors ++.
Far more interesting is the option to use some of the slots for PCIe SSDs... raid 0 together four 64 gb drives for an ultra-fast 256gb monster... vrooom!
Unfortunately I'm not the most tech-savvy person. Can someone tell me if this can be integrated with my iPad? If so, I might be interested in it. Also, what does it do?
And you need a power plant next to your house to run it... Tho I can see it used with CUDA for real-time brute-forcing. My aging single GeForce 8800 easily does 300mil MD5s per second.
This + 2 Core i7 975 + 12 4GB DDR3-1600 + 7 Matrox M9188 + 56 30" 2560x1600 monitors.
I bet the guy building that huge overkill Windows Home Server (a 32-bit OS) http://www.servethehome.com/?p=284 on the Asus Supercomputer motherboard is kicking himself about now for not waiting for this one. Why not spend more money for no reason and let more hardware go to waste? Maybe that's the target audience for this thing, people who buy hardware because they can.
ok to make the best out of this get
2 intel xeons
this awesome ram http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/21/corsair-pushes-speed-envelope-with-2-333mhz-dominator-gtx-ram-mo/
7 nvidia/ati gpu's (your preference)
looks like the motherboard supports 6 internal hdd's and 2 external so max that out too
oh and to cool it, good ol' mineral oil but a much bigger aquarium than this http://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php#update4
@manofchao5 oh and i forgot to say in case something thinks of this
you dont put the hdd's in the oil!!!, get some really long sata cables but ironically doesnt that make all your hdd's external even though some register as internal
@manofchao5
It is almost certainly too big to fit in the Armari XCP case, which is a pity.
The power and cooling for a 7 GPU mobo will be interesting. Can't wait to see a live sample!