ASUS Dual LGA 2011 Socket Motherboard goes up for pre-order

As we reported to you back in January the 10th 2012, ASUS has been working on a dual socket LGA 2011 workstation grade motherboard. That particular board, the ‘Z9PE-D8-WS’, is now going up for the sale. As the model name might suggest, the D8 is representative of the fact it will support 8 DIMMs which is in effect two pairs of quad channel memory. The ‘WS’ part of the model name is representing the fact this board is intended for workstations and built to workstation standards. However, this doesn’t mean it can’t be a monster gaming motherboard. This board perhaps shows the first real contender to EVGA’s monopoly of the dual socket motherboard market. Though you have to take into consideration that a dual socket motherboard requires CPUs that can communicate with another CPU. Hence, only Intel Xeon’s based off the latest Sandy Bridge-EP architecture will run in these boards if a dual CPU configuration is used.

The board has been pre-order listed on North American etailer website NCIX.com. The pre-order would suggest that the board is close to being launched and the pre-order price is a hefty CA $632.98 or US $634.56. We will expect to see this board arrive at the same time as the launch of Sandy Bridge-EP Xeon processors which has been scheduled for by the end of Q1 this year.