LGA1151 socket for Intel Xeon E3-1200 v5 processors and 6th-genereation Core, Pentium and Celeron processors
Dual-channel DDR4 2133 support
SupremeFX: Flawless audio that makes you part of the game
Sonic Radar ll: Scan and detect your enemies to dominate
Intel Gigabit Ethernet, LANGuard and GameFirst technology: Top-speed protected networking
RAMCache: Speed up your game loads
Gamer's Guardian: Highly-durable components and smart DIY features
USB 3.1 Type-A/C and M.2: Ultra-speedy transfers for faster gaming
I think this is a positive thing to be bringing to market. With the last 4 revisions of the Xeon E3 being used as i7 replacements in gaming machines, it's pretty much a no-brainer to make this board and keep that market tapped, rather than fold to Intel's arbitrary limitations. Obviously there will be some downsides to using the C232 chipset rather than a 100 series chipset, (I/O appears to suffer) but it's not likely to impact performance negatively.
Limitations appear to be:
No SLI support - PCI-E X16_2 limited to x4 max
Limited I/O
When PCIE x16_2 is occupied by x4 or faster devices, PCIE x1_1 and PCIE x1_2 will be disabled
No ECC DIMM support
ASUS claims the board is already available in the UK for around £120 ($179) but will likely be available elsewhere during Q1 2016.
Well skylake in general doesn't "fully" support SLI/Crossfire, since the there aren't enough PCI-E lanes on the cpu, hell even the 5820k can't do that. Still nice to see a manufacturer make a board with the Xeon E3 cpus in mind.
Skylake and Haswell mainstream cpu´s have 16 physical pci-e gen3 lanes directly connected to the cpu. You can basicly run sli / crossfire at 8x gen3 speeds. This should not realy be a limmitation for gpu performance, with the current gpu´s we have on the market right now.
Tobad that intel has locked down the ability to run the new skylake Xeon´s on consumer boards. This new Asus "consumer" E3 board is ofc a cool idea, but it does not make that much sense to me. Because you get way to much limmited in terms of feutures.
You CONDESCENDING FUCK... haha jk fouquin but just saying this board fits a very small tiny niche market of people using xeons for gaming... which is a reminant from the haswell days. Intel is probably going to lower the performance of the equivalent parts and limit the chipsets from here on out to avoid that. Which I 100 percent approve of
This is for people who will buy the Xeon E3-1240 V5, a non-IGP quad-core hyperthreaded chip, but with the clockrates of the i5-6600. If prices on Skylake chips weren't being skewed it would cost $285, about $60 more than the i5-6600, but $30 less than the i7-6700 (non-K).
I'm sure a 1231V5 will appear at $245 and be a 3.4-3.8GHz non-IGP chip, and it will be a better deal to pick up a "gaming" C232 board with a 1231V5.
As it is you save around $50 on this platform, and get a full Skylake quad-core in return. I hope more brands follow and we get a price-to-performance war going on at the $140 price range, essentially opening up a market for $850 Xeon gaming machines that can offer equivalent features and performance to a $1000-1200 i5/i7 machine. A market that technically has existed for the past 4 years.
Hmm Interesting. I was gonna do a 1230v5 build until I read about the server chipset bs. Still up in the air with what I want to do. Decisions Decisions. This, wait for Zen, possibly this (http://pcpartpicker.com/p/Tn4Kzy)
If you're using a consumer chipset. There are different requirements and workloads in an enterprise environment.
This motherboard is simply pointless from a practical point of view.
EDIT: On second thought, if you're only using a Xeon with the C232 chipset for gaming, this is still a bad idea. But if you game and also do other CPU intensive tasks this could be not such a bad idea if it ends up being cheaper than an i7.
