More Details Surface on EVGA’s Dual-Socket W555

At CES held a couple of months ago, there were motherboard vendors all over showing off their latest wares, but there was no motherboard that grabbed as much attention as EVGA’s W555. It’s for good reason, too, given that it’s a dual-socket enthusiast offering, to be equipped with LGA1366-based Xeons, including the upcoming Gulftown six-core models.

Since CES, though, there hasn’t been a lot of open talk from EVGA about its release, final features, and so forth, but our friend Anshel Sag from Bright Side of News* spotted lots of interesting tidbits from EVGA’s own forums. For those unaware, legendary overclocker Shamino, real-name Peter Tan, was snapped up by EVGA just over a year ago, and it’s he who is largely responsible for making sure this board is awesome.

One major question floating around about this board is whether or not it would accept desktop Core i7 chips. As I mentioned in our original news post about this board back during CES, the answer was no, given that the chipset being used strictly wants Xeon parts only. But it was rumored that at least one Core i7 could be used, but that’s not the case either. While both sockets don’t have to be utilized at the same time, a dual-QPI processor must be used, which leaves desktop Core i7’s in the no-fly zone.

As far as overclocking goes, there are going to be limitations, but seemingly few. The major one of them all will be locked DRAM/Uncore multipliers, which is a hardware limitation (likely due to the chipset, not the CPUs). As far as BCLK goes, though, there will be no real limitation. Peter does note that 205MHz can be reached on air, but anything as high as 230MHz or above will require liquid nitrogen. That’s ok… I’d personally be fine with 200MHz.

The board’s actual dimensions have finally be revealed also, at 381mm by 345mm. Don’t think that sounds too large? Well, it is, and it’s not going to fit in about 99.5% of chassis out there. But, it’s facts like that, that make this board just more interesting! It’s going to be exclusive, but nobody ever thought otherwise.

The ECC and non ECC functionality allow for people to use high frequency unbuffered DDR modules like the 48GB DDR3-1600 Kingston HyperX modules we’ve got running in our Nehalem-EP setup in Singapore. This feature caters to both the enterprise/server crowd as well as the gaming/overclocking crowds. More importantly, this reminds us of legendary Abit BP6 motherboard that catered to Photoshop and Premiere users, that simply need affordable workstation that used regular Desktop processors.