Table of Contents:
- NF200
- CUDA
- Diag LED
- ASUS Heartbeat
- GP Diagnosis card
- ASUS SASsaby card support
- LGA-1156
- Intel P55 Northbridge
- SLI
- PCIe 2.0
- Quad-GPU SLI and AMD CrossfireX support
- Tesla
- Dual Channel DDR3 2133 (OC)/1600/1333/1066 support
- ASUS TurboV EVO
- Auto Tuning
- ASUS Hybrid 16+3 Phase Power design
- T.Probe
- MemOK!
- ASUS EPU
- ASUS Fanless design
- Fan Xpert
- Stack Cool 2
- ASUS Onboard switch
- Q-connector
- Q-shield
- OC Profile
- EZ Flash 2
- IEEE-1394a
- S/PDIF
- GreenASUS
The P7P55 WS Supercomputer board is based upon Intel’s P55 chipset which supports the latest LGA-1156 CPUs including the Core i7 870 or Core i3 661 CPUs. The workstation aspect of the motherboard comes into play with the support of the Intel Xeon 34xx series of CPUs. These CPUs are designed to work with workstation boards based on the P55 chipset as well as Intel’s workstation motherboard
The Xeon 3400 series has a couple of features not found on the Corei series including ECC memory support. ECC memory allows for the memory to detect errors and correct them in systems. ECC memory is more expensive than regular memory as each bank of ECC memory has 9 chips of computing power. To facilitate this, ASUS has included a NF200 chip to offer the maximum number of PCI Express lanes to graphics cards in x16/x8/x8/x8 or 40 lanes compared to the 8 found on the P55 chipset.
Being a P55 chipset this board features all of the Xtreme Design features of their latest boards including the TurboV EVO processor, the Auto Tuning feature, their 16+3 phase power design, the T.Probe microchip and the Express Gate SSD operating system. The motherboard has 16-phase for the CPU and extra 3-phase power for the memory controller inside the CPU.
Reliability in motherboards is important for a workstation or server. To that end the ASUS P7P55 WS Supercomputer has specific features that include a Diagnostic LED that checks key components (CPU, DRAM, VGA card and HDD) in sequence during the motherboard booting process. This will tell the user where the root issue at boot is. A successful boot will result in a blue lighting that shines like a heartbeat.
Serial attached SCSI is a computer bus that is used to replace SCSI in workstations. The differences between SAS and SATA include the fact that SAS is full-duplex while SATA is half-duplex, systems identify SATA devices by their port number connected to the host bus while SAS devices are uniquely identified by their WWN, SAS supports tagged command queuing and SAS uses the SCSI command set while SATA uses the ATA command set and more. The P7P55 WS Supercomputer supports ASUS SASsaby devices which add support for SAS drives to the motherboard.
