Asus Z270 WS

[NumLock21]

New workstation board from Asus for Kaby Lake.

• Socket 1151 for Kaby Lake and previous gen Skylake
• DDR4, 64GB max, up to 3866mhz (oc)
• nvidia 4 way sli or amd 4 way cfx, with single at x16, dual at x16/x16, triple at x16/x8/x8, and quad at x8/x8/x8/x8
• 6x sata ports, 2x m.2, where one of them supports both pcie and sata drives, and 2x u.2 ports
• Intel rapid storage, smart response technologies, and Intel optane ready
• Supports raid 0, 1, 5, 10
• 8+4+2 digital power phase
• Back side you get Dual gigabit lan, usb 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, bios flash back, video outputs, optical, and 8 channel audio
• Onboard power, reset switch, q-code diagnostic, 5x 4pin fan headers + 5pin fan extension, 1x aio, 1x rgb, and front usb 3.1 type c 

 

 

https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Z270-WS/specifications/

 

 

[historicalpoultry]

Yes please. Do I need it? No. Do I want it? Yes.

[tlink]

what is the use for a board like this? who is it targeted at?

[TheRandomness]

8+4+2? What? Is that another way of saying 12+2?

[Antony Leung]

34 minutes ago, tlink said:

what is the use for a board like this? who is it targeted at?

Looks like is for any mainstream consumer. 

[tlink]

1 minute ago, Antony Leung said:

Looks like is for any mainstream consumer. 

four way sli does not exactly look like mainstream consumer to me, thats what mainly is confusing me.

[Antony Leung]

4 minutes ago, tlink said:

four way sli does not exactly look like mainstream consumer to me, thats what mainly is confusing me.

ok, but the looks of the motherboard is not themed as a gamer or anything, it looks like any mainstream consumer motherboard, but thinking about that. it looks like a server type of motherboard too..

 

maybe that's the answer.

[NumLock21]

16 minutes ago, TheRandomness said:

8+4+2? What? Is that another way of saying 12+2?

They're saying that based on the number of VRMs it has in each row. There is 8 on the top and 4 on the side, and 2 near the ATX power for the rams.

 

10 minutes ago, tlink said:

four way sli does not exactly look like mainstream consumer to me, thats what mainly is confusing me.

This is a prosumer board, for work related purposes. Not your typical home browsing and LOL gaming.

[TheRandomness]

1 minute ago, NumLock21 said:

They're saying that based on the number of VRMs it has in each row. There is 8 on the top and 4 on the side, and 2 near the ATX power for the rams.

 

This is a prosumer board, for work related purposes. Not your typical home browsing, gaming

Then 12+2 makes more sense to say.

[The Benjamins]

10 minutes ago, tlink said:

four way sli does not exactly look like mainstream consumer to me, thats what mainly is confusing me.

It's for a high end workstation build. I like the look a lot more then the gamer stuff

[NumLock21]

1 minute ago, TheRandomness said:

Then 12+2 makes more sense to say.

The 8+4+2 is mentioned on their specs page. I guess 8+4+2 sound like you're getting more, even though 12+2 is the same thing and will make better sense.

Hooray for marketing!

 

 

[Bouzoo]

1 hour ago, NumLock21 said:

nvidia 4 way sli

This made me laugh. I know it's a workstation board, but it still did. 

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

44 minutes ago, TheRandomness said:

8+4+2? What? Is that another way of saying 12+2?

 

Most likely 8 vcore, 4 igpu, 2 ram

[NumLock21]

4 minutes ago, Bouzoo said:

This made me laugh. I know it's a workstation board, but it still did. 

But Quadro or Tesla 4 way SLI!

[patrickjp93]

4-way SLI on a Z-series board and no 10G NIC despite it being a WS board, in 2017... Epic fail Asus.

[RadiatingLight]

42 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

4-way SLI on a Z-series board and no 10G NIC despite it being a WS board, in 2017... Epic fail Asus.

4-Way SLI isn't something bad to have.

10G Ethernet is missing, but for most people, it's not very important.

[alexyy]

2 hours ago, tlink said:

four way sli does not exactly look like mainstream consumer to me, thats what mainly is confusing me.

Anyone that's wants more wouldn't invest that much on a consumer chipset, this board doesn't have an actual place in the market as far I'm concerned.

[pas008]

29 minutes ago, alexyy said:

Anyone that's wants more wouldn't invest that much on a consumer chipset, this board doesn't have an actual place in the market as far I'm concerned.

owner of p67ws and z87ws here

cant people have options for a system for work and play?

[asim1999]

The only thing that would be needed to make this board truly complete and perfect would be wifi and rgb for those who want it

[Prysin]

I like the looks of that. Please let there be a AM4 board looking that good

[VerticalDiscussions]

Show me the X299 boards.

 

 

[NumLock21]

1 hour ago, Prysin said:

I like the looks of that. Please let there be a AM4 board looking that good

Just picture the Intel socket as AM4 socket and viola, your looking at the AMD WS motherboard.

 

[Prysin]

2 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

Just picture the Intel socket as AM4 socket and viola, your looking at the AMD WS motherboard.

 

as if

[NumLock21]

1 minute ago, Prysin said:

as if

That how they did most of their AMD boards. Others did the same too, like MSI with their titanium.

 

[Marinatall_Ironside]

On 2/3/2017 at 7:32 AM, tlink said:

what is the use for a board like this? who is it targeted at?

Workstation boards are targeted at the "prosumer" or the actual professional content creators who can easily leverage multiple GPUs in their workflow, but don't necessarily need more than 4 cores and 8 threads (Adobe Premiere + CineForm).

 

If you need 10 Gigabit Ethernet, the Z270-WS does support 10G NIC cards that use either 1 or more RJ45 connector(s) or SFP+ Direct Attach Copper connectors. Not to mention motherboards like these are guaranteed to work with Nvidia Quadros (Nvidia Workstation GPUs) and AMD Radeon Pro GPUs (AMD Workstation GPUs), since there are applications that does work (and in some cases, better depending on driver support) with these kinds of GPUs. Normal motherboards like my Asus Rampage V Edition 10 may not work 100% of the time with Quadros or 10 Gigabit Ethernet adapters, so there is a risk of flaky driver support and/or the system will refuse to boot if I were to install one due to hardware incompatibility even though it physically fits into a PCIe slot.

 

Plus 10 Gigabit Ethernet chips are not exactly cheap. The X99-E-10G WS is USD $100 more than its X99-E WS predecessor (at USD $649.99), and USD $50 more than my Asus Rampage V Edition 10 at the time that I purchased it (I bought the latter at its full retail price of USD $599.99). So if the Z270-WS retails in the neighborhood of USD $349.99 (based on the Z170-WS) and follows the same pricing scheme as its bigger X99 cousin, the hypothetical Z270-10G WS will retail at around USD $449.99 just to add 10 Gigabit Ethernet via RJ45. Is it worth it? Personally no, and that's basing it on my current and future needs. But your mileage may vary.

 

One final thing to take into account is that the 10 Gigabit Ethernet card or chip takes 4 PCIe lanes from the chip, and the Intel Core i7-7700K is limited to 16 lanes and there is one PLX PEX8747 PCIe x48 Bridge Chip that adds 48 lanes on top of the 16 for a maximum expansion limit of 64. So subtract 4 for the 10G chip and you're down to 56. So it is entirely feasible to add a 10G chip on-board, but will it add unnecessary PCIe lane bottlenecks? I'm not sure because I'm no expert in that field and I don't have enough PCIe cards to even test that out.

 

And something like this is made to be put under stress constantly. That's why workstation boards from whoever made one has to be validated for 24/7/365 stability, especially server boards.

Edited February 5, 2017 by JurunceNK
Found name of the PLX Chip, corrected bridge chip specifications, and other edits.