ASUS, a company that, as of late, has been concentrating mostly on its moneymaking product lineup with the Eee family, has just remembered that it is also among the world's leading motherboard makers. This is precisely why the Taiwanese manufacturer has decided to roll out two new products, with each being designed for a different market segment. The just introduced P5N7A-VM and P6T WS Professional motherboards have been built to deliver support for Intel's current and upcoming processor lineups, by integrating the new GeForce 9300 + nForce 730i chipset combo and the Intel X58 next-generation chipset.
These motherboards are generations apart one from the other in terms of features and performance potential. While the P5N7A-VM has been designed with an integrated graphics processor, the X58-based P6T WS Professional motherboard is set to provide support for Intel's upcoming Core i7 processors for a high level of computing power in a workstation computer system.In terms of specifications, the new GeForce 9300-enabled motherboard from ASUS is rather a standard implementation of NVIDIA's latest Intel-supporting chipset. The board is equipped with four memory DIMMs that can support a maximum of 16GB of DDR2 memory. There's only a single PCI-Express X16 graphics slot with support for Hybrid SLI setup. Users will be able to benefit from up to five SATA 3GB/s for storage, one eSATA port with support for RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and JBOD, and an UltraDMA 133 connector. The backpanel features six USB 2.0 ports, out of a total of twelve that are available through the board's chipset.Things aren't as specific where the X58-based mobo is concerned, because Intel is yet to officially unveil all the details of its next-generation desktop platform. However, from what we can see in the product's image, users will get the usual six memory DIMMs with support for triple-channel DDR3 memory, along with two PCI-Express X16 graphics slots with support for both SLI and CrossFireX technologies, two PCI-X slots and one PCI.
Both boards also feature ASUS' proprietary ExpressGate utility, which allows users to boot into a non-Windows OS in just 5 seconds. This will make it possible for them to go online and benefit from a suite of entertainment options without having to wait for a full Windows boot.