News BoT
RSS Feed
Joined: 11 May 2006
Posts: 32637
 |
 Posted: Thu Jun 06, 2013 8:00 am Post subject: Computex 2013: ASRock Z87 with 22 SATA Ports |
  |
|
<p align="center"> </p><p><p>
For X79 and Z77 ASRock have released an Extreme11 model, known for being high price due to the integrated PLX and LSI 2308 RAID chips to provide extra PCIe lanes and eight more SATA ports. For Z87, ASRock have gone one step further – the Extreme11 for Haswell will be four way SLI and Crossfire capable, but with an LSI chip designed to handle 16 SAS/SATA ports:</p>
<p align="center">
</p>
<p>
We get six SATA 6 Gbps from the chipset, and 16 from the LSI chip. If these were all SATA 6 Gbps, then we might expect a maximum peak speed in RAID-0 of 11 GBps, pushing the bandwidth of what I would assume is the PCIe 3.0 x8 required for the LSI chip harder than ever before. But the peak speeds showcased by ASRock were half this value at 5.5 gigabytes per second, suggesting that these LSI ports may be SATA 3 Gbps limited. Unfortunately I did not take a picture of what LSI chip was on board, although it does say SAS3 capable, which makes me wonder if it is not the 2308 or one that splits the SATA 6 Gbps into two SATA 3 Gbps.</p>
<p>
I did ask about how many PLX chips were onboard – I was told one, which would suggest 32 lanes total when used in the normal configuration. This would mean that 4-way SLI and the LSI chip would not be possible, unless used in an abnormal configuration, such as the EVGA Z77 FTW which allocated only 8 lanes to the PLX to split into 32, and then we would have the other 8 for the LSI chip. </p>
<p>
No word on price or release date yet (it is not on their website), but I could imagine it might be hitting the $600 of the Z77 Extreme11, although that had an additional PLX chip. The extra cost of the newer LSI chip might counterbalance this.</p>
</p>
Read more...
Source: AnandTech
This channel features the latest computer hardware related articles. |
|
