New Asus WS C246 Motherboard

[whispercat]

Anyone know when this might get released?

https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/WS-C246-PRO/

[awitko]

I'm curious to hear what people think of Asus and Supermicro boards and alternative motherboard platforms too for the new Xeon E, as well as expected availability.

Supermicro introduced X11SCA-W which seems better in that the second M.2 slot is x4 (full bandwidth for NVMe SSD) whereas the second M.2 for Asus is only x2 which seems to be directed to Optane sticks to speed up SATA drives. Also one Supermicro variant includes wireless and bluetooth. Supermicro has a second 3.0 front panel header and two usb 3.1 headers (one type A and one type C) whereas Asus only has one 3.0 header and no 3.1 headers.

https://www.supermicro.com/products/mot ... 1SCA-W.cfm

Is there any practical need for a second full speed M.2 that would actually noticeably affect performance? I think one 512GB Samsung 970 PRO should be all that one needs for quickly booting and loading apps. After that fast SATA SSDs such as Samsung 860 EVO may be more than fast enough. Any specific use cases where a second full speed M.2 might result in noticeable difference?

I realize ASUS is the more consumer oriented motherboard. Is there any practical difference between the two with respect to compatibility (BIOS, etc) with consumer oriented applications and devices. I am mostly going to be using this as a desktop workstation for business (e.g., office and cad software) but would like this to be as versatile as possible so be able to run games and virtual reality apps, for example. I probably will add a GTX 1080 or 1180 at some point.

Any difference with respect to sophistication of fan control -- building a profile that will control temperature as quietly as possible. I intend to use Noctua fans and the Seasonic fanless PSU.

Anything else one should consider in choosing the motherboard? Any new cases / components one should consider in building a silent PC these days?

Alex

[whispercat]

You could put a Samsung 970 Pro VMe PCIe SSD on each of those M.2 slots, and use them to store videos or video editing files on them.

I'm hoping this board gets released soon so I can read some reviews. Hopefully AsRock will do a C246 chip board too.

[awitko]

You could put a Samsung 970 Pro VMe PCIe SSD on each of those M.2 slots, and use them to store videos or video editing files on them.

Are you sure? The Asus website seems to go out of their way to say that the second M.2 slot is only x2 suitable for SATA drives. If that's the case I would think there is not much advantage to the second slot over a normal SATA SSD drive.

"Dual M.2 for up to 32Gbps performance and data redundancy
WS C246 PRO features dual M.2 slots to unleash maximum data-transfer performance. One M.2 slot supports up to 22110-length M.2 drives via PCIe Gen3 x4 for ultrafast data access, making it the perfect choice for an operating system or application drive. The other M.2 slot is suitable for SATA drives or Intel® Optane memory via PCIe Gen3 x2 support to speed up traditional hard drives."

https://www.asus.com/Commercial-Servers ... -C246-PRO/

On the other hand, the supermicro board seems to support two full speed M.2 slots.

[whispercat]

Hmm...interesting..on this anandtech article it lists two M.2 slots at 3.0x4 and says "or SATA?" for each.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13118/as ... s-c246-pro

Do most boards with two M.2 slots have both at full speed PCIe?