ASUS ROG Dominus Extreme Xeon W-3175X Motherboard Supporting 192GB DDR4 Gets Priced
Intel recently announced its Xeon W-3175W processor, a beastly workstation chip based on Skylake-SP with 28 physical cores and 56 threads of computing muscle. It's big, it's burly, and of course it's expensive—$2,999 when buying in bulk (that's the price per chip in 1,000-unit trays). What about an accompanying motherboard? ASUS launched its ROG Dominus Extreme, and as you might imagine, it's not cheap either.
"The W-3175X normally runs at 3.2GHz with a Turbo frequency of 4.3GHz. However, during our overclocking exploits, we successfully pushed the CPU to a stable 6.5GHz on all cores using LN2. ROG is one of only two companies selected to work with Intel on motherboards for this monstrous CPU, and the ROG Dominus Extreme shows what’s possible when our engineers have the freedom to go beyond traditional boundaries," ASUS says.
ASUS did not announce official pricing for ROG Dominus Extreme, but over at CompSource, it's listed for $1,799.99. Interestingly, Newegg has the Xeon W-3175W listed a bit below MSRP, at $2,977.99. Still, that means you're looking at forking over nearly $4,800 for the CPU and motherboard alone—yikes!
Of course, Intel didn't design the Xeon W-3175X for mere mortals who want to generate spreadsheets by day and play games at night. it's a workstation processor that is best suited for professionals who need some serious compute power.
That said, enthusiasts and power users with the requisite coin are invited to the party, and that appears to be the target demographic for the ROG Dominus Extreme. It's a massive circuit board measuring 14 x 14 inches (EEB form factor), with a dozen DDR4 DIMM slots supporting up to 192GB of RAM. The excess doesn't stop there, however,
It also features four PCIe x16 slots with support for 4-way SLI and CrossFire. On the storage side, it has half a dozen SATA 6Gbps ports powered by Intel's C621 chipset and two more that are powered by an ASMedia controller, plus a pair of ROG DIMM.2 connectors and two U.2 connectors.
"Designing the Dominus took much longer than is typical for ROG motherboards, and we’re not just talking about its 32 power stages or ability to support two PSUs. The styling had to be perfect as well, and little touches put it a cut above any of our other boards. The armor starts with molten aluminum, which is molded and then anodized to add a more premium finish," ASUS says.
RGB lighting and a 1.77-inch LiveDash OLED display are part of the package as well. It's one heck of a motherboard, and if you load it up, you could easily assemble a PC that runs north of $10,000. It's nice to dream, isn't it?
