Intel’s Xeon E3-1200 V5 series processors aren’t compatible with Intel’s consumer chipsets. Instead, the latest Xeon processors pair with Intel’s C232 chipset, which was specifically engineered for the new Xeons. ASRock believes there’s a market for these processors in the gaming and workstation categories and has announced that it will be launching a board for each segment.
The ASRock Fatal1ty E3V5 Performance Gaming/OC motherboard is equipped with the typical features found on the company’s other gaming motherboards with the exception of on-board graphics, which the Xeon processors don’t support at all.
The Fatal1ty E3V5 Performance Gaming/OC board comes equipped with the same exclusive features included with all Fatal1ty boards: Key Master, which lets you create custom macros; F-Stream, a software suite that includes overclocking tools and other tweaks; and the Fatal1ty Mouse Port, which lets you adjust the mouse polling rate from 125Hz to 1000Hz using F-Stream. The Fatal1ty E3V5 Performance Gaming/OC board also features Gaming Armor, Super Alloy, ASRock Hyper BCLK Engine and DDR4 Non-Z OC. The board supports both standard and ECC memory.
ASRock also announced the E3V5 WS, a workstation board that also supports standard and ECC DDR4 memory modules. ASRock has engineered the board to be compatible with Nvidia Quadro and AMD FirePro graphics cards. ASRock has also equipped the E3V5 WS with Intel’s I219LM LAN chipset for server-grade network connectivity and OS support.
ASRock has not yet revealed pricing and availability of these new C232 chipset motherboards but it did say the WS board would follow the Fatal1ty release and that both would launch after Christmas, so it shouldn’t be long before we have those details.
