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Asus puts PCI-X slot on Nvidia 780a board
Calls it a workstation motherboard
Asus is getting ready to announce yet another Nvidia-based AMD motherboard, although this one comes with a slight twist, it has a PCI-X slot. PCI-X is generally found in servers and workstations, and as such the name for this upcoming motherboard is the M3N-WS, WS standing for workstation.
We're not quite sure if this board will use the 780a or 750a chipset, as it's hard to tell just by looking at a picture, but either which way, this board features an N200 chip. The rest of the slots consists of a x16 PCIe, two x1 PCIe and two PCI slots.
Other features appear to include at least six rear USB 2.0 ports, 7.1-channel sound with optical and coaxial S/PDIF, dual Gigabit Ethernet, a D-sub connector and maybe even HDMI, six SATA ports, headers for six more USB 2.0 ports and two FireWire ports and, of course, supports for AM2+ processors.
With a cheap triple or quad core processor from AMD, this could be a decent enough entry level workstation board for those that need to use a PCI-X card, but it looks more like a normal consumer board with an extra slot that not many will use rather than a real workstation board.