ASUS Danshui Bay counts as one motherboard, but it is anything but an ordinary one. As a member of the ASUS ROG family Danshui Bay is currently only a prototype and we honestly don’t know that much about it, but we do know it has both a LGA2011 and a LGA1366 socket, and more memory slots than you can count.
ASUS presented the concept board during a press event at Computex and was very quiet about the details and the launch date, but Q4 soonest considering the LGA2011 socket. We don’t know if the sockets complete each other, but the question is why this board even exists and what it has to do in the ASUS Republic of Gamers family?
If we are to venture a guess we would tip that ASUS is working on a motherboard that can power two different systems, kind of like DFI’s Hybrid motherboard from last year. We are skeptic though as to why you would want to combine the two enthusiast platforms and especially the elderly LGA1366. A combination of a powerful platform and a more energy efficient such makes more sense, but that the same time we can’t say for certain what ASUS is planning, or even if it is just a PR stunt.
ASUS Danshui Bay is at least armed to the teeth and offers 14 DDR3 memory slots (6 for LGA1366 and 8 for LGA2011), but also 22 (!) SATA ports and 4 Gigabit Ethernet connectors. Exactly which graphics card combinations that are supported ASUS did not reveal, but it does support PCI Express 2.0 and PCI Express 3.0.
ASUS Danshui Bay is most likely a totally unnecessary design project, but one that does make you smile. That it has included a blessing of Japan is certainly worth mentioning.
Source: ComputerBase.de
