techpowerup Portwell Builds Intel Xeon Motherboard with 20 USB Ports

[axipher]

Tech Power-up

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Have you ever felt the need that your motherboard needs more ports? Different peripherals can occupy quite a lot of USB ports and almost fill up all of them quickly. That is where the Portwell PEB-9783G2AR motherboard comes into play. Being built on Intel's latest W480E/Q470E chipset designed to accommodate any 10th generation 10 core CPU with a TDP of up to 80 W, the board can run either a Xeon W CPU or regular Comet Lake-S Core CPU. However, what makes this board unique is not its chipset or anything, it is the number of USB ports present.

Portwell has put an astonishing 20 (you read that right) USB 3.1 Gen1 ports on the board, which you can run at a full 5 Gbit/s data signaling rate at the same time. The board doesn't use any splitting technology so you are getting the full bandwidth. To get that many ports to run at full capacity, Portwell has presumably re-routed chipset lanes for SATA 3 connectors and used them for USB ports, leaving only two SATA 3 ports. The board is built for the FlexATX form factor and features a sideways PCIe 3.0 port. Being built for Xeon, the board also features support for ECC memory and up to 128 GB of it. While the pricing is not yet available, you can get a quote on Portwell's website.

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Ars Technica

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Industrial PC company Portwell is offering an unusual server motherboard. The PEB-9783G2AR is a FlexATX board designed for use in low-profile chassis, supporting Intel Comet Lake-S CPUs and up to 128GiB of DDR4 ECC RAM. This, and the rest of the board's specs, are pretty normal—but then there's the 20 USB 3.2 type-A ports.

Yes, that's right, 20 USB ports. Sixteen of them are mounted on the motherboard itself and rear-facing; the other four are headers available for cable connections to chassis-mounted ports. Tom's Hardware covered this board and speculated that the massive array of USB ports would be useful to cryptocurrency miners for use with external GPUs (though some commenters disagreed).

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That's a lot of external hard drives.

 

At first when I saw this I thought those all might be PCIe x1 lanes via USB 3.0 cables to be used with external adapters, but nope, that's just a lot of USB ports.

 

Stick a 40 Gig network card in there and you've got quite a fancy ingest station for workplaces that need to upload/download lots of data to USB based devices.

• Big arrays of DVD/Blu-ray writers for backups of ripping
• SD/CompactFlash/RedMag's ingesting to a storage server
• External Hard Drive testing
• USB sensors

Edited September 22, 2020 by axipher

[ENTERPRISE]

This came up on my news feed today, great for simultaneous ripping/writing of content to DVD/Blue-ray but you would certainly need to ensure you have a CPU/HDD/GPU that can keep up (GPU If encoding work)

[axipher]

New source from ArsTechnica added to first post

 

Has some more interesting information