ASRock today introduced the W790 WS R2.0 motherboard for workstations powered by 4th Gen Intel Xeon W-3400 and W-2400 series processors in the Socket LGA4677 package. Although its model name suggests that it is a revision of the W790 WS, the new W790 WS R2.0 appears to be a lite version of the original, which removes several I/O features. To begin with, the fancy I/O shroud makes way for bare connectors, where you can see several of the connectors stripped away. While the CPU VRM appears unchanged, the VRM heatsinks used on the R2.0 are of a simpler design. The design effort behind both these changes appears to be to make the board friendly to certain kinds of rackmount chassis.
Besides the design changes, the ASRock W790 WS R2.0 loses out on Thunderbolt 4, Wi-Fi 6E, and only has a single 10 GbE interface instead of dual-10 GbE on the original W790 WS. These aside, the W790 WS R2.0 is still a very capable workstation motherboard for the platform it’s based on. It draws power from a combination of 24-pin ATX, two 8-pin EPS, and a 6-pin PCIe power; and uses a 22-phase CPU VRM. The board features four PCI-Express 5.0 x16 slots (x16/NC/x16/NC or x16/NC/x8/x8 or x8/x8/x8/x8), and one PCI-Express 4.0 x16 (electrical x4). The CPU socket is wired to eight memory slots, supporting quad-channel DDR5 memory, with support for DDR5 RDIMM-3DS, a total memory capacity of 2 TB, and a maximum overclocked memory speed of DDR5-6800.