A little birdie tipped me off with some new information on a NVIDIA nForce4-based dual Opteron board from Abit that is due to be released in February.  The board specifications are pretty impressive, and include SLI support as well as 4 SATA II ports and dual Gigabit ethernet connections.  Even more interesting is the fact that I am told that this board does not require registered memory and will work with standard non-ECC and non-registered memory modules, saving considerable costs on system.  And with the prices of 200 series Opteron processors dropping to nearly $200, a dual CPU system could be reasonably priced!

Below I have exclusive images as well as the full motherboard specifications listed. 

Abit WN-2S+ Motherboard Preview - Motherboards 4

Abit WN-2S+ Motherboard Preview - Motherboards 5

Abit WN-2S+ Motherboard Preview - Motherboards 6

WN-2S+ Specification

2.1. Product Specification

CPU

l Supports 1600 MHz Hyper-Transport AMD Dual Opteron processors (1XX, 2XX series)

Chipset

l nVidia CrushK8-04 Pro Chipset

Memory

l Four 184-pin DIMM sockets ECC Registered memory.

l Supports Dual channel DDR 400/333 (Max. 8GB)

Graphics port

l PCI Express x16 graphics interface with SLI

SATA

l Supports 4 ports SATA II (from CK8-04 SLI)

Audio

l 5.1 Channel AC97 Audio (Realtek ALC658)

l Support 24-bit S/P DIF In/Out

l Jack Sensing support (Mic In / Line In / Line Out)

USB2.0

l 8-port USB 2.0 Supports 480 Mb/s data transfer rate

IEEE 1394

l Supports 3 Ports IEEE 1394a at 100/200/400 Mb/s transfer rate

LAN

l1 x Intel 82540EM Gigabit Ethernet controller

l1 x Cicada CIS8201 PHY with RGMII

l Support ACPI & Wake on LAN

ABIT Engineered

l ABIT SoftMenuTM Technology

Internal I/O Connectors

l 2 x PCI Express x16 slot

l 1 x PCI Express x4 slot (bandwidth support PCI-E x2)

l 1 x PCI Express x1 slot

l 1 x PCI slot

l 1 x SLI switch key connector

l 1 x Floppy port supports up to 2.88MB

l 4 x SATA connector

l 2 x Ultra ATA 133/100/66/33 connector

l 2 x Dual USB 2.0 headers (1 for front connection)

l 2 x IEEE 1394a headers

l 1 x FPIO header

l 1 x FP-Audio header

l 1 x NIC LED header

l 1 x SATA FPIO header

l 1 x CD-IN

l 1 x Com port header

Back Panel I/O

l 1 x PS/2 Keyboard + 1 x PS/2 Mouse

l 1 x Parallel Port connector

l 1 x S/PDIF IN, 1 x S/PDIF OUT

l 1 x Audio connector (Surround right/left, rear right/left, center/subwoofer)

l 1 x Audio connector (Line Out, Line-in, MIC-in)

l 1 x IEEE1394a port

l 2 x USB connectors + 1 x RJ-45 LAN Connector

l 2 x USB connectors + 1 x RJ-45 LAN Connector

 

Miscellaneous

l ATX form factor 12 ‘ x 10.5′(305 x 265 mm)