Expanding the very small market of motherboards that don’t use Intel or AMD x86, Raptor Engineering have just released a new motherboard in the form of the Blackbird designed for an IBM Power9 CPU. The new motherboard is priced at around $800 but you can also add in a four core CPU for $1200.
The Blackbird mainboard features dual DDR4 ECC DIMM slots, one PCI Express 4.0 x16 slot, one PCI Express 4.0 x8 slot, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, 4 x SATA 3.0 ports, 4 x USB 3.0 ports, 1 x USB 2.0 port, and an HDMI display output. Although the motherboard is still expensive in hardware terms the new motherboard offers a significant reduction in price from the $3700 motherboard previously released by Raptor Engineering.
Specifications of the Blackbird motherboard include :
1 POWER9-compatible Sforza CPU socket
Supports up to an 8-core 160W TDP processor at full speed
Higher core count CPUs are not officially supported
Micro ATX form factor
2 DDR4 ECC registered RAM slots
Individual 128GB DDR4 DIMM support
Supports up to 256GB total main system memory
1 PCIe 4.0 x16 slot
1 PCIe 4.0 x8 slot
2 Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet ports
1 Isolated BMC Gigabit Ethernet port
1 Marvell SATA controller
4 6 Gb/s SATA ports
4 USB 3.0 ports
2 external
2 on internal header
1 USB 2.0 port
1 external RS-232 port
1 internal RS-232 port header
1 ASpeed BMC with OpenBMC
1 HDMI Full HD (2D) video port
1 CMedia 5.1 channel audio controller
External analog and S/PDIF output
S/PDIF over HDMI supported
Expected to ship late Q1 2019
For more details, full specifications and pre-ordering options on purchasing options jump over to the official Raptor Engineering website.
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