ASUS P5W64 WS Professional Motherboard Review :: ASUS P5W64 WS Professional Layout

The layout on the board is very impressive and makes it fully one designed for the workstation enthusiast. The first thing you should note is that there is an eight-phase processor regulator that many of the high-end ASUS boards have. The 8-pin power connector is on the top right hand corner of the board, giving easy access to the PSU. The 24-pin power connector is in between the floppy drive connector and the PATA connector.

8-pin power

24-pin power

The North Bridge is covered by a heatsink connected to a heat pipe connected to a heatsink fin that covers some of the MOSFETs. The South Bridge is covered by a heatsink as well. The IDT chip is covered by a metal plate with the Quartet logo visible. There are three USB headers on the board, bringing the total to 10 available on the board. Two IEEE-1394 connectors are also present.

North Bridge

USB

COM1

ASUS labels the board Wall Street Quartet. This signifies that one of the primary uses of quad graphics cards is to increase desktop screen space. Financial analysts or people who use their computer to track the stock market require a lot of screen space to keep track of the myriad screens. My friend has used a Matrox Parhelia for four years precisely because it allowed him to use 3 monitors in spanning mode at once.

PWR and CPU Fan

Chassis Fan header

Front Panel headers

4 PCI Express x16 slots

The board has four fan headers including the one needed for the CPU fan. The necessity of using four graphics card slots on the board meant that the PATA port needed to be sideways. Also be aware that if you use long video cards like the 8800GTX two of the SATA ports may be blocked due to the position of the card in the slot. That is to be expected, as even some motherboards with just two slots sometimes have it conflict.