ASUS P5E64 WS Professional

Conclusion:

We have been accustomed to checking out ASUS's enthusiast-grade motherboards, but with our encounter of the ASUS P5E64 WS Professional, we were left delighted. This X38-based motherboard had no Linux compatibility problems (aside from the +5V and +12V rails not being detected through LM_Sensors), was an absolutely stable system, had performed competitively with the newer X48 motherboards (in some cases the P5E64 had even won), and had posed no other problems. In addition, it has an excellent feature set with four PCI Express x16 slots, compatibility with Intel's newest processors, comprehensive overclocking capabilities, and an elaborate cooling solution. The four PCI Express x16 graphics cards do support ATI CrossFireX, which soon will be supported under Linux.

In addition to our routine motherboard tests, for this workstation motherboard we had done some additional testing such as extended compilation testing by building the GNOME desktop with GARNOME and running SPECViewPerf 9 for several hours. With everything we had thrown at it, this motherboard still remained stable and was performing great with Ubuntu Linux. So what is there to not like about this motherboard? Well, not much. The only hiccup we had run into were the +5V and +12V rails not being detected by LM_Sensors, but ASUS isn't at fault because it's just an issue with LM_Sensors and the Winbond W83627DHG-A ASIC. Aside from that, we love this feature-rich motherboard. It's as simple as that. The retail ASUS P5E64 WS Professional motherboard can be found for about $270 USD, which is really an exceptional value considering the feature set, workstation target, and other Intel X38 motherboards are still going for $200~300+ USD.

For pricing and more information on ASUS motherboards (and other products), check out TestFreaks.com.