ASUS P5E64 WS Professional

BIOS:

The P5E64 WS Professional uses an AMI BIOS and while this motherboard is catered towards the workstation market it does include the usual assortment of tweaking and overclocking features for being a product of ASUS. The FSB can be adjusted from 200MHz to 800MHz, CPU voltage from 0.85V to 1.90V, the DDR3 RAM voltage from 1.50 to 2.78V, and the Northbridge voltage from 1.25V to 1.91V.

System Setup:

We have tested many Intel X38 and X48 Express motherboards and with not a single one had we run into any compatibility issues with this chipset, even going back to the early X38 motherboards from last year. Did the ASUS P5E64 WS Professional break this pattern of success? Nope. This motherboard had worked like a charm with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. When it comes to the LM_Sensors detection, it had no problem picking up the Winbond ASIC onboard and it had properly detected the VCore, +3.33V rail, five fan monitors, and all three temperature sensors. All that was missing was the +5.00V and +12.00V rails.

Our test system consisted of an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, 2GB of OCZ DDR3-1333MHz memory, Seagate 160GB SATA 2.0 hard drive, NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX 512MB graphics card, and a SilverStone Zeus ST75ZF power supply. We were using the stock package set with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS 32-bit, which includes the Linux 2.6.24 kernel and an X Server 1.4.1 pre-release. Overclocking usually isn't a main focus with workstation motherboards, but using the ASUS P5E64 WS Professional we had no problems pushing this 3.00GHz dual-core "Wolfdale" processor past 4GHz with ease. Our limiting factor was just the air-based cooling solution for the processor.

For benchmarking this workstation motherboard we had used the PCQS Motherboard Suite with Phoronix Test Suite 1.0.5. Tests included Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Demo, Nexuiz, OpenArena, X-Plane 9, timed PHP compilation, timed Apache compilation, timed Gzip compilation, LAME MP3 encoding, GnuPG file encryption, IOzone, OpenSSL, RAMspeed, and Sunflow Rendering System. The motherboards we had used for comparison were the Gigabyte X48T-DQ6, Super Micro C2SBX+, and the ASUS P5E3 Premium.