Asus Z9PE-D8 WS Dual Socket Workstation Motherboard Review

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaGqhOfpiGg[/youtube]

Going back to the start of the review, workstation and server based products are a niche market in comparison to the mainstream consumer markets. This is why we focussed our attention towards testing this in a completely different environment. the consumer market and the programs that we would normally use are just not geared towards dual-socket boards and therefore cannot take full advantage of the power that was potentially available. This is why we specifically selected our tests based on those that could harness the power and those that couldn’t.

Should we grumble about the size of the board? Absolutely not, take into consideration that ASUS have packed two processor sockets on the board each with quad channel memory, and more than enough PCIe lanes and SATA ports to wave a stick at, all in a board thats 12″ x 13″ in size. That is impressive in my mind, and will still fit into a number of larger chassis with no issues – but of course check first! Styling wise, the board works well with its blues and aluminum colours with the odd white and black highlights on the power and SATA headers.

Moving onto the performance of the board, we can’t say anything as to how it fairs against the other options available on the market so for this part I will guage this bit against a top end consumer board for representation. As you may have guessed, this is not a high end gaming board, yes you can still play games on it, but don’t get any pre-expectations that you will have the power of two at your fingertips. Any form of rendering and CPU intensive tasks are where this not only flies but excels over and i7-3960x in our Rampage IV Extreme. Whilst some of the results had marginal differences, you have to look at the bigger picture with larger projects, the small differences that we found in our tests would be amplified greatly over a larger workload and this matters – a lot!

Unfortunately there is no real headroom for overclocking on this board with the Xeons that we used as they are locked and this is no fault of Asus, but with the little bit of BLCK head room that we had to play with, in all the rendering tests, this had a negative impact over having everything at stock with EIST enabled. Naturally this did favour more towards CPU intensive tasks, but choosing whether to overclock or not for me is a simple one and to be honest is not worth it with the Xeons.

If you are a home movie editor or student that is trying to get you projects edited quicker, then hold back a second as there is a significant cost involved and this is another reason why the enterprise market is what this is geared for. Lets start off with the biggest blow, the processors. Our two Intel Xeon E5-2670’s come with the price tag of around £1,200 – EACH! Add onto that the fact that you will need two sets of memory and coolers and you’re already taking mega bucks, but what about the board? Priced at £455.04, it is a lot cheaper than I was expecting and takes a bit off the blow that the processors punch.