In spite of their size and thanks to the low-profile VRMs and Conductive Polymer Capacitors that are part-and-parcel of ASUS' 8-Phase Power Design, there’s ample room around the Intel LGA775 processor socket for most oversized CPU coolers (check the manufacturer for the CPU cooler’s website and measure first—just to be safe). All of the heatsinks are tied together with a series of nickel-plated copper heatpipes to wick away additional heat. If you happen to turn the board over, you’ll see the ASUS Stack 2 Cool logo silk-screened underneath the CPU socket. Stack 2 Cool is ASUS' patented technology that transfers heat to the back of the specially designed PCB for better heat dissipation.

Overall, this cooling solution is vastly superior to one that relies solely on heatsinks for passive cooling, or those augmented by noisy, clip-on failure-prone fans. Unless you plan on throwing it on the barbie, keeping the ASUS P5E64 WS Evolution cool and quiet shouldn’t be a problem.

The board has an 8-pin EATX12V Auxiliary Power Connector. While it ships with a removable plug that allows the safe connection of an older 4-pin ATX12V, I would strongly recommend that if you’re going to spend the kind of money for a board like the Evolution to begin with, do yourself a favor and invest in a quality power supply with an 8-pin EATX12V connector—one that’s rated at least 620W—preferably more. No doubt, you’ll be upgrading components more than once during the lifetime of your P5E64 WS Evolution. That’s what ASUS engineered it for, so don’t skimp on a good power supply that can easily handle those future upgrades.

As workstation motherboards are typically used in systems performing mission-critical tasks, paying close attention to RAM that is certified and tested to work with them is more essential than with a budget or enthusiast-level motherboard. The ASUS P5E64 WS Evolution is no exception.

Four color-coded DIMM slots can feed the ASUS P5E64 WS Evolution with up to 8GB of DDR3 1800(O.C.)/1600/1333/1066/800 ECC and non-ECC un-buffered RAM. More than enough for any desktop system running demanding memory-hungry applications, particularly under 64-bit operating systems that can take full advantage of memory over 2GB. For optimal performance and reliability, it is preferable to fill the blue channel slots first, then the black ones.

Board layout is excellent on the ASUS P5E64 WS Evolution, and expansion is plentiful—thanks to four PCI Express x16 Expansion Slots. The blue ones are compliant with the new high bandwidth PCIe 2.0 standard, performing full x16 data transfers. The black ones are “Universal” PCI Express x16 slots—but with a “maximum” link speed of only x4 or x1, depending on what is plugged into them at the time. In addition, they are only PCIe 1.1 compliant.

The P5E64 WS Evolution supports AMD/ATI Cross Fire Multi-GPU technology—though Cross Fire would only be worth it using the blue x16 slots. While you could pop two more video cards in the P5E64 WS Evolution for some serious multi-display monitor action (not an unlikely scenario on a PC configured as a workstation), video cards installed in the black slots would be hobbled at the slower x4 bus speed. The P5E64 WS Evolution is also equipped with two standard PCI slots and a single PCIe x4_1.

Look closely behind and next to each expansion slot on the motherboard. You might need a magnifying glass (or some damn-good bifocals) to see “DET_X” followed by the slot designation silk-screened on the motherboard, next to a small LED. This is the ASUS Slot Detector I mentioned earlier. If an add-on card is not plugged properly into the slot, the corresponding LED will light up bright red and grab your attention—a highly useful feature that can save you a fried expansion card, motherboard—or both.

In addition to the CPU Fan, there are five additional fan headers. The CPU Fan has a 4 pin PWM header, while all the others are standard 3-pin. The ATAPI/EIDE, Floppy and EATX Power connectors are clustered along the front edge of the board. While the arrangement is a bit tight, it shouldn’t cause any major cable management problems, and is much better than the ASUS P5K PRO I reviewed back in April.

Also aligned along the front edge of the P5E64 WS Evolution are eight SATA ports—the six blue ones are under the management of the Intel ICH9R South Bridge, while the Marvell 88SE6145 is in charge of the two black SATA ports, the ATAPI/EIDE controller, and the two eSATA ports at the back of the board. The low-profile SATA ports are mounted at a 90° angle. This arrangement allows you to make full use of all the ports, even with full-length video cards installed. It also makes data and power cable management for the drives much less problematic.

Next to the System Board Power LED, the CLRTC (Clear Real Time Clock) Jumper for clearing the CMOS, is directly above the one responsible for Chassis Intrusion Detection. While not an ideal arrangement as it wouldn’t take much to move the wrong jumper, it’s better than some boards which place the jumper elsewhere on the mobo, where getting to it is usually a pain. Unless of course you happen to have a full-length, double-wide video card installed in the last PCIe slot or the PCI slot before it—in which case getting to it could very well be a pain.

Directly below, we have the 20-8 pin System Panel header for hooking up the wires to your case’s Power Button, Reset Switch, Power LED, System Warning Speaker and HD Activity LED—which will be a much easier task thanks to the ASUS Q-Connector. Next to that is the TPM header. To the left of the TPM header running along the left edge of the P5E64 WS Evolution, you’ll find two USB headers that provide connectivity for 4 USB 2.0 ports. Further left of those, are the COM1 and IEEE-1394a headers. Hopefully, your case has a cable long enough for the Front Panel Audio Connector which, like the audio ports on the P5E64 WS Evolution’s rear I/O cluster, supports both HD and legacy AC’97 audio via the Analog Devices ADI 1988B 8-channel “Azalia” audio codec—the connector is near the back of the fourth and final PCIe x16 slot.

Working our way upward along the rear edge of the board, there’s an Optical Drive Audio Connector for CD and DVD drives, TV Tuner and MPEG cards. Such a connector is hardly used much anymore, but if you do use it, be advised that a video card installed the first blue PCIe x16 slot—which is the primary video card slot—will partially obscure the connector. If you do use the connector, it's gonna be a tight fit, and you'll need to remove the video card when connecting/disconnecting a cable from it. A short distance from that, is yet another USB 2.0 header that will provide dual USB port connectivity.

The rear I/O panel has just about every connector you might want for the P5E64 WS Evolution. PS2 keyboards may be a thing of the past these days, but they aren’t quite extinct yet, as this proves. That’s why, starting from the left of the Evolution’s rear I/O panel, you’ll find a PS2 Keyboard port. Beneath it are two USB 2.0 ports. Next in line is a Coaxial S/PDIF Out port with an Optical S/PDIF Out port. The LAN1 RJ-45 port is supported by a Marvell 88E8056 PCI Express Gigabyte Ethernet Controller, and beneath it are two more USB 2.0 ports.

Next up is an IEEE-1394a port and beneath it, two Marvell eSATA ports for external SATA hard drives. If you want to create a RAID array higher than RAID 0 or 1 (RAID 10 and 5) on the P5E64 WS Evolution, you’ll need to have the Marvell controller set to RAID in the BIOS. Two drives on the internal black SATA ports and two more external drives connected to these eSATA ports (as per ASUS the Marvell RAID drivers and management console should be loaded under Windows as well).

The LAN2 RJ-45 port is supported by a Marvell Gigabit Ethernet 88E8001-family 32-bit PCI Controller. Can you guess what’s beneath that? Yep—two more USB 2.0 ports. Counting the headers on the motherboard, the ASUS P5E64 WS Evolution has 12 USB 2.0 ports for you to play with! Lastly, there’s the color-coded analog Audio Port block, which supports 2,4,6 and 8-channel audio configurations for whatever your particular speaker system might be. The included SoundMAX software has an auto-sensing feature that detects when you’ve plugged the audio jack from speakers or headphones into one of the ports, presenting you with choices for your particular speaker or headphone set-up, advising you if you’re using the wrong port.

Setup

When reviewing and testing motherboards, CPU coolers and similar hardware that usually requires a lot of parts swapping in the process, I find it much faster and easier to use HighSpeed’s PC Top Deck Station rather than a regular PC case. As a result, I had the ASUS P5E64 WS Evolution and supporting hardware physically installed on the Top Deck Station test bench in under 30 minutes with a 3.0GHz E8400 Core 2 Duo Processor, the new ASUS Lion Square CPU Cooler (look for a review of it here soon), an ASUS EN8800 GTS TOP 512MB Video Card, and an OCZ 2GB “Titanium Series” Dual Channel DDR3 RAM Kit straight off the ASUS Motherboard Qualified Vendor List for the Evolution board.

Windows Vista Ultimate Edition SP1 was installed on a pair of Western Digital 74GB 10,000 RPM Raptor hard drives striped in a RAID 0 array, along with all the rest of the software used for the tests. Although Vista SP1 has native support for Intel’s ICH9R RAID controller, I installed all the Vista drivers—including Intel’s RAID drivers and chipset software, along with all the other utilities and software from the Support DVD. This is what an average user building a system would usually do, and it’s a good way to see if the just how well-behaved the drivers and software shipped with the board, are (I still recommend downloading and using the latest drivers and upgraded utilities, though).

I used the ASUS InstAll wizard for the drivers, which can install all of them for you in one shot. The process works well, and reboots the PC as necessary. The only thing it can’t do is log you back into Windows if you have a password set, after a reboot. If you do, it’s best not to take a break too far from your PC. Otherwise, if you take off for an hour and come back expecting all of the drivers to be installed, you’ll find that’s not the case.

You can also use ASUS InstAll for the ASUS utilities and other software. However, InstAll will not automatically install PhotoImpact, WinDVD and PowerBackup (they are grayed out on the InstAll menu). To install them, you must do it the good old-fashioned way by navigating to their respective folders on the Support DVD, and launching their setup executables.

In both instances, you also have the option of running ASUS InstAll in Custom mode where you can select what to install—or not. One good feature about InstAll is that it displays whether or not the driver or program is already installed, and its version number. Not only does this make it quick and easy for you to determine whether what you’ve installed is the latest, it can help you avoid installing older versions of software and drivers over newer ones with the resulting version conflict issues that will make your system unstable. If there’s a downside to ASUS InstAll, it’s that it can be somewhat slower than just installing the drivers and software yourself. If you’re not in a hurry, though, it’s really no big deal.

Driver and software installation went without a hitch, as I expected it would. ASUS PC Probe II surprised me this time. When I tried it on the ASUS P5K PRO, you’ll recall that it reported some pretty wild temperatures for that board, even after updating to the latest version from ASUS’ website. On the P5E64 WS Evolution, both the Support DVD version (v1.4.0.29) and the newest version from the web (v1.04.46) everything was spot-on without any false alarms.

Unfortunately, it was the exact opposite with ASUS AI Suite, which worked just fine on the P5K PRO but turned out to be a real nightmare on the Evolution—even after updating it to the latest version from ASUS’ website (v1.03.29). AI Gear3 was the biggest problem. Calibrating the Auto mode and switching between the other four modes (Turbo, High Performance, Medium Power Saving and Max Power Saving) almost always caused a blue screen crash. AI Booster would back-door all kinds of crazy overclock settings when I wanted to do was disable its overclock setting so I could evaluate AI Gear 3—which needs to have any overclock settings via the BIOS or AI Booster turned off to work. No small feat since AI Booster would just overclock the system again as soon as Windows loaded, no matter how I had it set and no matter how many times I turned off what it did in the BIOS. And just when everything appeared to settle down (finally), and whatever demons that were plaguing it, had been exorcised, AI Booster began resetting the BIOS to factory defaults on power-downs and reboots, turning off the RAID setting for the hard drives necessary for me to boot into Windows. That's when I decided enough was enough, and I removed AI Suite for the duration of the review.

Another “gotcha” I ran into, was with the SoundMAX BlackHawk Control Panel for the P5E64 WS Evolution’s Analog Devices ADI 1988B codec. First, I have to say that the Analog Devices ADI 1988B provides some of the best sound I’ve ever heard from onboard audio so far, coming pretty close to what you’d get using an add-on sound card. And the BlackHawk panel with its hi-tech “stealth fighter” design looks much better than some of the more cheesy and gaudy ones that are usually bundled with motherboards. I was stuck using the Jazz preset because I could not select the others from the BlackHawk’s drop down menu or the system tray applet. Worse still, the drivers from the ASUS DVD are the latest ones. After searching Google, I found that the problem is an issue with Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista on some motherboards using the ADI 1988B.

Every brand new motherboard that hits the market is bound to have some annoyances and issues in its early stages that are resolved with BIOS and driver/software updates from the motherboard vendor. I don't expect that the ASUS P5E64 WS Evolution will be any different. Thankfully everything was smooth-sailing as I pressed on with the review.