Its well-known fact, that copper oxidizes with salt (sweaty palms). To prevent these reactions ASUS coated heat pipes with nickel and ribs with blue colored coating (paint). Heat pipe system is responsible for cooling CPU power unit, northbridge and southbridge with NEC chip (Nippon Electric Company, Japan – more on this latter). ASUS P5E64 WS Evolution gets all credits for cooling solution besides the fact that heat pipe system is attached to motherboard with plastic clip-on feet instead of metal screws.
There is enough space around CPU socket for implementation of bigger air cooling systems. Power supply unit is made as 8-phase model and it did great job for our test processor QX9770. There was no larger voltage drops than 0.015V – 0.02V, which is praiseworthy. But we are little bit disappointed when it comes to voltage filtration of chipset and DDR3 memory. In this case it was used only one phase model while at some older models was used better and more stabile 2-phased.

Workstation motherboards are intended at first place for advanced users, so it was natural to expect more SATA 2.0 inputs. Asus provided ten SATA 2.0 and, besides them, also two eSATA inputs on the back panel. Also on the same back panel there are even located two Firewire ports and 6 USB 2.0 inputs. All together we came at number of twelve possible operative USB inputs. Gigabit LAN support isn’t left out and it is realized using Marvell chips (versions 88E8056 and 88E8001). Integrated sound card used in this case is ADI AD1988B 8-Channel High Definition Audio Codec. We are talking about sound solution that should satisfy almost every user. This sound codec even supports one coaxial and one optical S/PDIF output.

 
BIOS

BIOS on ASUS P5E64 WS Evolution is signed by AMI. We won’t waste too much time on huge number of options of this BIOS. Instead we will deal with its overclock capabilities. It is possible to change FSB strap to four basic clock values: 200MHz, 266MHz, 333MHz and 400MHz. Maximum FSB can be set at 800MHz with maximum processor voltage set at 1.9V. CPU PLL voltage can reach 2.78V, while maximum voltage for RAM memory stops also at 2.78V (that is too high voltage value even for DDR2 standard). To get highest possible FSB, it is necessary to raise voltage for NB (maximum is 2.21V) and FSB. All mentioned values are more than enough for stabile overclock. We achieved stable operational conditions of our 45nm Quad test CPU with 1.5V at 480MHz for FSB.