Upper segment-motherboards have developed a tendency to look like space stations or Starcraft structures lately. If they don’t, the basic presumption is that they must be cheap. Therefore, it was with a great deal of relief that we received a top-notch motherboard that looks moderate, while being replete with features. ASUS’ WS series, which is shortened for Workstation, targets users who find quality and stability to be the key features to any PC, while enabling the same PC to use its performance to the max on said motherboard. As the new series of Sandy Bridge CPUs has recently been introduced, it was only logical to expect ASUS to send a new WS motherboard our way as well.
ASUS P8P67 WS Revolution looks stunning at first sight already. Nothing is lacking, one could say. The black-coated PCB, combined with a very nicely designed cooling system makes this motherboard extremely visually attractive. The designers were 100% serious and you’ll find no eye-candy extravaganza or useless exhibitions on this motherboard.
The bundle contains everything that you may need, but nothing atop that: manuals and documentation, seven SATA cables that we’re always in dire need of, as well as brackets with eSATA and USB outputs. As AMD supplies CrossFireX bridges together with their graphics cards, you won’t find any of those here, but there’s a sturdy 3-Way SLI bridge, as well as two ordinary ones instead. An additional panel with POST display and a COM port panel are welcome additions as well, although the latter is probably never going to be used, which means that you probably won’t even get it outside of its bag. There are even a few Y-splitters for powering SATA connectors in the case that your PSU doesn’t have its own, although the chances for this motherboard being powered by such an obsolete PSU are admittedly small.
This motherboard simply has everything that you could ever need as far as expansion is concerned. Whichever configuration you have in mind, this motherboard can pull it off. Four Radeons in CrossFireX? Check. 3-Way SLI? No problem. Four NVIDIA Tesla cards for complex calculations? Certainly. All this is possible owing to the motherboard’s four PCI-Express x16 slots, which work as x8/x8/x8/x8 in the case that all four graphics cards are present. In order to remain compatible with the SLI work mode, besides the P67 Express chipset, the motherboard also has an nForce 200MCP controller, which enables relaying the cards into a multi-GPU configuration, a fantastic feature that few motherboards can pride themselves on. Besides, in a dual-GPU setup, whether SLI or CrossFireX, both PCI-Express slots will work in x16 mode, which removes any chance of a bus bottleneck between the two cards.
The CPU socket has 1155 pins and supports the entire gamma of Intel’s second-gen Core iX CPUs. This means that all 32 nm Core i7, i5 and i3 CPUs with the prefix “2” (Core i7 2600, for instance) are supported. The power section around the CPU is phenomenal and made of highest-quality elements, in order to provide maximum stability under load and overclock. ASUS has used a digital voltage unit with 16+2 phases, and we’re most satisfied with its performance under pressure. With control in the form of a separate DIGI+ VRM CPU, the voltage unit should work efficiently and thus reduce unnecessary heating and consumption.
As far as RAM is concerned, you’ll be using DDR3, and the motherboard supports up to four modules and 32 GB RAM. If you have a large number of HDDs to be connected, worry not, for P8P67 WS Revolution has eight SATA 6 Gb/s connectors. Besides Intel’s RAID controller, WS Revolution also has an additional Marvell’s connector which is in charge of two dark blue SATA connectors.
The number of USB 3.0 ports is four, while there are twelve USB 2.0 connectors at disposal (with the addition of the supplied brackets). There’s also FireWire, unnecessary to most, but critical to some, and a double LAN connector, with “Dual Interconnect” capability. The 8-channel HD audio with Realtek’s ALC889 chip is present as well, providing you with 3.5 mm plugs as well as an optical digital output (S/PDIF).
P8P67 WS Revolution has obviously been designed very carefully, since we couldn’t hit any obstacles in mounting large coolers despite the fact that we intentionally used very tall RAM modules, which means that there’s plenty of room between the CPU socket and the DIMM slots. Besides, three GeForce GTX570 graphics cards worked flawlessly together while next to each other; with three Radeon HD 6970 cards, we had to place small buffers between the cards, but this is no fault of ASUS’, but AMD’s, since unlike GeForce, Radeons are closed from all sides and can only pull air in from the fan opening.
