- Conclusion

The Asus P5W64WS Pro fulfills the needs of office and professional users with support for four PCI-E slots, allowing for up to eight monitors to be connected. Engineers, architects and graphics artists will appreciate the ability to have so many VGA cards on board. The motherboard supports all currently sold Intel processors for the 775 socket, Intel® Core™ 2 Duo/ Intel® Pentium® D/Intel® Pentium® 4/ Intel® Celeron® D processors.

On top of the ususal set of tests, we also installed four VGA cards and connected eight monitors. The ability to create a virtual desktop of up to 10240x1024 (assuming you are using 19" TFT monitors) is very interesting, especially for architects and designers. The only problem is the limited space between PCI-E slots which limits the choice of VGA card to slim ones. Using two identical VGA cards can also enable SLI or Crossfire, assuming you are using the "proper" driver pack.

In all our tests, the P5W64WS Pro was found to be as fast or faster than the P5B Deluxe, especially in CPU tests. The Asus P5B Deluxe was faster in the memory tests, since the P5W64WS Pro could not set our Crucial PC2-8000 to run at 1:2 (FSB:RAM). We hope that this "problem" will be fixed with a newer BIOS revision.

The board itself is of good overall design, as we have come to expect from ASUS. There is plenty of free space around the CPU area, allowing for the installation of large 3rd party fans. The memory banks are color coded for dual channel memory setups. There's an extra power input in case you install more than one VGA card. Apart from the IDE and floppy connections, it also has seven SATA II connections for HDD and optical storage devices. There are several other expansion slots available on board and Asus has included all the required cables in the retail package.

The board proved to be easy to overclock and somewhat similar to the Asus P5B Deluxe. We managed to reach a top FSB of 395Mz without any voltage tweaks. The Asus P5B Deluxe had reached 430MHz in the same test. There are many options in BIOS to "play" with. Other reviewers have reported reaching as high as ~500MHz, with of course, a different cooling system, CPU and memory modules.

Ending our presentation, we would say that this board is not for everyone, especially with a retail price of US$295~320. With four PCI-E slots and the capabilities that this feature offers, it is aimed at a specific target group.

It proved to be very stable during our testing, it has unique features, its performance was very good and overall, we feel it is a great product. Combined with a good Core2Duo processor and plenty of memory, it can be a very powerful system. If you can afford the price tag, this is a motherboard you definitely want to have for your Core2Duo processor.