Review: ASUS P8B WS
Published by Marc Büchel on 26.08.11Page:
Conclusion
| Allgemein | + | - | |
| At a first glance ASUS leaves a good impression with its P8B WS. Unfortunately there still are some things which could have been done in a better way. Most importantly there are the cooling blocks which keep the current supply at adequate temperatures. They're simply too big which has the consequence that several high end aircoolers are not compatible with this board. On the other hand the board looks absolutely marvellous. We very much like the color design and to us it very appealing. | - Server
chipset - Intel vPro Support |
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| Layout | + | - | |
| Generally the ASUS P8B WS's Layout has been well thought. Once more practical are the angled SATA connectors as well as the power- and reset-buttons which can be found on an additional diagnosis card. Furthermore it is possible to install a total of four graphics cards. Unfortunately one can only build a CrossFire multi GPU setup and therefore your limited to applications which cause high open GL loads. A closer look at the area around the CPU socket reveals that there is plenty of space to install any big CPU cooler. The fact that the cooling blocks are much smaller makes it easy to install a CPU cooler too. the placement of the third PCI-Express slot isn't perfect. We would have love to see it as the second last expansion sloat onboard but in with the P8B WS it is the last and therefore when a dual slot video card is being installed in the last PCI-Express x16 slot it will cover the connectors at the bottom edge of the board. Unfortunately as we already phrased out in the text above there are some issues if you focus on the CPU socket. The aluminium blocks which keep the current converters cool can cause compatibility problems with high end CPU coolers. Another thing is the DIMM slots. They are also very close to the socket. In this case memory which is equipped with big heatspreaders can also collide with big aircoolers. | - Angled SATA connectors - Debug card |
- No SLI | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| Generally the ASUS P8B WS' performance which si based on Intel C206 server chipset lacks behind the desktop competition. That fact that DDR3 1'333 MHz is the maximum standard setting makes it perform worse in memory intense benchmarks. On average the board can be found in the bottom quarter of our comparison tables. Only in a few SiSoft Sandra benchmarks the P8B WS was able to show good numbers. | - SiSoft Sandra - Arithmetic | - wPrime - SuperPi - Games |
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| BIOS | + | - | |
| In case of the P8B WS, ASUS is using a BIOS which is almost identical to the one you get with the P8P67 Deluxe. What we missed were some workstation specific feature of which you might want to get some if you decide to assemble a workstation. Nevertheless, like all the graphical UEFI BIOS you get from ASUS these days this one is also very well structured and it's childrens play to use it. | - Well structured BIOS - UEFI-BIOS | - Almost no workstation specific features | |
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| If you consider assembling a rendering workstation for Open GL applications then the P8B WS from ASUS might worth considering because it comes at a very aggressive price point of est. CHF 200.- (est. EUR 180.-). | - Open-GL Rendering-Workstation | ||
| Rating | |||
| We give the ASUS P8B WS three out of five stars. One reason is the performance which could be better and another is that there are almost no workstation specific features. | |||
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Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch Copy edited and translated: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch c.ney@ocaholic.ch
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