Connectors and I/O

Overall, this board provides you with the ability to connect no less than 14 SATA devices. The Intel C602 chipset is able to drive ten of them, two SATA3 (blue ones on the picture below) and eight SATA2 (black ones on the picture below). The other four SATA3 (the gray ones) ports are controlled by a Marvell 9230 contoller. On this board there is no LSI SAS controller this time. Furthermore you will find no less than seven PCIexpress Gen3. x16 slots, three are running at x8 and the other four at full x16 speed. Asus claims the ability to run true 4-way SLI/CrossFireX at full x16 PCIe speed on their front retail motherboard box but if you look at the back of this same box you will find that "only" x8, x8, x8, x8 is possible. Well we will find out in our testing whatever is true. Enthusiasts will like it as much as I do, there are power/reset buttons as well as a LED postcode debug available on the PCB between the southbridge and the SATA connectors.

Totally you'll find six fan headers on the Asus Z9PE-D8 WS which is more than enough for a workstation as well as an enthusiast motherboard. You will find two of them at the bottom of the motherboard, another two are right between the memory slots and the SATA connectors and the ones for the CPU coolers are located next to the two 8-pin power connectors. All are 4-pins PWM fan headers. Oops, we forgot the two ones that are located between the USB and PS/2 ports near the backpanel of the board. SO in total they are in eight.

Looking at the external connectors directly at the back-panel, Asus equipped their worksation motherboard with six USB2.0 ports, two USB3.0, two Ethernet LAN (RJ45), a PS/2 connector as well as the analog audio pannel.