Asus Z9PE-D8 WS Dual Socket Workstation Motherboard Review

At the heart of any computer system as we all know lies a motherboard, whether it be your laptop, home desktop, workstation or server.  Depending on what the systems main role is (ie whether it be a desktop or server) there is a great effect on the type of motherboard that is installed inside.

To most consumers and the majority of the market, the focus is on the traditional board that we know of with its single CPU socket and memory banks to go with.  In the industry sector and enterprise markets however, a single socket board just doesn’t cut it and naturally we find here boards that can hold multiple CPUs and far more memory than your home system will ever hold. In the design industry speed, as with any trade, is everything and having the ability to render the design of a new car or a component of a plane for example in a quick turn around is vital for keeping the overall project on track with no delays.

With this in mind there are naturally a number of ways of doing this rendering and a whole other array of CPU and in some cases GPU intensive tasks.  One of these methods is to have an onsite server farm with stacks of rackmount servers of which are solely dedicated to either crunching numbers, remdering images or performing simulations at a rate that growing day by day. This method though for the most part is very expensive not just in the purchasing of the equipment but also the running costs that are involved with there after.

In some cases this factor can be a huge offset to some companies whether it be for financial reasons or purely that they don’t have the space available for the setup. Such companies are normally the smaller sized businesses and they will therefore endeavour to find a method of increasing their productivity without the same huge costs – especially with the economic climate in the state it is.

This therefore has lead us to taking a new edge on the scope of products that we look at and review and looking at workstation based systems with dual socket capabilities for extreme rendering and processing power is an area that we feel is a niche in the market.

When we first got the board in we soon decided that we cannot test this in the same way the we traditionally test a board with the array of game based tests with their built in benchmarks and other fps based benchmarks such as 3DMark11 as this would be completely diverging from the market sector that this board is aimed at.