Asus P6X58-E WS

ASUS P6X58-E WS Review

When looking to purchase a new motherboard consumers must ask themselves a few basic questions. It is good to know how many graphics cards you want or need as this will determine the required number of PCI Express x16 slots. Choosing a platform is important if the board will be in a new system. Currently, as a general rule of thumb, Intel is leading performance while AMD is going for affordability. How many SATA ports needed is another thing to keep in mind, six is usually stock, give or take two, but some high-end boards have up to ten! Some will need a motherboard with the intent of running a server. For this task there are workstation class motherboards such as the ASUS P6X58-E WS motherboard. The x58 chipset was designed for workstation usage and can use either i7 or Xeon CPUs. This motherboard has 16+2 phases, dual Intel 82574L Gigabit LAN ports, 2x SATA 3.0, USB 3.0 supporting newer devices, 3x full x16 PCI Express 2.0 slots, and room for 24GB of DDR3 memory! The board also supports a PCI Express x4 SAS card from ASUS based on the Marvell 88SE6440 chipset and called the SASsaby (like the antelope), but good luck finding one. In any case this board should do great for gaming or server-related duties.