Four PEG slots you say? Why, yes! Now, Rys is a hard man to please, so when you see words like 'the perfect mainboard' in his writing, it's highly likely that we've found something rather special. The P5W64 WS Professional is indeed very special.



All the current good stuff makes an appearance: 8 ports AHCI SATA2, one of which is backplane-based eSATA, support for all LGA775 CPUs including yet-to-be-released quad-core, up to 8GiB of DDR2 with ECC if that's what you need, dual LAN and both GigE, 8ch SoundMax HD Audio and Firewire all come as standard. The Ethernet controllers can be teamed if you so wish, for a 2Gib/sec interface with failover, as expected.

But you'll find most of those features on a bunch of other high-end i975X-based boards, so what makes the P5W64 so special? Ah, the quartet of PCI Express Graphics 16X (PEG16X for brevity) slots you say, and you'd be right. Combining the i975X northbridge, itself providing 16 lanes of PCIe, with an IDT PCIe switch is what lets ASUS get away with the two possible slot configurations for the four PEG16X PCIe slots.

HEXUS

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