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| ASUS P5W64 Wall Street Qartet Professional We Avoid Temptation | |
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(Review by MS, November 16, 2006) |
Final Thoughts
The ASUS P5W64 Wall Street Qartet experience was certainly different from the usual motherboard testing we do here. Arguably, the Wall Street moniker suggests a primary use in bean counting, with multiple monitors showing different charts and, quite honestly, this is perfectly legitimate. And boring... not really. Still, from a hardware perspective simlar configurations have existed since the days of PCI graphics cards. That's primarily the reason why we were testing "Flavors Mother Nature Never Intended", i.e. running the board with a heterogeneous mixture of graphics cards and pushing CAD and gaming applications simultanously.
In general, all of this is possible on the P5W64 WS Professional but there are problems that prevent the individual cards from playing out their possibilities. Unfortunately, we did not have several Quadros, that might have been more interesting. As it stands, multiple monitor support is there but true 3D processing still seems to be limited to a single card. We tried running simultaneously "Prey" and "3DMark 2006", unfortunately, they always went to the same monitor. We tried Call of Duty2 and Prey - alas, the same happened and the same goes for all other gaming applications we tried. Granted, there is the possibility of using multiple monitors for widescreen gaming - wherever supported but that is nothing new either.
ASUS' manual features a 2 pages list of compatible cards, and it appears higly advisable to at least take a look at it before trying to outfit the P5W64 WS Pro with graphics adapters. One thing we noted though, in the list, is that for example the RADEON X850 XT and the RADEON X1900 XTX are listed. Make no mistake, the two-slot design of these cards will not allow the installation of four cards. Understandably, this is a trivial statement but sometimes it is worth pointing out the obvious.
Even with "single slot" solutions, as we found out the hard way, there are constraints. Some of the single slot solutions out there comform to the single slot spacing on the top OR the bottom face but in combination, they are just an idea too wide and, consequently will touch each other if more than one card is installed in adjacent slots. Moreover, using different cards can make matters even worse because of different arrangements of surface components. Needless to say that in light of these issues a combination of low power cards appears to be the best choice - as long as they support dual monitors - and that also concerns thermal management of the cards, which essentially have no room to breathe.
By the end of the day, we are left with a bit of confusion. Compared to Intel's BadAxe2 board, there is one extra PCIe x16 slot but whether it is actually useable is a different story. On the other hand, use of all x16 slots on the BadAxe2 board essentially kills the available legacy PCI slots, which are available on the P5W64 WS Professional. Also, full-length PCIe slots, even if the manual designates them as graphics slots can be used for a variety of purposes as, for example RAID cards. In the final analysis, the P5W64 WS Professional provides an alternative to anything else that is out there and as such it will find its followers. There is nothing "wrong" with the board, it overclocks like a banshee, it is stable and has the proverbial ASUS quality. If we were not too thrilled with it ... let's say, we just have different preferences.
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