<div><span style="font-size: small;">Alongside their line of channel and ROG motherboards, ASUS also has business (B/Q chipset) and Workstation (WS) lines for professional markets. The goal of these products is compatibility and stability &ndash; the desire to be a rock solid product in the face of any computational conundrum. Today we are reviewing hopefully the first of many ASUS WS motherboards &ndash; the P9X79-E WS, for the socket 2011 / performance Xeon market. This is an upgrade over the P9X79 WS, featuring a PLX chip giving seven full length PCIe slots.</span></div> <div><span style="font-size: small;"><br /> </span></div> <div><span style="font-size: small;">The goal of the P9X79-E WS is to be able to tackle anything a user wants to use in it: in order to ensure this, ASUS try to validate as many RAID cards, 10 GbE cards, FPGA and PCIe devices as possible. The goal of the P9X79-E WS is to be the final frontier in single socket performance, suggesting that a 12 core Xeon E5-2697W and several of the latest Xeon Phi cards is just a walk in the park, as well as any consumer level CPU. If a user needs to run seven RAID cards should not be a problem here.</span></div> <div><span style="font-size: small;"><br /> </span></div> <div><span style="font-size: small;">Several of the main features of workstation motherboards are hard to test from a review point of view. &nbsp;Compatibility is wholly taken from the QVL list: either a device works or it does not &ndash; if I find a device that does not and tell ASUS, chances are it will probably be working in the next BIOS update. Stability and longevity is hard to test as well &ndash; these motherboards are built to withstand several years at full throttle in high ambient temperatures, so if I tested it like that and it fails or works, then it might be up to the sample and I would have to take a statistical look at MTBF (mean time between failures) &ndash; a test not within my remit and could take a while to perform! Feature comparisons and performance are thus vital to our testing &ndash; aesthetics for gaming motherboard evaluations are not required here. It needs to work, ideally out of the box, and work well.</span></div> <div><span style="font-size: small;"><br type="_moz" /> </span></div> <div><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/7613/asus-p9x79e-ws-review" target="_blank">Read more...</a></span></div>