Asus P5E64 WS Evolution Evaluation

Asus has been a frequent flyer here on the Planet, most notably because of their recent decision to enter ALL parts of the computer and consumer electronics market. We have seen notebooks, mainboards, GPUs, and just about everything in between. For now we have finally managed to get one of Asus’ workstation boards in house. The X48 based P5E64 WS Evolution. This board boasts power efficiency and performance. Offering four x16 PCI-e slots(2 full x16 and 2 x4), an SAS option (called SASaby) and support for two separate RAID configurations, the Evolution looks to be quite a board on paper. Today we will tell you if that paper translates into the real world or is it just fiction.

Product: Asus P5E64 WS Evolution     
Author: Sean Kalinich
Reviewed on: July 4th 2008
Product cost: $369.99 (at Newegg.com)
Manufacturer: Asus
Spelling and Grammatical editor: Planetx64 Staff

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{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}
Packaging and Accessories:
The P5E64-WS Evolution arrived in a blue box (maybe blue for Intel?) on the box was a graphic of a wireframe 3D car partially rendered as well as what looks like some CAD drawings. I guess this is supposed to let us know that the Evolution is meant for a serious workstation. On the outer slipcover there is a flap that you can open to view additional information on how great the P5E64 is.
Once you remove the slipcover and open the box the real fun begins. Inside the box are a host of nice toys to go with the P5E64.

{mospagebreak title=Board Layout}
Board Layout:
I have, in the past, gone on and on about board layout and its importance. With the P5E64 I will touch on this again. The Evolution is not all that well thought out in terms of layout. But I cannot fault Asus directly as this has become a trend with all mainboards. I think we have reached a point where the desire to use multiple GPUs is preventing manufacturer’s ability to make a well laidout product. Slots have to be too close to use all of them; you are left with having to make decisions and compromises. If you want multiple GPUs you might end up stuck with onboard sound, as the PCI slots are covered. The same thing applies with PhysX cards or other peripherals that you might want to add in. It is true that more and more peripherals are coming in PCI-e flavors but you still are left with limited choices.

Another item of note is the placement of the four PCi-e ports. They are setup in pairs, the two blue are the primary pair while the two black are the secondary pair. Now the thought of running Quad Crossfire is very nice indeed but you are not going to be doing that with any of the higher end cards (ones with dual slot coolers) this reduces the functionality of the four slots for most enthusiasts. The top PCI-e x16 slot is also right on top of the RAM slots making easy installation and removal of RAM an impossibility.
The PCI-e x4 slot is the only slot on the board that seems to be in a good spot. Although you have to watch the length of your card here or it will hit the RAM.

Air space around the CPU is well done considering the towering heatsinks needed to keep the X48 Northbridge and power regulators cool. Asus, as is common, includes a small fan to keep air flow moving through these if you are using water cooling on your CPU. Although this makes for a cooler X48 board the placement of the 8-Pin Aux power connector at the top of the board makes installation in a mid-tower case a bleeding knuckle exercise.
Asus also decided to go with a ton of Blue LEDs these do have a function and are primarily there to let you know if your cards are in the slots properly (taking a leaf from ECS’ book) they have also surrounded the Asus logo with Blue LEDs these strobe from dim to bright and bathe the inside of your case in a friendly blue glow.

Our impression of the evolution at this point is: pretty but not very functional. Performance needs to be stellar to bring our opinion back up.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Part I}
Performance:
Test system:
Intel QX9770
Asus P5E64 WS Evolution
2GB (2x1GB) Kingston KHX13000D3LLK2/2GX DDR3-1625MHz
Asus 3850 Smart OC 1GB DDR2
Western Digital 150GB RaptorX HDD
PC Power and Cooling 1KW PSU.
Corsair Nautilus 500 external water cooling kit
HiSpeed PC techstation
Microsoft Windows Vista x64 Ultimate w/SP1
Subsystems:
Most know that a mainboard is not a single component but is comprised of many separate subsystems that have to work together properly to give you good performance. The following three subsystems are the main ones that directly impact performance on most mainboards.

Overclocking:
I found something interesting while playing with the Evolution, it did not like overclocking my QX9770.
This is not to say that I could not get a high OC. I was able to get up to 4.4 GHz I was also able to get a respectable 475 FSB by playing with the settings. The issue came with performance. Once I hit a certain speed with the Quad (over 4.1GHz or 450MHz FSB) I found the system slowed down considerably especially in Multi-Core testing.

Now 450MHz FSB is nothing to sneeze at, but I would have thought the x48 would do much better and that the DDR3 I was using from Kingston would not drop the way it did.
In the end I found the best performance and most stable OC was 450MHz x9 using the same DDR3 1600 from Kingston running at DDR3-1800. Timings were 8-8-8-24.

Audio:
The P5E64 WS Evolution uses the SoundMAX AD1988B audio codec for sound reproduction. This is a nice little audio chip that can produce some good sound, but comes at a cost in some games and during BluRay HD playback. I noticed an increased in CPU time when running HalfLife 2 Episode 2 in 7.1 mode and while watching any of my BluRay movies. Now the increased CPU usage did not affect the video playback with BluRay but did cause some stuttering in HalfLife 2 during heavy combat. Switching to 5.1 fixed this issue though.

Drive Performance:
HDD performance is on par with what you would expect from an X48/X38 mainboard, the option for two discrete RAID arrays is very nice but using both does increase CPU and memory overhead. I would not recommend this with anything less than 4GB of DDR3 1600.

Memory Access and Bandwidth:
Memory bandwidth is not a constant nor are most measurements truly accurate.  With that in mind we always take a look at the numbers we get as bandwidth potential. Meaning that this is what you might be able to get in the right circumstances. The P5E64 WS does very well and in my testing actually seems to handle DDR3 better than the reference Intel DX48BT2 board that I tested.

Application and Synthetics:
For application testing I ran the usual suspects and put the P5E64 WS through the paces at stock and at maximum stable OC.
FutureMark:
What evaluation would be complete without a couple of benches from FutureMark?
We ran both 3DMark and PCMark Vantage and took a look at the numbers.

The P5E64 WS performs as good as we expect with the 3850. Crossfire performance is a healthy improvement while our CPU overclock does not give much of a boost at all.

PCMark does well on the Evolution and shows a nice boost from our CPU overclock

HyperPi:
A great test for system I/O performance. HyperPi runs multiple instances of SuperPi MOD. Each instance is run on its own core. This test hits CPU memory and HDD performance hard.

The 18 minute times for a 32M HyperPi run are at the faster end of what the X48 is capable. Our overclock on this board was able to shave over a full minute off of the time.

Lightwave 3D x64:
Newtek’s Lightwave is an industry standard for 3D modeling and animation.  This test also hits system I/O very hard.

Lightwave shows off the power of the QX9770 combined with the X48. Our overclock managed to knock 0ver 30 seconds off the the already fast sub five minute render time here.

Video Encoding:
Our video encoding tests were run with a  2:30 movie written to a standard 9.4 GB Dual layer disk.
This was then encoded back to Avi at 100% quality.

AutoGK shows the Evolutions speed in moving data from CPU to Mem and then to HDD. With our overclock we manage to know over two minutes off of the encoding time.

Photoshop CS3
Testing in Photoshop was centered on image manipulation. For testing I used the Driverheaven Photoshop benchmark.

I was very impressed with the way the Evolution coupled with the QX9770 and the Kingston RAM handled Photoshop. They seemed to move through the filters with out effort.

{mospagebreak title=Performance Part II}
Gaming:
For gaming tests on the P5E64 ES Evolution I ran three current games in single card and Crossfire mode.
Resolutions were maxed at 1920×1200. Game settings are shown with each game.  All testing was “in-game” frame rates were captured using FRAPs.

Bioshock:
Performance here with the 3850 in single card mode is not the greatest  even when overclocked. The DX10 textures show their greed here.(although with the Asus 3850 SmartOC you can get quite a jump in performance by using the smartoc button look for a full review on these soon )
on the other hand in crossfire mode I saw a huge performance increase. The jump from 27 to 72 FPS is simply amazing.

Call of Duty, Modern Warfare:
Again in COD4 we see less than impressive gaming numbers but as mentioned above this is due to the GPU used and not a fault of the board. The board is clearly capable of more as the 8 FPS jump in our overclock testing shows.

Also the performance on the Evolution shows in the 42 FPS jump while in Crosfire mode even with the older 3850.

Assassin’s Creed (DX10)
Another bad showing for the P5E64/3850 combination, with average frame rates under 20. Overclocked gives the this combo a 8 FPS boost (as with other games) And again the Evolution shows it ability to handle crossfire with ease brining in a 30+ FPS jump over single card mode.

{mospagebreak title=Price/Warranty}
Price/Warranty:
The Asus P5E64 WS Evolution will put a $370 dent in your wallet (for many this dent may run completely through their wallets) It is not a board mean for the average consumer. But it is designed to give the enthusiast the best X4) It is not a board mean for the average consumer. But it is designed to give the enthusiast the best X48 performance to be had and runs circles around the Intel DX48BT2.

The warranty on the Evolution is the usual three year limited from Asus and covers defects in workmanship. Lately Asus has come under criticism for its lack of support and slow support site; for the most part these claims have been justified. Calling or e-mailing their support lines (at the time of writing) can be a very frustrating endeavor. I have spoken to a few people at Asus and have been assured that they are working to correct these support issues. I do not know how or when things will change but feel the support problems have arisen due to the massive growth that Asus has seen in the last few years.

{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
Performance at stock speeds was quick and responsive. I have never been happy with just running a few tests to get a feel for a product, so I have been using the Evolution as my workstation at home while not testing. In normal use I found the P5E64 to perform very well indeed.
Overclocking, as I mentioned above was a little different than what I was used to. I found that leaving the sub-timings alone produced better results, there was also an issue with overclocking a quad on the P5E64 but I think this is more a limitation of the CPU/chipset than the Asus design. In all I was able to get a very respectable 24/7 OC of 450×9 (4050MHz) with the Kingston DDR3 memory running at 1800MHz. this  OC provided me with a nice boost to all applications I use for testing. Asus has also been able to overcome the X48 overheating problems; the heat pipe system cooling the X48 and power regulators around the CPU was able to keep me from overheating even while overclocked.  Although board layout was not well done I can honestly say that after a few hiccups the Evolution more than made up for layout issues with solid performance and power.
If you are looking around for a fast solid board and have a deep pocket the Asus P5E64 WS Evolution is the board your cash is looking to be spent on.

We are happy to give the P5E64 WS Evolution our Best on the Planet award for its power and performance.

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Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank Eric Chen at Asus for his help in putting this evaluation together.

Tags: asus