You know ASUS, don't you? Come on, their the largest motherboard manufacturing company in the world. At least that was the case at the end of 2008. The company's range of motherboards and graphic cards caters to the needs of addictive gamers and non-enthusiasts alike.



While ASUS are famous for their “republic of gamers” edition motherboards, this is not to say that that the company doesn't produce high end boards without the gamer's mark. Such an example is the P6T WS Professional. The board is powered by the Intel X58 chipset designed for the Core i7 CPUs.



But let's see what ASUS added as a bonus to the already impressive performance of the X58 chipset. First of all ASUS made sure that if there is any problem with one of the motherboard's components the use would know what it is. So the company placed leds near each important component (CPU, RAM, Graphics and HDD) and if one of them is to fail, it's respective led will remain lit until the problem is fixed.



We have onboard SAS support using a Marvell 88SE6320 SAS controller, 2 eSATA ports complements of yet another Marvell chipset and (surprise surprise), no IDE connector (thank God!). The board uses a new and improved version of the old PCI standard (PCI-X) which is backwards compatible with older cards. There are 2 PCI-Express 2.0 slots that can run in 16X/16X mode for (dual) SLI and Crossfire configurations. Yep, it's the new thing with X58, it can run both Crossfire and SLI.



Since most gadgets these days rely on USB for data transfers (or even charging), the new ICH10R southbridge provide a dozen USB 2.0 ports. Counting mouse, keyboard, mp3 player, digital camera, 2 external USB storage units and a thumbstick we add up 7 ports, so 12 should be more than enough for every soul out there.



For energy efficient gamers (yeah right, try saying that when running a quad SLI configuration) ASUS have integrated their EPU-6 power saving engine. This uses auto-phase switching the EPU automatically regulates power usage in real time. Aided by the 16+2 phase power design, the EPU can provide even more power efficient computing.



As a last bonus to the already existing X58 and ASUS (common) features we find the Express Gate 5 seconds boot up system. This represents an integrated stripped down Linux OS which comes complete with everything you need for Internet browsing and communications.



The board comes bundled with most of the cable which can be used to connect different gadgets and storage devices.