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Today we are looking at the Asus Z9 PE-D8 Workstation motherboard. This dual LGA 2011 socket board is based around Intel's C602 chipset with support for quad channel 8 DIMM memory, effectively targeting the high end audience.
We pair the Z9 PE-D8 up with two flagship Intel 8 Core Xeon E5 2687W processors, two Corsair H80 liquid coolers, a Sapphire HD7970 6GB Toxic Edition graphics card, Seasonic Platinum 1000W power supply and 64GB of Kingston Predator 2,133mhz memory. Is this the ultimate Workstation?
This system will hammer your credit card into submission. Xeon E5 prices are generally set between the £800 and £1,500 mark and this system today will easily cost around the £5,000 mark.
If gaming is your only requirement then it goes without saying that this is completely overkill.
Initially we wanted to use the EVGA Classified SR-X motherboard, but I experienced quite a few issues and decided to bin the review, while I still had some hair left. We really don't recommend anyone purchase this motherboard as the bios seems totally unfinished and unstable.
Asus kindly supplied their Z9 PE-D8 Workstation board, which is £105 cheaper, faster, smaller and infinitely more reliable. The Xeon E5 processors can't be overclocked therefore stability and performance at default speeds are the primary focus for this review.
Today we have built a very high end system with 32 threads and we put it through its paces when editing images, working with high definition video and rendering 3D scenes. Additionally, can it be used as a gaming machine when you have some downtime? It is good enough for playing games at 5760×1080 across three monitors? We answer all these questions today.
Special thanks to Intel, Kingston, Corsair, Lian Li, Sapphire, Seasonic and ASUS for supplying this high end hardware for our review today.
