Bundle and Presentation
The box makes note of CPU and memory support, PEG slot count and the "Wall Street Quartet" moniker. It's pleasingly clean and denotes the P5W64's position as a "Workstation Class Desktop Mainboard" at the very least.
Bundle wise we only show you the interesting bits and commentate on the rest.
The manual is mostly well written, but we caution ASUS to next time have one final pass over the manual contents before publishing in English. Schoolboy errors like "CorssFire" shouldn't make it into a manual for a product with this positioning and price.
Bundle wise you get SATA data and power connectors (7 data plus enough for 7 power, using Y-splitters from Molex input), Firewire 400 ports (6- and 4-pin) and a pair of USB2.0 ports, both on backplane slots, COM on one too, ATA and floppy ribbons, the I/O shield and the rather cool Q-Connect connectors.
The Q-Connect connectors work nicely, especially for the front-panel connector, and let you pre-connect the cabling to a freely removable connector block that then plugs into the mainboard. It's a simple layer of abstraction that works wonders, and it's a feature that -- in our opinion at least -- deserves to be paired up with something like on-mainboard button operation for power and reset, should you be working with the board outside of a cabled chassis.
Let's have a peek at the board BIOS and overclocking adjustments. Early pre-release promise for the P5W64 has centered on its overclocking performance, especially in terms of the CPU-to-northbridge bus, so it's that which we examine next.