Introduction

We have tinkered around with a few of the ASUS workstation motherboards here at TweakTown. These have been boards that arguably could be setup as a desktop and run to get a very good combination of features, performance, and stability (with some overclocking sprinkled on top).

Now, while these have been lots of fun and have shown that the WS team can certainly hold their own against even the ROG desktop team, we have not really gotten deep into the ASUS WS offerings. Today that all gets to change as we tear the box off of a Dual Socket 1366 board from ASUS. The ASUS Z8NA-D6C is something; you get two Nehalem CPUs and six slots of RAM all stuffed into an ATX package.

You also get an ASPEED VGA controller with 8MB of its own memory (for server usage), two Intel 8475L GBe LAN chips, and much more for around $300 at NewEgg.com. Shall we see what it can do as a desktop/workstation?