ASUS TS700-E8-RS8 Barebones Workstation Review

Introduction

We have only had a handful of barebones kits in the lab, in fact only two. The first one was a server kit and now we have a workstation to take a look at.

One of the advantages of barebones kits is they pretty much come with everything you need for the base build and often times they are pre-assembled so you do not have to get down and dirty installing every little thing into the case. In fact, that is what we like about barebones kits.

Barebones kits can come with or without CPU coolers or even rack mounts in the case of servers. Kits that come with everything you need will naturally same time and money doing the final assembly. Let us get started unpacking and setting up the ASUS TS700-E8-RS8 Workstation Barebones kit.

Packaging

The shipping box is made of heavy gauge cardboard; it is thick and provides good protection for the components inside. Inside there are four foam inserts with ample air space to provide protection against punctures. Two of the foam inserts have white boxes that contain the supplied heat sinks for the workstation.

The workstation kit comes with two CPU heat sinks, which we see here. These are rather generic looking and lightweight. Down the middle of the heat sinks is a single cooling fan to supply airflow through the cooler. It seems rather simple; we will use these heat sinks in our tests to see how well they perform.

Here we get a look at the accessory box that comes with the TS700-E8-RS8 Workstation. It has everything you will need to get the workstation up and running.

Several inserts are provided to give you options on how you want to outfit the workstation.

Here we see the rest of the included accessories. As we will see, later on most of SATA ports are connected inside the case so we only get a few spares here. We only received two sets of GPU power cables, while the system can support three full size video cards, this would leave us short power connectors if we wanted to use a full load out of video cards.

The supplied DVD's provide drivers and manuals for the workstation:

• S584 - ASMB8 Support DVD Rev 5.0
• S593 - ASWM Enterprise SDVD Durian Edition Rev 12.0
• S594 - C61x Server Support DVD Rev 14.0