Motherboard Photos
Below you can find photos of the E3V5 WS motherboard.
Layout is pretty simple but is based on high quality components. Personally I feel like ASRock and some other brands which are releasing workstation motherboard series care more about good power section than server manufacturers. ASRock used five power phase design which is more than enough for a motherboard this type.
On the back there are four USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports. All of them have spike protection. There is also one LAN port connected to Intel I219LM chip. It’s Gigabit LAN which is usually used in servers but we can find it also in some higher desktop motherboards. Personally I find Intel LAN controllers more stable than any other brands. Hard to say how it looks like in real but in my experience they’re more reliable than any special gaming LAN cards.
At first I thought that E3V5 WS has two x16 PCIE slots. They’re in fact only physical x16 as electrical connections tell us that first is x16 while the second one is x4. It still let to run Crossfire or any additional PCIE controllers. On the other hand desktop motherboards will run as PCIE 8+8 when you use two cards while on E3V5 WS it will be 16+4 what can be better if you focus on the highest bandwidth of first PCIE slot ( for example dual GPU graphics cards ). In this scenario using dual GPU graphics and PCIE SSD will give the best results.
The E3V5 WS has no graphics card as we used to see in desktop Z, H and B series chipsets. I feel like it’s really missing here as not all users wish to spend additional money on a graphics card when they don’t need anything special besides single monitor and basic features. On the other hand the cheapest PCIE graphics cards are not really expensive.
All who wish to use larger storage can set RAID using Intel controller ports. There are 6 SATA 6Gbps ports.
The E3V5 has one AMI BIOS/UEFI chip with additional features like crashless flash. More about UEFI on the next page of this review.
