The M2N32-WS Professional motherboard from Asus is part of the company's Main Station product line mainly aimed at workstations, but before you run screaming for the hills, it's worth mentioning that not only does it support SLI setups, its also got some good overclocking potential and a host of features. The downside is that it's a bit on the pricey side.

As with most high-end Asus motherboards the first question you ask yourself is how the Hell they ever shut the box lid in the first place. On opening the box you are confronted with nine - yes, nine - SATA cables, five SATA power cables, a two port USB 2.0 bracket, a single port Firewire bracket, an 80-pin ATA cable, a floppy cable, an SLI bridge and a Q-Connector (a very useful connector that allows you to connect chassis front connections in one module), a SuperBeam directional microphone and all the manuals and bundled software. Oh yes, nearly forgot; and a motherboard.

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As befits a high-end board, the M2N32-WS Professional is an 8-phase power design which also uses Asus's Stack Cool 2 cooling solution; a PCB under the board that transfers heat away from critical areas without needing a fan. Also keeping the noise down is the heat-pipe solution keeping both the chipsets and MOSFETS cool, which uses a serious amount of copper.

Built around AMD's AM2 socket and an Nvidia Nforce 590 SLI / Nforce 590 MCP chipset combination, the board is well laid out with space around the major components, which is remarkable really considering the features the board comes with.

Four DIMM slots can support up to 8GB of 800/667 or 533MHz DDR2 memory in non-ECC or ECC formats. The support for ECC (Error Correcting Code) memory is another sign that this is principally a workstation board. ECC memory has been specially designed with extra circuitry to detect and correct errors as data comes in and out of memory.

Two full-speed x16 PCI-E slots are provided for SLI graphics setups, either with the standard gaming cards or with high-end workstation cards. The 590 SLI chipset also comes with something called LinkBoost which ups the PCI-E bridge from 100MHz to 125MHz, but only for graphics cards that support it (which is currently only the 90nm Nvidia cards like the GeForce 7900GT/GTX and the 7950 family).

To go with these there are two x1 PCI slots, a single normal PCI slot and two PCI-X slots. Another nod to the workstation market, PCI-X slots are 64-bit and run 100MHz faster than a standard PCI slot (133MHz as opposed to 33MHz). They are usually used for cards such as SCSI and large throughput Ethernet controllers, but they are also backward compatible with PCI cards.

When it comes to attaching hard drives to the M2N32-WS Professional you are spoilt for choice. If you include the e-SATA (external SATA) port on the rear panel, you get 10 SATA 3Gbps ports. Six of these (and one of the two ATA ports) are controlled by the 590 MCP Southbridge and can be built into RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 and JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) arrays while the other four SATA, including the external and second ports, are controlled by a Marvell controller. Also integrated into the board is 7.1 audio (ADI 1988B) and dual Gigabit Ethernet.

If you are into overclocking then this board offers plenty of opportunities to tinker in the BIOS. The CPU can be set from 200-400MHz in 1MHz increments, as can the HyperTransport connection speed. Voltages for various components can be adjusted as follows: vCore from auto to 200mV in 50mV steps, CPU voltage in 0.025V increments from 0.8V up to 2.500V, while the memory can be increased from 1.8V up to 2.5V. A nice touch is the ability to adjust each of the two PCI-E graphics buses separately from 100 up to 200MHz.

The M2N32-WS Professional is a stable and well featured motherboard that ticks most of the boxes for a workstation user, but with so much overclocking potential it's an ideal board for the enthusiast too.

An excellent board for workstation or enthusiast use alike, but only for those with deep pockets, as all these features come at a price.