When it comes to external mass storage, bandwidth has always been an issue, and external Serial ATA makes even IEEE 1394b's 800Mbps bandwidth look paltry by comparison. Asus has placed an external SATA (eSATA) port on the rear I/O of the M2N32 WS Professional motherboard.

This connection uses a slightly modified SATA cable (not included), which is better suited to external connections. Standard internal Serial ATA cables are sufficient for internal connections, but SATA-IO governing body decided a while back that the external version should be a somewhat different format, thus creating the eSATA standard. eSATA enclosures for hard drives are widely available, and the great thing is that hard drives connected over this standard are just as fast as internal devices.

The connectors are hot swappable, so it makes adding and removing an massive external hard drive about as complex as plugging in a USB memory key. For anyone who as ever had to move Gig's of data over a USB cable, eSATA is simply awesome.

The Asus Q Connector

The Q-Connector makes connecting front panel I/O, USB or IEEE 1394 headers on the Asus M2N32 WS Professional motherboard a snap. Since the standards are different per manufacturer, cases often come with front panel connectors broken down to one pin per line. If you're a tweaker that makes removing the motherboard a more tedious task but with Q Connector, you can connect all the pins to the proper Q connector then connect that to the motherboard when you're ready.

Removing the motherboard to do some maintenance? Simply remove the Q Connector from the board and plug it back in when you're set. Asus even labels the individual pin values from ground to power and data! Just make sure you line up the pin outs properly, in a dark area it might be difficult to tell.

Silent Chipset Thermal Solution - no more rattling mini-fans

The Asus M2N32 WS Professional motherboard has a collection of copper heatpipe-based thin fin heatsinks covering its chipsets. The nVIDIA nForce 590 SLI chipset generates a fair share of heat, requiring more cooling than. The nForce northbridge and southbridge chipsets are cooled by a totally silent thermal solution - so there are no small fans to fail over time, no small fans to make noise, and no small fans to get clogged with dust.

The nForce 590 SLI MCP has a finless chunk of copper mounted on it, with a heatpipe snaking its way around slots and onboard devices towards the copper northbridge heatsink. Two heatpipes connect the Northbridge heatsink to a large thin fin copper heatsink mounted to the processor power supply MOSFETs.

The thin copper fin heatsink on the 8-phase power supply MOSFETs to the left of the AMD AM2 socket harnesses the exhaust airflow from the processor fan for its cooling. A clever solution for sure, and one that most motherboard manufacturers have embraced as a quiet way of managing the thermal output from chipsets. As always, it's important to remember that if water cooling is used here, you have to point a fan in the direction of these copper heatsinks.

The nVIDIA nForce 590 SLI chipset gets pretty hot under load, but in our experience with the Asus M2N32 WS Professional we found it's passive chipset solution quite effective at keeping temperatures in check.