Asus uses the same spartan packaging for all its high-end boards.

Board revision: 1.04

BIOS version: 1001

If it weren't for the two processor sockets for the Xeon, you might take the PC-DL for a "standard" P4 board, much like those you find en masse at any computer store.

Even experts may find themselves doing a double-take at the board. After all, Xeon boards generally have more than just two chipset components - in addition to the north bridge and the south bridge, they almost always have an I/O bridge. The I/O bridge is responsible for the PCI-X slots, with 64 bits and 66, 100 or 133 MHz. And that's the main reason why this motherboard is so compact: there is neither an I/O bridge, nor PCI-X slots, nor a SCSI controller.

That doesn't mean that Asus was stingy with the interfaces, though. Thanks to Intel's ICH5, the board sports two serial ATA ports in addition to the obligatory ATA/100 connectors. You can set either of the controllers as primary controllers in BIOS, although you'll have to install drivers in Windows if you are using the serial ATA ports.

Furthermore, Asus has also built a Promise PDC20276 into the PC-DL, adding one UltraATA/133 and two serial ATA ports to the mix. With these additions, you can set up RAID arrays in RAID 0, 1 or 0+1 (with four hard drives).