Asus has been one of those motherboard companies that have been known for quality, good performing boards. It?s hard not to consider an Asus motherboard when upgrade time comes around. Of course this is expected as Asus has put out plenty of enthusiast favorites such as their A8N line of SLI capable motherboards and previous A7V boards from the Socket A generation, albeit the mentioned boards are for AMD processors. However Asus also produces motherboards for Intel processors.

Intel launched their 975X chipset a couple months ago with the introduction of their Presler dual core processors. The updated 975X brought dual PCI Express x16 slots with eight lanes per slot for CrossFire operation?an upgrade from the 955X?s one x16 and one x4 piggybacked off the south bridge PCI Express implementation. Since the launch of the 975X Asus has updated their previous 955X based P5WD2 Premium with Intel?s 975X?enter the P5WD2-E Premium.

The specs

The P5WD2-E Premium has impressive specifications including support for all of Intel?s current dual and single core processors. Dual channel DDR-2 533/667/800 compliments the bandwidth hungry Netburst architecture swimmingly. Two Gigabit Ethernet controllers will provide plenty of bandwidth for whatever you choose to transfer across a network while eight SATA ports with support for various RAID levels keep up with the high bandwidth data transfers.

Audio is provided by a Realtek ALC882M high definition audio codec. The new ALC882M supports most high definition audio features outlined by Intel?s original HD audio specifications?including Dolby Pro Logic IIx and Dolby Digital Live. Lastly a Texas Instruments 1394a controller tops off the list for transferring those home videos recorded with your brand new high definition video camcorder.

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• The board... (1 of 8)
• The BIOS... (2 of 8)
• Test setup... (3 of 8)
• Synthetic tests, Cinebench 2003... (4 of 8)
• Gaming... (5 of 8)
• Audio performance... (6 of 8)
• USB performance... (7 of 8)
• Conclusion... (8 of 8)