ASUS P5WD2-E Premium Review - PAGE 1

Last August was witness to an exciting time here at Neoseeker. We'd just received ASUS' high-end, media-oriented P5WD2 Premium, and this board turned out to be a great option for the media/performance enthusiast. Packing heat in the form of performance, features and overclockability, the P5WD2 has become a regular on our test bench. Today, our lab is once again home to a new ASUS motherboard, and this one happens to be a direct descendant of the P5WD2.

Whereas ASUS' P5WD2 was designed around an Intel 955X chipset, today's P5WD2-E Premium sports an updated Intel 975X. We briefly discussed the difference between the 955X and 975X chipsets in our Foxconn 975X7AA review.

The difference basically amounts to additional PCI-Express lanes, allowing for dual PCI-E x16 slots with a bandwidth of 8 lanes each -- but the real treat is official support for ATI's CrossFire. Now, not all Intel 975X chipsets "support" CrossFire (as in, not all of them have it enabled), but the P5WD2-E is no guest to such limitations.

The previous P5WD2 also sported dual PCI-Express x16 slots, but resorted to running the second slot at a limited 4-lane bandwidth, and of course it didn't support CrossFire. Due to this increased flexibility, the P5WD2-E also offers a different physical slot configuration which I think will ease some of the personal gripes that I had with the previous design.

So what'll it be? Is CrossFire, an updated chipset, and potentially better overclocking enough to sway those of us who have been on the fence about the P5WD2 series? Let's find out and see just how much these improvements pay off!