Related Articles

Overclocking

I won't keep you in too much suspense. The board is a pretty good overclocker, but not spectacular.

I was able to reach a 980MHz FSB with the Intel P4 560 - on some other boards I reached as high as 1084MHz FSB with this processor.

I am somewhat suspicious that Vcore may be underreported, as I experienced several cases of thermal shutdown during the overclocking experiements; they only stopped once I lowered Vcore to 1.5V

Looking at the results above it is clear that the P5WD2 is a good overclocker. The performance was limited by the 980MHz maximum FSB speed we reached. We got an excellent increase in memory bandwidth; almost 24% is nothing to sneeze at!

Doom3 performance went up almost 9%, and we even got a 4.6% increase in Business Winstone.

Overall, quite satisfactory overclocking results.

Conclusion

The ASUS P2WD2 is a solid, well designed board that provides very respectable performance. It is not the fastest board we have tested, but it performs well overall. It is a reasonably good overclocker, however I do question the accuracy of the reported CPU temperature and core voltage.

The lower Doom 3 score makes me suspect that the PCIe x16 on this 955 based board is more conservative than on nForce boards, as otherwise I am at a loss to explain such a large difference. If it is PCIe timing, than some more BIOS tweaking - or perhaps a BIOS update - may greatly diminish the performance difference for those few games that showed it.

Unlike the nForce 4 based motherboards this board should have no problems working with any Socket 775 dual core processor from Intel, and with the I/O capabilities offered by the board you can't really go wrong by getting one. We were unfortunately unable to test the TV/WiFi card, however if you are going to buy one of these boards you can get your hands on the lower priced version without the TV/WiFi card - we normally would use one of the provided 1Gb Ethernet ports for networking, and for a TV card a Hauppage card with hardware MPEG-2 encoding is hard to beat.

Really the only negative for this board is the price - it is more expensive than a lot of the nForce 4 boards. Everything else makes this board really easy to recommend.