In addition to three different Intel P965-based motherboards, Asus also produces several Intel 975X-based motherboards, including the P5W DH Deluxe.
Even though all 975X motherboards have two high-speed PCI-E slots and support CrossFire, they don't support SLI. In addition to these slots, the P5W DH Deluxe has two 1x PCI-E slots and three PCI slots. The back panel is further crammed with two Gigabit Ethernet ports, an 802.11b/g wireless transceiver, the usual complement of USB 2, FireWire and PS/2 ports, and a full set of analogue and digital audio outputs for the on-board Intel HD Audio. The ICH7R Southbridge provides three RAID-capable S-ATA II ports, while two extra controllers provide a further three RAID-capable S-ATA II ports and a single RAID-capable eS-ATA II port.
The Southbridge is fitted with a small heatsink, but the Northbridge and VRM heatsinks are linked by a heatpipe. In addition, a small crossflow fan can be clipped onto the upper heatsink to reduce the temperature of the Northbridge and VRMs.
The bundle includes a microphone, infrared receiver and remote control, just in case you wanted to use this high-end overclocker's motherboard for watching TV. We think that these media PC extras simply inflate the price without providing much extra benefit and would like to see Asus leave them out in the future.
Like all the other 975X boards, with the exception of the pre-overclocked Abit AW9D-MAX, the P5W DH Deluxe proved to be slightly slower than any of the P965 motherboards at its stock settings. The BIOS gives you the option to increase the vcore to 1.7V, the RAM to 2.4V and the FSB to 600MHz, but you can only increase the Northbridge to 1.65V. Even so, we succeeding in overclocking the FSB of our test Core 2 Duo CPU from 266MHz to 350MHz, which is the second-highest frequency achieved by any 975X motherboard in this test.
While the P5W DH Deluxe doesn't overclock quite as far as the awesomely overclockable Abit AW9D-MAX, the Abit's solitary PCI slot counts against it, making the P5W DH Deluxe a better motherboard overall.
Author: James Gorbold
Custom PC Online