reviews Tes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tized
84 MAXIMUMPC october 2006
O
h, how the world turns. Last month
you marched past the Intel 975X
chipset motherboards holding your
nose, but with the release of the Core 2 Duo
and Core 2 Extreme CPUs you’ve made a U-
turn to give this chipset a second look.
Well, you better take a good look at
Asus’ P5W DH Deluxe, which could be the
ultimate 975X board, with its handy remote,
driverless RAID, and onboard Wi-Fi. Our
favorite feature of the P5W DH Deluxe,
though, is the simple fact that it works with
the Core 2 Duo and Extreme CPUs. Many
older boards that still litter store shelves
and inventories don’t support the Core 2’s
lower voltage requirements.
On Intel’s D975XBX motherboard, for
example, only those with “AA” codes that
end in 304 work with Core 2s out of the
box. Asus’ original version of the 975X
board, the P5WD2-E, didn’t work with Core
2s, but newer versions do. Unfortunately,
the majority of web stores don’t differenti-
ate between new and old boards. You avoid
the incompatibility pitfall by purchasing
a board that universally supports Core 2,
such as the P5W DH.
But the differences aren’t just in CPU
support. The P5W DH Deluxe adds a mix of
new tricks to the 975X chipset, such as the
aforementioned remote, which lets you turn
your PC on or off.
Asus went plumb crazy with the storage
options: The board includes Intel’s Matrix
RAID-ready ICH7R south bridge and the
integrated JMicron controller (which lets you
create RAID 0 or 1 using an internal SATA
drive and an external eSATA drive). We’re
not sure what exactly you’d use an inter-
nal/external RAID array for, but the chip also
supports non-RAID options, and it gives you
a valuable second PATA port.Even more interest-
ing is the Silicon Image
4723 controller chip,
which supports driver-
less RAID 0, RAID 1,
and JBOD. Just set the
mode via jumpers on the
board and start installing
your OS—you don’t even
need to install F6 drivers!
By default, you’re given
RAID 1, which Asus calls
“EZ Backup.” As a safety
feature, the board won’t
change RAID modes even
if you change the jump-
ers by accident, until you
approve it in the BIOS. We
recently learned the value
of driverless RAID when
we tried to recover a file
from a corrupted RAID 0
system. A driverless RAID
mode would have saved
us hours of work.
The expansion-slot
layout is PCI friendly. If you run two dual-slot
CrossFire cards (nVidia doesn’t allow SLI on
the Intel chipset), you can still run two PCI
cards. This is great for today’s hardware,
but what if the graphics-card manufacturer’s
plans to use a third PCI-E graphics card
for physics pans out? You’re out of luck
with the P5W DH’s config. Another ding is
more against the chipset. When running two
graphics cards in CrossFire mode, the board
limits both cards to x8 modes. In today’s
games, the bandwidth gap shouldn’t make
much difference, but why not support dual
x16s? Bueller? Intel? Anyone?
The board includes Asus’ excellent over-
clocking capability (we took our 2.66GHz
proc to 3.2GHz without breaking a sweat)
and tons of BIOS options.
We have a hard time quantifying the per-
formance of the board because it’s the first
production Core 2 board we’ve reviewed.
We ran a few benchmarks with the 2.66GHz
Core 2 Duo E6700 and, golly, the new Intel
chip still kicks ass. If we could just get
SLI support, everything would be perfect.
Unfortunately, that’s apparently out of the
hands of Asus and Intel.
—Gordon Mah UnGAsus P5W DH Deluxe
Conroe cometh via Intel’s 975X chipset
It’s hard to imagine what else asus could have added to
the P5W dh deluxe board.ScoreWe tested with a 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E6700, a GeForce 7900 GTX, a Western
Digital WD4000KD SATA hard drive, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/800, Windows XP SP2,
and a PC Power and Cooling Turbo-Cool 1KW.3DMark2001 SE 43,505
QuakE III 705
PC Mark 2005 MEM 5,428
HD TaCH 3.0 56.6MB/sbenchMarkS
$280, http://www.asus.comasus p5w dh deluxeM240B
Core 2 Duo and Extreme
support, up to 8GB of RAM,
and driverless RAID!
M60^9
Where’s the dual x16 PCI-E?
Damn, this thing is expensive! MAXIMUMPCKICKASS
CPu SuPPorT Pentium 4, Pentium 4 Extreme Edition,
Pentium Extreme Edition, Pentium D,
Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Extreme
FSB SuPPorT 800MHz, 1066MHz
raM 8GB DDR2 553/667/800
SoCkET LGA775
CHIPSET 975X w/ ICH7R
auDIo HD Audio using RealTek ALC882M
LaN Marvell 88E8053 dual Gigabit, 802.11b/g
SToragE 7 SATA, 2 PATAspecs