Thoughts, HEXUS.awards & HEXUS.right2reply
At nearly £160 inc VAT at Scan, there's no doubting the P5WD2-E Premium is an expensive mainboard. For starters, it's a £30 hike over the nearly identical board it was tested against, the P5WD2.The differences between i955X and i975X are minimal, running to a x8 + x8 PCIe split on i975X, whereas i955X has to make do with x16 + x4 (from the southbridge). So support for dual graphics (and ATI's Crossfire) gets a bit better with i975X, with the changes pretty much stopping there.
Enough to make you spend £30 more? How about the -E also integrating the Marvell disk controller, giving you twice the SATA ports (and one eSATA shared on the backplane) and another IDE port (although matching the non E's count of 2 there)? If that's not enough, dual Marvell-supplied GigE LAN on PCI Express largely helps to account for the difference.
The board is more fully featured for your money, it's just performance that's hard to differentiate.
What we think will drive interest in this board more than anything is the probable (although we can't confirm as yet, please understand that!) support of Conroe. A recent BIOS dropped minimum Vcore to a value that suggests support for the voltage supply requirements of the new processors, and we know for a fact that i975X will support the chips. Mainboard vendors may decide a new revision of an existing mainboard (largely for marketing reasons we suspect) is what's needed, though.
Regardless, if you're looking to run high-end P4, Pentium-D or Conroe, this is the kind of board you're likely to want. Massively full-featured, stable, supportive of a dual graphics solution and with an enabling of system performance befitting the components you feed it, the ASUS P5WD2-E Premium doesn't really put a foot wrong.
A good layout tops things off, putting the ASUS P5WD2-E Premium to the top of our Intel mainboard tree at the time of writing. Competition exists, but we're not convinced it's fierce enough to trouble ASUS's new flagship mainboard. Very good indeed.
HEXUS Awards
ASUS P5WD2-E Premium
