Asus P5W DH Deluxe

I’ll have a Conroe board with the lot, thanks. And don't skimp on the networking.

It seems that now Intel and AMD are cut-pricing their processors, motherboard manufacturers have stepped in to keep the total cost of ownership the same, with high end boards now comfortably topping the $400 mark, and creeping ever so quickly towards $500. Considering how razor-thin margins are on motherboards, we can hardly blame them.

In its defence, the P5W DH Deluxe is stupidly feature laden, as evidenced by the ridiculously huge manual included with this board.

Fortunately, most things included are actually useful, which is more than we can say for things like presets on monitors.

This board, for example, comes with built-in 802.11g Wi-Fi from the get go. It also comes with a PCI bracket into which an MP3 player can be plugged, and it can happily play music through your speakers without the PC needing to be turned on. Then there’s the Q-Connector that we’ve come to know and love, which allows you to hook the wire headers from your case into it, and then plug it onto your motherboard all in one go, rather than spending hours trying to fit every single fiddly pin onto the board while doing your best impression of a Cirque Du Soleil gymnast contorting yourself around the case.

Finally, there’s a small and simple remote – with profiles for the most popular players already bundled, and five user slots so you can assign whatever hotkey you like to the buttons. In a glaring oversight, the Windows key has been omitted as a Shift operator, leaving only Ctrl, Alt and Shift. Further to this, the remote didn’t work right off the bat. While you’re asked to plug the receiver into one of the two USB ports under the second LAN port, all it would do is detect the hardware then tell us that the device was disconnected. After some random shuffling around we found that removing our mouse (which was under the first RJ45 connector), then plugging the receiver into that port, then back into the port it was meant to be in got things working. Hurrah for voodoo mechanics.

From the outset this is simply an 975X board updated to be able to take Core 2 Duo, and it still comes bundled with the ICH7 southbridge. It also supports 800MHz RAM and comfortably travels along at 1066MHz FSB, meaning we could open up some X6800 loving.

While it doesn’t benefit from the 965’s new memory controller, it does have one large thing in its advantage – CrossFire support. Speculation runs rampant over whether or not NVIDIA and Intel will see eye to eye long enough to enable SLI on the 965. But right now for a dual card solution and Conroe, it’s either 975X or an updated nForce 4 board for SLI – the 590 SLI and RD600 are still nowhere to be seen.

As with all the top end boards these days the motherboard is heatpiped, so it runs cool and quiet. ASUS’s continued wide spacing between the PCI-E x16 slots means you can still have two PCI cards in the system if necessary – oddly though, the PCI-E x16 retention clip has been altered so it can only be released from the heatsink side of a video card – tres annoying. The secondary IDE controller is also annoyingly placed at the bottom of the board, while the floppy takes precedence on the side.

We tested with a 7900GT, two sticks of Corsair 6400MHz in dual channel and an X6800, and compared it to AMD’s highest offering, the FX-62, using identical components where possible. As expected Core 2 Duo performs well on the 975X, outstripping the FX-62, although AM2’s memory bandwidth is still significantly higher.

If your pockets are lined with gold, or you absolutely must have the best of the best, the P5W DH Deluxe should cover all your needs, and then some.