Product: Asus P5W DH Deluxe Mainboard
Author: Sean Kalinich
Category: Enthusiast/HTPC
Reviewed on:
Product cost: (In dollars, and if in the EU ? in pounds/euro)
Manufacturer: Asus
Spelling and Grammatical editor:
Introduction:
You know, Asus is a company that really needs no introduction. If you do not know who they are, well you might have clicked on the wrong link and are probably at the wrong website.
Well now that we have that out of the way lets dig into the P5W DH Deluxe.
{mospagebreak title=Packaging and Accessories}
Packaging and Accessories:
I think out of all of the manufacturers that I test out and evaluate I like Asus? packaging just about best.
The Boxes are clean and uncluttered by harsh and sometimes tacky graphics they have detailed information about the product and are sturdy.
The P5W DH arrived in a white and light green box with the model number in large letters on the front. To the left of the name is visible the wireless antenna and the included IR remote. Tow very attractive features.
Above this there are the logos of some of the major features of the board; such as Crossfire support, Dolby Master Studio, and others.
Below both the name and the remote is a proclamation that the P5W DH supports the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme. This is in twelve different languages just so you won?t miss it.
{mospagebreak title=Board Layout}
Board Layout: 4 out of 5
The layout of the P5W is a fairly standard Dual x16 slot ATX layout. The major differences are in the placement of the SATA/ PATA ports the 1394 and USB headers Clear CMOS jumper and a few other items that while small can have a large impact on ease of installation and later upgrading or tweaking.
I will cover the highlights of the major portions of the board and touch on the items that may or may not cause some issues during your build or later tweaking or over clocking.
As always I am talking about the board when mounted in an ATX tower case.
I will start from the upper right corner.
The P5W DH, when you first look at it, looks very cramped. After working with it I can tell you that in many cases the board IS cramped. In the upper right quadrant Asus has placed the usual items, 24-Pin ATX power connector, Floppy port, RAM slots etc. nothing new. Above the RAM slots is the 4-pin CPU fan header, again nothing creative or awe inspiring. Moving left we come to the 975x Northbridge and the 775 CPU socket. The 975x Northbridge is covered by a nice shiny copper heatsink. This heatsink is covered on three sides. On the top side are the words ?Digital HOME? it is a shame that Asus went to the trouble of putting that nice cover as it is something that I would recommend removing as soon as you can. That cover, while very attractive, restricts air-flow across the fins and holds in more heat than it dissipates. If you do chose to leave the cover on the heatsinks there is one thing that you do HAVE to remember to do. On each of the three main heatsinks (Northbridge, Southbridge, and EZ-Backup) there is a plastic coating (presumably to reduce fingerprints during installation) if you leave this on your temperatures will sky-rocket. For the most part these are barely visible, so many may miss them if they do not pay attention. Around the CPU socket Asus has placed solid capacitors these have a much longer life and are more resistant to heat than the standard capacitors. So points for including the solid caps? But we have to take away a few points for putting them too close to the socket. The proximity of these restricts the ability to use some third party cooling solutions. With the Cool by Corsair I had to rotate the block and bracket around a few times to get it seated on the CPU properly. Continuing our stroll to the left we find the power regulators these are topped by another copper heatsink and also are at the end of the heat-pipe running from the Northbridge heatsink. The theory is that this heatsink will receive enough air-flow from the CPU fan to keep the power regulators and the Northbridge cool. Now this is a great theory but in the real world it just does not work out that way. There is simply too much heat concentrated in this little area for my liking. For those that are going to use a water cooling system Asus includes a fan to force air through the fins over the power regulators.
Just below the heat pipe are two back to back fan headers. One seems perfect for a third party fan for the Northbridge and the other would work for your PSU fan. Also secreted away in this area is a single SATA port. This port is run by a Jmicron JMB363 controller that also handles the e-SATA port as well as a PATA port located along the bottom edge of the board . Above the power regulators is a four-pin ATX AUX power connector.
Along the far left edge of the mainboard are the I/O ports. Just below the I/O ports is the Wireless adapter. Now this is a nice, and welcome, feature that I will drone on about later in the evaluation.
Moving to the lower portion of the mainboard and back to the right we find some interesting things in the lower right quadrant.
Here are some interesting and confusing things. Here we find a 90 degree PATA connector, nothing special about that, a nice touch but nothing to write home about. Now here is where it does get interesting. To the left of this is a set of jumpers that control the configuration of something called EZ-Backup one of the features on the P5W DH. This is a RAID setup controlled by a Silicon Image 4723 controller that supports SATA2 3.0GB. These jumpers allow you to easily set the RAID type 1, 0 or JBOD. There is no BIOS to set, just the jumpers. I will talk more about this feature a little later. Below these jumpers is one of the confusing things that I mentioned. There are only three SATA ports, although the solder spot on the board for the fourth is clearly visible.
These SATA ports are controlled by the ICH7R controller which sits just to the left of the SATA ports and is covered by another of those nice looking but not so efficient heatsinks. Below all of this is the Asus EZ-Backup controller and SATA ports, moving to the left side of the board we find the PCI-e and PCI slots. Just to the left of the first PCI Slot is a read four ?pin port similar to a CD-Audio port. This port is actually a line-in for MP3 Audio. As with EZ-Backup I will cover this interesting feature more in dept later in the evaluation. The last part of our walk around is the bottom edge of the board. Along this edge are the front panel headers, the EZ-Backup SATA Ports, two USB headers the Jmicron PATA port and a 1394 header.
Quite a busy and cramped board.
{mospagebreak title=Features}
Features and Bios: 4.85 out of 5
Features:
Before we embark on the epic novel that is the list of features packed into the P5W DH. You might want to take a break and grab something to eat and drink. Maybe even take a short nap first. The list is LONG, there is not a lot more that Asus could have stuffed into this board. I will cover some of the major highlights.
Dual (Tri?) RAID.
The P5W DH has three separate RAID controllers. There is the ICH7R, the Jmicron JMB363, and the Silicon Image 4723. Together these three controllers give you four options for RAID. The fourth option I am referring to is a cross-RAID. This combines the ICH7R RAID and a single port from the Silicon Image 4723 to form RAID 0+1.
Now all of this sounds wonderful but some of the RAID options available are less than stellar. The Jmicron RAID is a software based RAID solution that allows you to combine an internal drive with and external drive. It also allows for the use of port multiplying enabled external enclosures. As with any software based RAID solution there will be a performance hit due to software over head. One other item worth mentioning is that there are two independent PATA ports on the P5W DH, one controlled by the ICH7R and the other by the Jmicron JMB363. Neither of these can be included in any of the SATA RAID sets available. Also the Jmicron PATA controller will require drivers to be installed at the F6 prompt if you use it for your optical drives during installation of your operating system.
EZ-Backup:
This is a nothing more than a nice name for a simple configuration hardware RAID controller. The Asus EZ-Backup is powered by a Silicon Image 4723 RAID controller. This controller does not have a BIOS that is used to configure the RAID options. Instead they are set by a series of jumpers on the board. The EZ-Backup name comes from the default RAID 1 setting on the jumpers. Simply plug in two SATA drives into the EZ-Backup SATA ports and you have a RAID 1 set. The EZ-backup can be configured as ?safe?, ?fast? and ?big? these options relate to RAID 1 (safe), RAID 0 (fast), and JBOD (big). You will still need to install drivers at the F6 prompt to run from this RAID set but there are no real configuration issues, such as waiting for the BIOS prompt and making sure you hit the correct key combination. You simply attach your drives, set the jumpers, enter the main BIOS (in the DH Feature submenu of the Advanced Menu) and switch EZ-back up RAID Mode Change to enable. That was EZ wasn?t it?
8-Phase Power:
The P5W DH uses an 8-Phase power design that allows for cleaner and more stable power. According to Asus, it makes the P5W DH ?ideal for overclocking?
We will see how the P5W DH fairs at that a little later.
8-Channel HD Audio with SPDIF out:
I am not sure if this qualifies as a feature anymore. Yes you can get boards without the HD audio, and yes there are many boards without any sort of SPDIF out. However, there are few high-end and even mainstream boards without it anymore. There is a bright spot to this and that bright spot is the Dolby Master Studio Support. This combines a few nice Dolby technologies to enhance the already clean sound. Dolby Prologic IIx, Dolby Headphone, Dolby Virtual Speaker, and Dolby Live are the major features of the Master Studio Suite.
Asus AI Life:
The P5W DH also combines the usual array of AI Life features such as: AI Quiet, Stack Cool, AI NOS, AI Net2, Precision Tweaker, PEG Link Mode, Crash Free BIOS, and many others. It is, as I mentioned above quite a list of features that the P5W DH packs, and I am not finished yet.
Asus WiFi-AP Solo:
Asus has thrown in a WiFi adapter to complement the existing Dual Lan that the P5W DH already has. This WiFi Adapter is based on the 54Mb RealTek RTL8187 801.11g chipset and Asus provides you with drivers that work in XP x64 right on the drivers CD-ROM. One of the nicest features of many of Asus? mainboard is the inclusion of 64-bit drivers. I can simply run the auto installer and not have to worry about searching the Internet for drivers.
The WiFi-AP Solo has two modes; it can operate as a WiFi adapter and connect to an existing access point or you can opt to have the WiFi-AP run as an access point.
In Windows XP the AP mode can handle up to ten systems or wireless devices. In XP x64 that number seems to drop to only one device. When I set it up as an AP in XP x64 I was only able to have one device connected and able to access my network at a time.
I am not sure why this limitation exists in XP x64, but I am sure that it can be corrected in future driver releases. The P5W does not need to be on to act as a wireless AP, you can put the system in EZ-WiFi mode this places the system in sleep mode and allows the AP to continue to function while the system is using minimal power.
This makes the AP feature even more attractive.
Asus DH Remote:
You know, it seem like everything has a remote now. I remember when I bought my first car stereo with a remote and thinking how lazy you would have to be to use it.
Well the P5W DH comes with a remote too.
This remote allows you to turn the system on (even if you did not use the remote to turn it off), place the system into EZ-WiFi mode, set the system to Noise Off (this slows down any attached fans to reduce system noise), and place the system into suspend mode.
The DH Remote also allows you to set up one application that you can control from the remote. You can start this application by pressing the AP Launch button. For most applications this feature is not very useful however it is nice to use with a software DVD player. I set this up with PowerDVD and found that it was functional enough to be of real use. Asus also provides a clip to allow you to hang the DH Remote where it will be right at hand.
One feature of the DH remote that I was a little disappointed with is the IR sensor. This sensor is a small external unit that can be attached to your case through the use of double sided tape that is in-place on the bottom of the sensor. It is connected to the mainboard Via a USB port. There is only one port this works in though you have to use the top USB port bellow the second LAN port. It would have been nice if Asus had of provided a front ?break-out? box with the P5W DH. The inclusion of the IR sensor, and the MP3-In would have been nice. This could even have fit into a 3-1/2? slot. As it is there is quite a bit that requires access to the back of your system to use. This can become a hassle.
Asus MP3-In
What is that you say? I can play my MP3 player through my speakers without having to have the system on?… Oh wait, I haven?t told you about that yet.Well Asus has provided you a way to hook up your MP3 player and to play it directly through your system without the system being on. That is according to the manual and the heavy sell information on the box.
How does this work in practice? Well to start off with you have to an adapter that has 1/8? stereo jack. This jack unfortunately fits into a slot on the rear of your system. (as mentioned above a break-out box would have been very nice for this.) this plugs into a port on the mainboard that allows for direct output from your MP3 player to your speakers.
Not a bad little feature given the number of MP3 players out there. In practice it is a little less than it sounds. If you shut your PC down using the Windows shut down menu you cannot listen to your MP3 player through the speakers.
{mospagebreak title=BIOS}
Bios:
The BIOS on the P5W DH follows the same format that we all have come to love/hate from Asus. The version I used was the 903 for most of my testing, for the overclocking portion I used the 1506 BIOS. The overall layout is easy to follow as you can see from the screen shots bellow.
I will cover the highlights and the areas of the BIOS that most tweakers and enthusiasts will want to visit.
Under the Advanced section you will find all of your performance and overclocking options. The first stop on your overclocking trip is going to be the JumperFree Configuration. Here you have all of the voltage and bus settings for the board. To access these you would simply set the AI Overclocking to manual. From there you can tweak the system to your heart?s content. You can adjust the FSB up to 450MHz, and set the DDR2 speed. Although the settings are shown in DDR2 speeds what you are actually seeing are dividers. Just below these two settings you find the Performance Mode setting, this can be set to Auto, Standard or Turbo. When overclocking, you will want to set this to turbo.
The next two settings of interest are the PCI-e and PCI bus frequencies.
The PCI-e bus can be set to auto or from 90MHz to 150MHz. The PCI bus has a few less options; you can set it to auto, 33.33MHz, or ?to CPU?.
For your voltage tweaking habits you have the options for the following:
Memory Voltage ? can be set to Auto or from 1.8v to 2.4v in .05v increments (after 1.9v)
CPU VCore Voltage – Auto or from 1.2250v to 1.7000v in .1250v increments.
FSB Termination Voltage ? Auto or from 1.20 to 1.50 in .10v increments
MCH Chipset Voltage ? Auto or from 1.50v to 1.65v in .05v increments
ICH Chipset Voltage ? Auto, 1.05v, or 1.20v
The last item is Digital Home Mode; this is either enabled or disabled. If you are overclocking you will want this set to disabled as when it is enabled the system will adjust the fans and system VCore to their lowest settings to maintain temperatures inside the case with the least possible noise.
The next spot for tweakers is going to be the CPU configuration:
As you can see your major settings for the internal workings of the CPU are here, you can adjust the multiplier, the thermal control, and many other settings.
The next stop is the Advanced Chipset settings; here is where your memory settings are. Granted there are not many to be found. Pretty much just the basics of control
CAS Latency, RAS Precharge, RAS to CAS Delay, RAS Activate to Precharge, and DRAM Write recovery are available options. There are also settings for ECC mode, Hyper Path 3 (this should be disabled if overclocking), DRAM throttling threshold, and a memory remap feature. This should be set to ?enabled? if you are running a 64 bit OS.
The rest of the settings here relate to Video performance.
Adjusting these did not appear to have any noticeable effect on Single Card or Crossfire performance. They did seem to make the system unstable if set to anything other than Auto.
Now for the rest of the BIOS:
Starting off with the Main page; here is where you find all of the basic settings and information about the system such as, what HDDs are attached, system time and date, as well as the settings for IDE configuration and a System Information page.
Moving back to the Advanced tab, we find a couple of items that I skipped over. These are; LAN cable status, USB settings, Onboard Devices Configuration, PCIPnP, and DH Feature page.
Out of all of these the one that is the most important is the Onboard Devices Configuration page.
This page has the settings for all of your peripheral devices, LAN ports, Audio, The JMicron SATA, all of them are here.
Another interesting page here is the DH Feature Page. The only option here is to enable or disable the EZBackup feature on the board. I do not think this needed its own separate page and could have (probably should have) been included on the Onboard Devices Configuration page.
The rest of the BIOS pages are pretty self explanatory. Power, has your configuration for power options and hardware monitoring. The Tools page has items such as; Music Alarm (you can set your system to turn on like an alarm clock) EZ Flash and you can store OC profiles here. These are pretty much what they seem, a way for you to save certain OC settings so you do not have to reenter all of the settings each time you reset the BIOS or shift from one tweak to the next.One note to make before we save our changes to the BIOS.
In BIOS 903 the options for HD audio were very limited. When I flashed to 1506 I found a new setting for HD Audio. This is Vista or Non-Vista. I have not had the chance to see what the difference is and there is no explanation but I believe that this is a setting to open up a broader range of sound options when using Vista?s built in media player.
Time will tell on this one and I am looking forward to finding out about it.
We have a series of HTPC reviews coming up soon based on Vista and we will find out then.
Overclocking options:
The P5W DH would not be an Asus board if it did not come with an assortment of overclocking options. Of course any overclock is going to be very dependent on the hardware that you use.
With the system I used I was able to push the FSB to 365MHz, anything over that with the CPU and RAM that I had and I was not able to post much less boot into windows. Not too bad but not great. Again your results may vary.
The settings used can be seen below in the stability test
{mospagebreak title=Performance ?Test System}
Performance: 4.0 out of 5
Test system:
Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800
Kingston
Asus P5W DH
Western Digital 74GB 10,000RPM Raptors (RAID 0)
ThermalTake Pure Power 680Watt PSU
Generic 16x DVD ROM
Generic 1.44MB Floppy drive
ATi Radeon X1900XTX
ATi Radeon X1900 Crossfire
ATi Radeon X1950XTX
ATi Radeon X1950 Crossfire
Microsoft Windows XP Professional/ Microsoft Windows XP x64 Edition
ATi Catalyst 6.10 drivers.
{mospagebreak title=System and Application Tests}
System Tests:
Memory:
Memory bandwidth on the P5W DH is about what you would expect from a 975 chipset.
And it is close to what we saw with the BadAxe mainboard we used for testing the Core 2 Extreme.
Subsystem:
Audio:
The Audio on the P5W DH, is a little better than the average HD Audio. I do not know exactly what it is about the sound but with every type of speaker system I used it seemed to have a much fuller and rich sound.
Drives:
Network bandwidth:
The P5W DH has a total of three LAN devices.
Two are Gigabit Ethernet ports and one is a Wireless device.
The two Gigabit ports run as you would expect no big surprises there.
The Wireless device is much more interesting. For starters the Wireless card can act in two capacities. Either as a simple wireless network card or as a software-driven wireless access point. Both function at 54Mbps.
This means that you could potentially use one card as your dedicated network card (for Internet connection when you are working at the system) and one for use with the wireless access point, this turns your nice HTPC or gaming system into a high-speed wireless access point. That is nothing to thumb your nose at either.
If you are using XP x64 you may want to wait on better drivers for the access point. As it stands the 64-bit version does not like to handle more than one connection at a time.
In XP Pro it is able to handle more.
Performance – Applications:
PCMark05:
PCMark05 is a synthetic test designed to show overall performance of a particular system. While the numbers do not mean much outside of the individual system tested it can give a decent impression of how well a system will perform.
When we use it to test a mainboard, it should show how well the mainboard can handle different hardware configurations such as SLI or Crossfire. Will enabling either of these have a performance impact?
On the P5W DH enabling Crossfire did have a negative impact on system performance.
I was surprised to see that the PCMark numbers dropped, normally I would anticipate an increase in performance since the graphical tests should receive a healthy boost from a crossfire setup.
Divx Encoding:
DivX encoding is simply a measure of how well a mainboard can handle heavy traffic over the majority of the system bus.
To perform well a system has to be able to move information from a PATA DVD-ROM (or SATA if you have that) to the Memory then to the CPU then back to the memory and finally written to your storage media (HDD) any weak link and you have slow encoding times or a bad encode.
The P5W DH did not handled Divx encoding as well as some of the other boards we have tested. I was a little disappointed with times averaging around 46 minutes for XP Pro and 45 minutes for XP x64
Super PI
Super Pi is a test that we like to include because while it may seem simple on the surface it actually requires a system that can maintain heavy I/O traffic.
SuperPi relies, not only on your CPU, but on your memory (size and speed) and your hard drives. Again size and speed matter here. The ability of a mainboard to handle the I/O demands on the system bus will come out here. If you see a longer time, chances are you may see a performance hit in other areas. For testing we run one 32M and one 1M test per CPU core. Each test will have affinity set to a particular core. In the case of multiple cores the additional runs are started after the initial value is calculated. This will have the most impact on the system and can identify possible I/O issues in a system.
So what does SuperPi tell us about the P5W DH?
{mospagebreak title=Gaming Tests}
Performance ? Gaming:
The P5W DH seems perfectly suited to life in a classy HTPC case. Effortlessly handling your entertainment needs. But will it work just as well as a gaming platform?
The tests below should give you an idea. All tests were run at either 1600×1200 or 1680×1050 with all AA, AF and any HDR turned up as far as it would go (yeah, but this one goes to eleven). Frame Rates were captured during actual gameplay using FRAPS 2.80
Prey:
Prey is a fairly recent release from 2K games, the same people that brought you Oblivion. However, Prey is a much faster paced game in addition to having stunning graphics the AI leave something to be desired but the physics engine is great. In all Prey is a good game title to play and to test your system.
For testing I ran the ?Crash Landing? level.
Prey is an OpenGL game based on the Quake4 engine. This means that there is a frame rate cap in the low 60s. Although you may get higher than that for a few seconds your averages are not going to be much higher than 50-60. This is still good as for smooth game-play you really only need frame rates in the mid 30s. On the P5W DH, in single card mode, the game-play was smooth with rates in the low 50s. In Crossfire mode the performance was one to two FPS slower than in single card mode.
Need for Speed Carbon:
Following on the heels of Most Wanted Carbon puts you back behind the wheel in a place where car gangs run a major city. Carbon also features, in addition to cheesy plot lines and dialogue, improved graphics, sound, AI, and physics. All of this makes Need for Speed Carbon hard on a system. For this title I ran the Bronze Pursuit Challenge.
Need for Speed ran very well on the P5W DH, there were no sound glitches or stuttering. Gameplay was smooth with my only complaint being the slow loading of the levels. Running Need for Speed Carbon was a problem though. Apparently there is no profile for Carbon in the 6.10 drivers. I had to rename the .exe to FEAR.exe to see a performance benefit. Once I did this the performance boost was very nice indeed as you can see from the graphs above.
F.E.A.R.:
Speaking of F.E.A.R. this title happens to be the last of my game tests. I have gone on and on before about how much I like F.E.A.R. and Monolith in general. They are, in my opinion one of the best game developers out. They combine great gameplay with immersive visuals that really do drag you into the game.
For my testing I ran the Interval 02 ?Insertion? level from just after you fast rope into the Loading Yard to the end of the level.
Here is nothing I did not expect, F.E.A.R. simply gains a performance boost from a dual GPU system. As you can see the P5W DH show this very well.
Gaming Conclusions:
The P5W DH is certainly and Asus creation. With excellent gaming performance in Single card mode it can run just about any game you throw at it without missing a beat.
Powered by a Core 2 Duo or Extreme CPU the P5W DH makes a powerful gaming platform that will be sure to impress you. The lackluster Crossfire performance appeared to be a limited issue with the titles that I chose for evaluation. I feel confident that with future driver releases from ATi the P5W DH will show great improvements with setup for Crossfire.
{mospagebreak title=Costs/Value}
Costs: 4.0 out of 5
Price:
You can find the P5W DH on the net for around $230.00 ($227.99 at newegg.com). Although that sounds pretty high, when you consider what you are getting with the P5W it is not that bad at all.
Warranty:
As mentioned above the P5W DH comes with a 3-year warranty. This is the standard warranty for many of your top end mainboards now.
{mospagebreak title=Conclusion}
Conclusion:
I have had the P5W DH in my ?lab? for a long time now and have used that time to fully explore the features of this versatile board from Asus. I was extremely impressed with the array of features when I first read them on the box, but after testing out each feature I found myself enjoying the board even more. The DH remote, which at first I thought would be of no use, turned out to be a very well thought out addition. The wireless, the EZ-Backup, the HD-Audio with Dolby-Live, Crossfire support, all combine to make the P5W DH a board of many uses and one that is should certainly find its way into your home.
Gaming was excellent (with the exception of lukewarm crossfire performance).
The minor issues that I encountered were more than outweighed by the performance and versatility of the P5W DH.
If you are looking for a Holliday gift for the Enthusiast in your life (or perhaps one for yourself) the Asus P5W DH should find a home at the top of your wish list.
Pros:
Feature Packed
Crossfire
DH Remote
Wireless AP and LAN works natively in XP x64
MP3 direct in
EZ Backup
E-SATA
Dolby Master Studio sound
Vista HD Audio Ready
8 Phase Power
Cons:
Board is a little cluttered
Crossfire performance not what it should be
Scores:
Board Layout: 4.0
Features and BIOS: 4.85
Performance: 4.0
Price/warranty: 4.0
Total: 16.85
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank Charlton Ho at Asus for send out the P5W DH for our evaluation.