A Walk About SLS (Special Graphics Card Edition) (25-6-2005)ASUS P5WD2-Premium
Over at Fuwell, we saw one of the best boards of this current generation. The ASUS P5WD2-Premium. Featuring Intel's latest i955X chipset, supporting Dual Core Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition CPUs. To top it off, this board has insane overclocking ability, as demonstrated by our Overclocking star, Shamino, over here. Priced at S$ 448, this board is the board to go for, if you want absolute quality, together with extreme performace.
The large box of this ASUS board. Like the lower end P5LD2 we reported, this box spots similar design too.
The label present on the box, to give a brief overview of the features found on this board.
The board from top down.
The I/O connectors. Dual Gigabit LAN connectors could be found on this board. Also, like the P5LD2, it comes with an external SATA port, for external useages.
The Intel Gigabit LAN chip found on this board. This chips uses PCIe lanes for operation!
The other Gigabit LAN controller, powered by Marvell 88E8001, featuring ASUS's AI NET technology.
The famously large northbridge heatsink, that cools the Intel i955X chipset. With heatsinks of this size, they could do away fans, which could potentially add noise pollution.
Another feature that does away rotational cooling. Similar to other high end current generation ASUS board, they had this MOSFET heatsink, with fins made to capture moving air from the CPU fan, this MOSFET heatsink is a simply, innovative yet effective way to cool these MOSFETs which could run hot.
This ITE IT 8211F PATA controller, would take charge for that additional 2 PATA controllers present on this Premium board.
This Silicon Image Si 3132 SATA II controller will take charge of that external SATA port, as well as 1 more internal SATA port. Runs on PCIe too!
Seeing double? 2 full length PCIe x16 slots are available on this board. However, the black slot is only 4x electrically. SLi is still possible on such setups, with very minimal performance lost.
The ASUS Stack Cool 2 present on this board. Like the P5LD2, this iteration of the Stack Cool now covers the whole board, providing additional cooling power via ASUS's special layer of PCB.