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ASUS P5GDC-V Motherboard Review :: The Board
The P5GDC-V Deluxe is based upon Intel's 915G chipset. The 915 chipset is the low-tier of Intel's chipset strategy for 2004. The board takes all LGA-775 800MHz FSB CPUs including the 3.8GHz Pentium 4 Prescott recently released by Intel and the 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. The only chipset to support the new 3.46 Extreme Edition with the 1066MHz FSB is the Intel 925XE chipset, so that isn't an option for this 915G motherboard.    Memory support is brought through 2 240-pin DIMMs (Dual In-line Memory Modules), and 4 184-pin DIMMs. The 240-pin DIMM slots support DDR2 memory, and the 184-pin DIMM slots support normal DDR memory. There's no way to operate both DDR and DDR2 memory at the same time, so the maximum support of memory is 2 GB DDR2 or 4 GB DDR unbuffered non-ECC memory. The layout is pretty good. I especially like the positioning of the 12V 4-pin connection. This connector is above the CPU socket making easy placement of the cable without going over the CPU HSF as many motherboards do. Another nice touch is the positioning of the main power connector. It's on the top of the board which is an ok positioning, considering the rest of the layout of the board. The North Bridge doesn't have active cooling. As this board is targeted for the 915 platform it's not expected, but it could be an added bonus for enthusiasts. The PCB is the standard gold colored PCB that I expect from ASUS. Aesthetically, the PCI slots and PCI Express slots are white standard color which is fine except for those that have a windowed case and want multicolored goodness. Expansion on this board is excellent for a 915 based motherboard. The standard PCI Express X16 graphics slot, 3 PCI 2.3 32-bit slots, 2 PCI Express X1 slots make for easy expansion slot options. As more and more PCI Express devices arrive the 2 X1 slots will see rapid use, as the bandwidth provided by 250 MB/second on a PCI Express x1 lane is over 8X that found on PCI 2.3. Gigabit LAN can make good use of the extra bandwidth.     Hard disk and drive support is provided by 3 IDE ports, 4 SATA ports and one floppy disk port. Two of the IDE ports are labeled Primary RAID and Secondary RAID. You can set up to four hard disks in RAID 1 mode. Setup of RAID is easily explained in the manual. The Intel ICH6R supports up to 4 SATA ports natively. ASUS did not include an extra SATA controller, but did include 4 ports. You can create a RAID 0 or RAID 1 or use the Intel Matrix Storage Technology for Serial ATA hard disks through the ICH6R chipset. The location of the floppy disk connector is in an especially precarious position. When installing the motherboard I had to dig around and use a longer cable to connect my floppy disk drive to the board. On-board sound is provided through a C-Media CMI9880 CODEC. This supports the Azalia High Definition audio standard that Intel is promoting through their new chipsets. Azalia replaces the AC'97 standard and most motherboards with this chipset or the Realtek chip see little benefit from using an external audio solution. The on-board audio supports up to 7.1 surround sound and Dolby Digital streams when connecting a AC-3 decoder to the system.     On-board graphics is normally laughed at by most gaming enthusiasts. Only very recently, with the release of GMA900 and RADEON Xpress 200 integrated graphics have the integrated video on motherboards been updated to a point where it can play the latest games at all. Intel says that the GMA900 supports Pixel Shader 2.0 technology. This is a good thing. However, Intel's site has a list of games that the GMA900 doesn't support, because the Intel GMA900 doesn't support Hardware Transform and Lighting (HW T+L). Personally, I would prefer that Intel stayed out of the graphics business, making us purchase standalone PCI Express cards. However, for the business user, or the casual gamer, GMA900 is just fine. After all, a business wouldn't want their workers playing Half Life 2 while doing data entry or other work. The rear panel of this motherboard is well appointed for an ASUS motherboard. The ports included are PS/2 mouse/keyboard ports, parallel port, COM1 port, Firewire (IEEE 1394a port), RJ-45 port, Rear, Side, Line In, Line Out, Microphone, Center/Subwoofer ports for audio connectors, 4 USB 2.0 ports, VGA port for the onboard graphics, Optical S/PDIF Out and Coaxial S/PDIF Out ports. The manual is especially well-done, as an explanation for what to plug in every port is included. Discuss This Article
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