ASUS P5W DH Deluxe Motherboard Review :: ASUS P5W DH Deluxe Layout

The layout of the board was exceptional. The 4-pin power connector is on the upper right hand side of the board, meaning that the power cable doesn't have to snake around or above the CPU cooling area, as some boards do. The capacitors are arranged in two neat rows of capacitors along the top side of the CPU Socket.

The board has two PCI Express x16 slots, which allow the board to operate in Crossfire mode as long as there are two ATI cards installed at the same time. The 975X chipset supports Crossfired cards with x8 bandwidth to each PCI Express x16 slot. As current cards don't saturate x8, this provides more balanced Crossfire implementation than the x16 x4 modes the 965 chipset provides. The board also has two PCI Express x1 slots and two PCI slots providing plenty of expansion space for those that need it.

ASUS decided to use the ICH7R for the Southbridge on the ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe board. This chip supports RAID modes 0, 1, 5 and Intel's Matrix Storage Technology. Three SATA ports are supported by the ICH7R chip, while a JMicron chip supports a single UDMA channel, another SATA channel, and an External Serial ATA channel. A third controller, the Silicon Image 4723 RAID controller is on the board, providing support for 2 additional SATA channels. This brings total support for SATA devices to 6 with two IDE channels.

With the advent of High Definition Audio, onboard audio has moved into the modern age. Days where integrated video was limited to 2.1 Surround Sound are long gone. AC'97 integrated audio has been around since 1996 and was replaced in 2004 by HDA. Today's integrated audio from even the worst motherboard has support for 7.1 Surround Sound, Multiple Audio Streams and certified Dolby sound.

The Back Panel IO on the board is rather unique. The P5W-DH Deluxe is a Digital Home centric motherboard and there is a TV-Out board onboard. 6 audio jacks are present on the board, as well as SPDIF In/Out coaxial ports. Another important feature for a Home Theater PC is Firewire, and the board has an onboard Firewire port. Rounding out the Rear IO is 4 USB 2.0 ports. Note, to use the additional Firewire header and 2 USB headers are present on the board bringing the total to 2 and 8 respectively if all headers are used.

ASUS cools the North and Southbridge of their P5W-DH Deluxe with a heatsink and heatpipe configuration. The P5W DH Deluxe has the option of passive cooling or you can add a fan to keep the chipset cool. An optional fan is included in the bundle if you want to use it, but I prefer a silent PC. Doc uses water cooling in his main system and the system built on this motherboard.

The cooling headers on the board are numerous and in perfect position to provide efficient cooling of the system as a whole. The CPUFan is located above the memory, as it should be. Beyond that there are 3 Chassis fans, so a total of four fan headers are available. If you use the optional chipset fan, three fan headers are available.

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