ASUS P5W DH Deluxe Motherboard Review :: Doc's System

The board is currently in use by Doc as his primary gaming computer. You can see the board and his setup in all its glory in Doc's review here. You can see a picture of me and my work area in that review. I'm wearing the grey sweater. This is where we do our testing with two open-air test stations, two monitors, and a separate system for video card testing.

The first thing I do with setting up any motherboard is take inventory of the various components in the bundle that came with the motherboard. After all you don't want to buy a motherboard with an advertised feature only to find that the bracket required for that feature didn't come with the bundle that the board shipped with.

The second step in the installation process is to mount the motherboard. We use a custom-built open-air test station in our motherboard testing that's worked well over the years since we've started using it. After mounting the board, I installed the CPU, a memory stick and the 7900GT we use for testing. First boot is always exciting. A recent email from a reader of the review on the P5N-E SLI motherboard had an issue with installation that stemmed from the CPU heatsink installation. First boot shows if gdthere are any problems with the board before installing the Operating System. In this case first boot went without a hitch.

Doc's System

• Pentium X6800 Core2 Extreme CPU
• 4GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800MHz memory
• 2 150GB WD Raptor SATA HDDs 10000RPM
• Gigabyte X1950XTX
• Plextor 12x SATADVD-ROM
• Enermax 565W ATX PSU
• Windows XP with SP2
• DirectX 9.0c

The system that Doc uses most of the day is based upon the ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe motherboard, a X6800 CPU, a X1950XTX (this is his business computer his other computers have 8800GTXs) and two of the new 150GB Raptor SATA HDDs which are the bigger versions of the 74GB HDDs we use in testing motherboards and video cards. To get a feel of the setup and usage of this board read the above link.

The 975X MCH can address up to 8GB of DDR2 800MHz memory, as long as the operating system is 64-bit. The 32-bit Windows XP can only address 4GB of memory. Doc's system has 4GB of Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800Mhz memory and it operated flawlessly. Once we move to Windows Vista for our systems, the memory on our tests will likely be the best available at that time.

One thing to note is if you bought an early ASUS P5W DH Deluxe motherboard you need to update the BIOS to get a Core 2 CPU to work as the board was released before the advent of the Core 2 CPU. Most boards on the market today have an updated BIOS, but if your BIOS is older than 604 be sure to update it. I found this out the hard way the first time I tried the X6800 with the board, but after updating the BIOS it works flawlessly.

Internet telephony is a trend that has come to the computer world. Today companies like Skype charge around $30 a year for around the world telephone calls ASUS sells the AiGuru S1 marketed as the first Wi-Fi Music Skype phone. Calling other people on Skype phones is free, but for $30 a year you get unlimited phone calls to anyone in the U.S. or Canada, no connection fees and no roaming fees. The AiGuru worked flawlessly with the P5W DH Deluxe motherboard. I was able to make phone calls almost immediately after installing the software and registering for the service.

Discuss This Article