The P5WD2-E Premium, as with most of the ASUS Deluxe motherboards, is manufactured on a black PCB. The layout of the interface connections makes them easily accessible and the colour coding helps in identifying them.

The P5WD2-E Premium employs the STACK COOL 2 technology, a cooling solution that lowers the temperature of critical heat generating components by up to 20°C. The motherboard uses a special design on the printed circuit board (PCB) to dissipate heat that critical components generate.

With the P5WD2-E Premium, Asus has once again used its fanless design, well known from previous latest model motherboards. There are three aluminium fanless heatsinks.

Below is the 775 socket for the Intel CPU.

The memory module slots, are colour coded black and yellow. You put two memory modules of the same memory size in the same coloured slots, to enable Dual Channel's symmetry mode support, or use two memory modules of different memory sizes for asymmetric mode.

On the back panel, you will find the keyboard and mouse (PS2) ports, audio ports (digital, analog and coaxial), one parallel port, 4 USB2.0 ports, and two RJ-45 ports. There's also an external Serial ATA connection. As for the IEEE1394a port, you have to install the appropriate component, which is included in the package.

There are two more connections on board, for extra USB, as well as two for firewire.

The ICH7R Serial ATA connectors come with RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID 10 support, based on the ICH7R RAID controller.

Marvell's chipset handles four more Serial ATA connectors and the Marvell IDE connector which supports up to two IDE devices.

The Marvell 88SE6141 controller is responsible for the SATA II and PATA capabilities,

Below, you can see the Primary IDE channel connector.

As you can see below, there are 2 x PCI Express x 16 slots, with Crossfire support, 1 x Universal PCI-E (max. x2 speed), 1 x PCI Express x 1and 3 x PCI.

Apart from the CPU fan power connection, there are three more on the motherboard.

There are two Marvell 88E8053 controllers, in charge of the Dual Gigabit LAN, both featuring AI NET2.

The P5WD2-E Premium also hosts the Realtek ALC882M High Definition Audio 8-channel CODEC, which supports Multi-streaming, Jack-sensing and Jack-retasking functions.

- The package

The retail package for the P5WD2-E Premium includes a large list of accessories:

Everything you need to know is included in the very good manual, and it is worth spending a little time reading it.