The P5WD2 Premium is currently the flagship motherboard from Asus and from this, you can expect that it will be a featured packed motherboard. Everything you'll ever ask for in a motherboard is already supported and included inside the packaging. Wireless LAN, PCI-Express, Gigabit LAN, HD-AUDIO, SATA II /IDE RAID, Dual Channel, N.O.S. WiFi-TV are only some of the board's long list of features. All this on a well designed and high quality construction PCB with Stack Cool 2. Plenty of cables and software are also included.

We liked the ProbeII utility which allows you to monitor your system from within Windows. Temperatures, Voltages and fan rotation speed are some of the things it will inform you on. The bundle software also includes AIBooster, which will help amateur and advanced users increase the speed of their system. Finally, with Asus Update, you can easily locate BIOS upgrades and drivers for your motherboard and flash them from Windows.

To measure the performance of the P5WD2 Premium, we ran a series of tests covering both 2D and 3D applications. The motherboard managed to surprise us as it out-performed both of its rivals in all of our benchmarks. Until now, it was said that the P5ND2-SLI Deluxe had the best overall performance. According to our tests, the P5WD2 Premium managed to be faster in all tasks than the NForce4 based motherboard. Benchmarks and games, actual performance, confirmed this.

The overclocking capabilities of the P5WD2 Premium were also great. Easily, without any advanced knowledge, you can increase the FSB speed, the memory speed, adjust the DDR2 timings, etc. The result of this was our P4 3.73GHz Extreme Edition processor ran at 4.34GHz, the highest speed we have achieved. Note that our DDR2 memory from Corsair ran at 1000MHz!

The price at the time of the review was US$272 from newegg.com for the retail package, including the WiFi-TV option. The price is a little high but keep in mind that it is about a motherboard with the latest available chipset on the market, the 955X, a full package and WiFi TV support. A little lower price however would be welcomed :-)

Pros:

• Excellent construction and Stack Cool 2
• Retail Package with plenty of goodies
• Plenty of features
• The best performance at this moment
• Monitoring utility from Windows
• Q-Fan and AI NOS features
• Excellent motherboard overclocking capabilities
• TV Tuner available
• WiFi Lan included

Cons:

• SLI mode did not work

Features
Performance
BIOS/Overclocking
Value for money