The last couple of chipsets that Intel has released haven't been as widely accepted as their previous offerings. Part of the reason for this could be the radical jump in technologies that Intel offered with its last few chipsets that required you to change quite a few components. However, it has been a while since the launch of the 915/925 platform and technologies like PCI-E, DDR2 and Serial-ATA have become much more widely available. The only new things that the 955X/ICH7 chipset brings is support for Dual Core CPUs, DDR667 memory and RAID 5 and 10.

Today, we take a look at the Intel 955X/ICH7 chipset based ASUS board modeled P5WD2 Premium Edition. While this isn't a chipset review, we can arguably say that nVidia's recent nForce4 for the Pentium 4 platform offers more features than the 955X- for example, SLI, Gigabit Ethernet, ten USB 2.0 ports and the option to create RAID from eight possible drives. However, ASUS fills quite a few holes nicely with their P5WD2 Premium Edition. Lets find out what it offers.

Packaging

ASUS uses a white box this time around for their ALife series which certainly looks elegant. The front of the box has very little stuff on it which create the minimalist effect successfully. Flip it open and you?ll see all the features supported by the board.

With the amount of cables that ASUS bundles with the P3WD2, you can pretty much open a shop and start selling stuff! Tons of cables are included for SATA/power and IDE along with the drivers and applications CDs. ASUS also bundles their WiFi TV card with its cables but more on that later.

While SLi isn't supported on this board, ASUS bundles their SLi connector which is totally flexible and completely awesome allowing you to connect to any SLI setup.

Layout

The P5WD2 features the ?Stack Cool 2?system which basically adds a layer underneath the motherboard that dissipates heat better which in turn, results in reduced temperatures below the CPU area. The CPU socket is well placed and does not feel tight meaning you should be able to install a decent HSF unit if needed. ASUS places the main power connector next to the memory sockets along with the floppy connector while the 12V connector is placed to the left of the CPU right on top of the board- again the right place for it as it keeps the system cable-clutter free.

Above the CPU socket, we see ASUS placing a Serial-ATA connector which is certainly a weird position for this but as you will see that the back plate has an external SATA connector as well and for this reason, ASUS had to place this connector within the region. In our opinion, ASUS should've placed both these SATA connectors on the back plate as you already have four inside.

The board features two PCI-E slots that can be hooked up to video cards, however SLi is not supported. Instead, you can connect the two cards to four display units and enjoy quad view. Keep in mind that you can run the secondary video card at either PCI-E x4 speed by disabling the onboard x1 slot or at PCI-E x2 speed. These options are adjustable from the BIOS. The remaining slots are three 32-bit PCI slots as most add-on cards are available in this format. Next to the PCI slots, ASUS places four SATA connectors and one IDE connector powered by ICH7 as well as two IDE connectors powered by the iTE RAID chipset. You can also find the clearing CMOS jumper in this area for easy access as well as all the USB/Firewire headers along the bottom edge of the board.