Features

With the 955X chipset, Intel allows support for Dual Core CPUs along with PCI-Express, dual channel DDR2 667 and 3Gb SATA with Matrix Storage allowing creation of RAID 0,1,5 and 10. You also get High Definition Audio and eight USB 2.0 ports. While these are pretty good features, ASUS adds quite a few things to it to make it one of the most feature rich boards to hit our labs. Starting off, we’ve already talked about Stack Cool 2 and ASUS puts it to good use by using fanless heatsinks on the North and South bridges to keep the board noise free. For additional storage, a Silicon Image RAID controller is added and ASUS provides one of the SATA connectors on the back panel.

ASUS also adds a couple of Gigabit Networking controllers as well as a Firewire controller to give you good wired connectivity options. Wireless connectivity is handled by a PCI card that supports 802.11 a/b/g standards- the only thing missing is Bluetooth. On that same WiFi PCI card, ASUS adds FM/ TV Tuner that supports High Definition TV but we couldn’t test that bit out as we don’t have High Definition TV available yet. A remote control allows you to easily operate all of these functions

BIOS

ASUS provides all the BIOS options that you’d come to expect from an ASUS board. The memory frequency can be selected upto DDR800 and the timings tweaked to your module’s liking. All of the onboard features can also be enabled/disabled from the BIOS- as you would expect.

For overclocking, ASUS allows you to adjust the FSB speed upto 450MHz and although the option to modify the clock multiplier for the CPU is available, it didn’t work in our board. We have an unlocked EE which works in most other boards but we're not too worried about this as a BIOS update will probably fix this.

Voltage options are also plenty ranging from memory (upto 2.3V) and CPU (upto 1.70V) to Northbridge (upto 1.65V) and Southbridge (1.02 and 1.20V). Lastly, as we mentioned earlier, the BIOS has the ability to select the speed of the secondary PCI slot.

Since the multiplier option didn’t work on our board, we weren’t able to reach very high FSB speeds. The max we were able to go was 305Mhz FSB which translated into 305x13=3965MHz which is about the limit of our EE CPU.

Stability

Stability was not an issue with the ASUS P5WD2 and it managed to perform beautifully with all kinds of hardware that we used it with. Intel chipsets and ASUS quality are usually enough to warrant a stable solution.