The introduction of Intel's new 955X and 945P chipsets has caused a flood of new motherboards to hit the market. These boards offer better features and improved compatibility for the future when compared to their predecessors. ASUS was among the first to snap up these new chipsets and create a number of new and exciting motherboards. This time last month the ASUS P5WD2 Premium (i955X) was placed on the test bed, where it was then tested using the usual series of benchmark programs. Today the same series of tests will be thrown at the ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe motherboard, which of course features the i945P chipset.
There is virtually no difference between the layout and design of the P5WD2 Premium and P5LD2 Deluxe motherboards. The P5WD2 Premium is of course more expensive as it does utilize the 955X chipset. The only other noticeable difference other than this is that the P5LD2 Deluxe only features a single Gigabit LAN controller. The P5WD2 Premium was a superb overclocker and if the P5LD2 Deluxe can match or better the overclocking performance it is going to be a serious product. Given that these two motherboards are almost identical, most of the review will contain much of the same information that was found in the P5WD2 Premium review.
Before I continue, here is a little bit of background information on the two chipsets. The 955X is the flagship chipset designed to deliver maximum performance for power-users and enthusiasts alike. The 945P/G series on the other hand, are designed to be more mainstream products. Currently the average 955X motherboard can be found retailing for a little over $200 US, where as the 945P/G boards are around the $150 US mark. The key difference between the two chipsets is the added memory support for the 955X chipset. This chipset offers a total memory capacity of 8GB's; this is 4GB's more than the 945P/G chipsets. The 955X also supports ECC memory and Intel's Memory Pipeline Technology.
The Intel Memory Pipeline is said to be an enhanced memory pipelining technology that enables a higher utilization of each memory channel, accelerating data transfers between the processor and system memory and resulting in higher system performance. While this technology is missing on the 945 versions, I do not believe there will be a noticeable performance difference between the chipsets. Given how things have been in the past with Intel chipsets, it would be unwise to expect a performance difference between the mainstream and performance chipsets.
Before we move on let's just have a look at what processors are currently available to suit this motherboard. Currently Intel's flagship processor is the dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition 840, rated at 3.2GHz. Then there are the dual-core Intel Pentium D processors which come at clock speeds from 2.8GHz through to 3.2GHz. There are also a range of processors featured in the Pentium 4 6xx and 5xx series, all of which are based on the Prescott's 90-nm technology utilizing an 800MHz FSB, Hyper-Threading and SSE3. Of course the Celeron has also become available on this platform, running on a 533MHz FSB at a range of clock speeds.
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