Reviews for Asus P5WD2 Premium Desktop Motherboard - Intel 955X Chipset - Socket T LGA-775

Fantastic motherboard!

Strengths: Stable, powerful, good price, dual GigaBit LAN, dual-core support, and SATA as IDE.

Weakness: Heat.

For the most part this is a fantastic motherboard. I had no problems installing it and adding components to it. I really like the feature where SATA drives can appear to be IDE drives. That features helps a lot when installing Windows being that you don't have to specify additional drivers for those drives. Having a dual-core processor helps a lot with the amount of stress I put on it. Also having dual GigaBit LAN can come in handy if you have multiple connections or just want to balance out the network between them. The only problems I have had with it is an error where it doesn't detect the CPU fan sometimes and slight heat. Other than those, it has been a great motherboard and would highly recommend to all.

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Asus P5WD2 Premium Desktop Motherboard - Intel 955X...

Strengths: FAST ! Easy to setup and use

Weakness: AI booster doesnt really do anything, runs a little hot.

I have this board with PC2 800 Mhz ram and a intel 930. I have OC this to 1066FSB, no probs, and then 3.15 Ghz with no probs. Great board if u know what you what u are doing, not for the beginners.

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Great !! Asus P5WD2 Premium Motherboard

Strengths: Awesome MB Working Stable no problem..

Weakness: so far no problem..

Since like i have this MB first time, everything working prefect!! no problem for me. I do a lot multi tasking program & gaming, i will recommend this MB to other user.

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good MB so far

Strengths: Great features and good price

Weakness: over heat and some problems with sound card

It is a great MB and if you know what you are doing you can get plenty more from it but you have to try to control the CPU heat but for that, as is expected, now you can buy some good fans that will reduce this some 20 C that will help wen you try to do multi task especially when you like to edit videos wile you chat or surf the internet.

And wen you install windows XP media center edition it doesn't recognize the sound card in the first place.

One other problem there is not good technical assistance and the manual can be better especially in important point like were to install windows XP.

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Asus P5WD2 Premium Motherboard a pain to install!

Strengths: Fantastic feature set (DDR2, Firewire, 2-GigaBit LAN, PCI-E, USB2, SATA, RAID, IDE, etc)!

Weakness: Poor install documentation! Lame technical support! StackCool2 does nothing (for me)!

I have had this for about a month now, and am very happy with its performance, with one exception! The CPU core temperature is outrageous, much worse than what I had in my P5P800 MB. Same CPU, different MB, but about +20 degrees C higher! Heck, the specs on the MB state there is a StackCool2 on the back of the motherboard which is supposed to dissipate 20 degrees C by itself! Ha!

I was also disappointed with the documentation during the install process. The manual should have been more explicit saying that you pretty much need to install your windows XP onto a SATA drive. I was trying to do this on an IDE drive, but you needed to install a driver during the install in order to make the IDE visible. And these IDEs are Asus add-ons, so are not visible by the BIOS. I have no problem with this, HAD THEY JUST EXPLAINED THIS up front! It took hours going thru the asus forum before finally figuring it out. Why didn't they put this sort of information on the FAQ for the board? Just read their forum and you will find a ton of folks with the same problem. Plus its a pain (if not impossible) to get any tech support. They are just relying on the extremely helpful users out there to bail them out! And on top of this, their server is oftentimes busy and you cannot even get to their support site. TERRIBLE CUSTOMER SERVICE!!

Okay, enough of the negatives. I love the board performance wise, and it does everything I need, plus provides an excellent upgrade path. Feature set is pretty much top-of-the-line. That is why I am giving it 4/5 stars. Was tempted to knock it down one more level due to my complaints highlighed above! ;-)

Note that if you are interested in the Wi-Fi TV Edition, you will be hard pressed to find it anywhere. They might have even discontinued it.

UPDATE on 1/6/06. After having this for another month, my rating has now dropped a couple of notches! It has proven unstable, no matter what settings I apply in the BIOS. One big one is that during bootup, just after memory test and before identifying all the drives/devices installed, it just hangs from 10-seconds up to 20-minutes!! You can go to the ASUS forum and read lots of complaints about this issue. Meanwhile, ASUS has done nothing to address it! Their customer service is absolute awful. Never will I buy an ASUS product again!!

UPDATE on 3/8/06. Well, with no help from Asus, but lots of help from the forumns at the ASUS support web-site, I found the bootup problem. Apparently, by attaching my Antec PSU fan monitor cable to the motherboard, the slow boots would occur. Not sure if its a problem with the PSU unit (would surprise me, as Antec has a great reputation) or the BIOS not dealing with this properly. So, I just unplugged it, and stopped monitoring the PSU Fan RPM in the BIOS, and ouila, the slow boots stopped. So, I've bumped my review back up one star! Still, terrible tech support from Asus. They should monitor and contribute to their forums!

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Reply by member: drizzet1
Mar 8, 2006

I bought this same board for a system I built and have similar problems with it hanging during the boot sequence. It seems to be intermittent though - sometimes it will boot up fine and other times I have to restart it. Very annoying - let me know if you find a solution.

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Reply by member: drizzet1
Mar 9, 2006

I also have an Antec PSU, so hopefully that will work. I'll let you know after I get a chance to work on it...

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Reply by member: drizzet1
May 2, 2006

Disabling the PSU fan monitor in the Bios did solve the problem I had with the system hanging indefinitely. It still boots up slow though (like 30 seconds or so before windows starts to load).

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Dead out of the box... or was it?

Strengths: Powerful board at a competitive price

Weakness: Terrible documentation Terrible tech support

Bought this board about a week ago with a brand new processor and memory. Got everything assembled and it would just boot to the white splash screen, try to detect the hard drive, then sit for a few seconds and reboot over and over. Since there are no troubleshooting tips in the manual or any sort of knowledgebase online, I called tech support. After a very long wait, the support guy said "Oh yeah, we've been getting a lot of them coming in for repair that are doing that. Take it back to the store where you got it." So I returned it and got an Intel board that worked fine. After doing a bit more research, it seems that the board may not boot from and IDE drive properly and that a SATA drive should be used. Information like that would have been helpful in the manual... or online... or from the tech support guy at the very least! I expected a higher quality experience from Asus, so this was a real letdown.

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Asus P5WD2 Premium Desktop Motherboard - Intel 955X...

Strengths: Accessable and User-Friendly OC features

Weakness: Quirky operation and compatability issues when pushing high-end of capabilities.

Beware of the fine print of what options or features are compatable with eachother. Yes this mobo has 6 SATA2 ports, but they only run in SATA1 if you want to use them in a RAID. Also if using a RAID the external SATA2 port is not available.

The other big issue I have is that the product specs say that I can use sdram DDR2 up to 1066 FSB, but failed to note that this number is attainable only if you over-clock the system. Otherwise it will run the RAM at 533 or 800 depending on the config.

So I purchased faster RAM than the mobo will actually use which is a waste to me.

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Good Mobo

Strengths: Stable

Weakness: PCI slot location

Everything in this board works just fine, I do not overclock it too much, just 10%, but no problem with that. Only one thing I don't like - location of a PCI slot righ next to PCI-E one - if you have 2-slot video you loosing it. I'd rather loose PCI-E x1 slot, since periferals are almost non-existent. So, if you have more than 2 PCI cards to install and 2-slot video you might consider nvidia SLI chipset mobos.

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P5WD2 Premium Motherboard (Pentium 4 w/ HT...

Strengths: Very good MB.

Weakness: Could make 2 IDE connector to work. Sound build on MB doesn't with XP with out service pack 1

Hightly recomend to anyone, even couldn't make 2 IDE connectors to work,sound need xp service pack 1.

It is very powerfull MB I ever had, working very good....

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awesome board!

Strengths: great layout premium components and xcellant suport

Weakness: none i can see

luv this bard it has i need to buid a truly killer 64bt sysem thanks ASus!!! everything about this boar drocks it's full of greta innovastions like pci express a nd ddr2 800 native support

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Asus P5WD2 Premium

Testseek.com has collected 16 expert reviews for Asus P5WD2 Premium and the average expert rating is 86 of 100. The average score reflects the expert community’s view on this product. Click below and use Testseek.com to see all ratings, product awards and conclusions.

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