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Asus P5WD2 Premium: DDR2-1066 and the Promise of 955x SLI

 by Wesley Fink on May 11, 2005 12:05 AM EST
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34 Comments

General Performance & Encoding

General Usage Performance

Content Creation Performance

General Performance

MPEG-4 Encoding Performance - 'Sum of All Fears' Ch. 9

The range from top to bottom in Business Winstone and Multimedia Content Creation was just one point among 925X boards and 955x and NVIDIA nF4-SLI Intel chipsets. This included a range of chipsets running at a constant 3.6GHz with low latency memory at DDR2-533, DDR2-667, and DDR2-800. We can only conclude from this tight clustering of General Performance benchmarks that memory speed makes very little difference in the performance of standard desktop office applications and content creation on these Intel chipsets. We have seen in past reviews that CPU speed impacts these General Performance benchmarks, but Microsoft Office seems to perform the same at 3.6GHz, regardless of the memory speed.

PCMark2004 also shows a very small improvement as we move from fast 533 to fast 667 to fast DDR2-800 memory. Auto GK encoding scores also show a tight clustering of performance. If these are the applications that you run on your computer, the added DDR2 memory speed of the 955X/nF4-SLI Intel will not provide much boost to your performance.

Test Setup DirectX 9 Gaming Performance
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  • overclockingoodness - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link

    Can someone tell me why they decided to bench both at DDR-667 and DDR-800?

    Wesley: are you planning on testing all Intel mobos like that with two different memory speeds?

  • Capt Caveman - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link

    I actually plan on returning the P5WD2 Premium that I purchased. I bought this board for going to dual core but was really sold on the Wifi-TV card that was supposed to come with it. It's the first board in Asus's Ai Life Series and the major component of this series is the Wifi-TV Card.

    Well, surprise my Asus Premium doesn't come with one. It's optional. I spoke to people at Asus US in Technical Support, Customer Service, Pre-sales and RMA groups and they all confirmed to me that there was only one model and it's optional. Every retailer that carries the P5WD2 Premium has it without the Wifi-TV Card. Yet, the reviewers have them, making you think that the card comes with the board.

    Also, things have been down-graded on this board from previous premium boards. The mosfet heatsink is aluminum compared to the copper heatsinks used in my P5AD2-e Premium. Contrary to what some have said, the P5WD2 Premium does not have IDE Raid when the P5AD2-e Premium did. The P5AD2-e Premium also has 1394b where the P5WD2 Premium does not. And obviously no built on Wifi.

    Why did they call this board a Premium when it's missing all of the premium items that we're used to getting? Why didn't they just call it the Deluxe since this board does not have the premium features as it's other premium boards?

    I believe Asus is misleading folks. I have yet to receive a reply back to several emails that I have sent also.

    Sad thing is that I was a huge fan of Asus til getting this board which I must pay a 15% restocking fee to return.

  • elecrzy - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link

    on page 2, you might want to add that NF4 supports SATAII, not just SATAI.

  • RadeonGuy - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link

    it would have been better to include a fx-55 as competition
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