Asus P5W DH Deluxe: The Flagship, Slightly Off Course

Feature Overview

This board has every connector you would typically want, with the possible exception of a parallel port. Asus provides an external SATA connector, but without a power connector. For system power, you can keep using your existing power supply unit if it offers the standard 4-pin ATX-12V connector; the 8-pin version is not required.

In addition to the chipset's four Serial ATA ports, this motherboard has a Silicon Image chip that brings in four more connectors. It is even possible to set up a huge RAID 10 array across all eight SATA ports. Users of UltraATA legacy devices will be happy to hear that there is a third mass storage device available: JMicron's chip offers one more SATA port and an UltraATA/133 channel for older hard drives or optical drives. However, the positioning of its connectors is not very useful, as it takes a long UltraATA cable to connect a device to the JMicron's UltraATA port. One of the SATA ports is also placed right next to the chipset heat-pipe, which can become pretty hot.