This motherboard features an eight-phase voltage regulator, which is very decent for stability and for overclocking. Asus provides a radial fan that allows the user to cool down the heat sinks on the voltage regulators; this is very important if you want to use a liquid cooling solution for your processor.

All component voltages can be altered, and we had no issues running the system at DDR2-1066 memory speed. Should you pick overclocking settings that don't run reliably, the P5WDH Deluxe will reboot at default settings, without erasing the settings you made. However, we could not convince our test sample to run at the overclocked 333 MHz system speed (FSB1333), which shouldn't be hard to reach these days. The system kept crashing after few seconds.

Our Take

The P5WDH Deluxe had problems detecting our test hard drives (Western Digital WD1500ADFD-00NLR1, Firmware 20.07P20). Once in a while the system would not boot, reporting "No IDE Master H.D.D. Detected". A possible workaround is to turn off halt on errors, but this will also disable reporting of other, more severe issues.

The BIOS item "Performance Mode" set to 'Turbo' increases the Front Side Bus clock by 2 MHz, which hardly has any effect. The Asus surveillance tool PC Probe II kept reporting a critical motherboard temperature of 48°C (118°F), which wasn't the case. Also, we would have preferred to change the RAID settings for the Silicon Image secondary storage controller in software rather then setting an old-fashioned jumper.

Special Features

Asus EZ Backup is an extra feature that helps to reduce the impact of a hard drive crash by automatically copying the content of the primary hard drive onto a secondary drive (which you do have to purchase separately). Think of the EZ backup feature as a sort of offline RAID 1; it initiates the backup process automatically and thus does not require user intervention. EZ backup uses the Silicon Image mass storage controller.

Asus provides a Wireless LAN module, so you can place your system anywhere in your apartment or house. There is an infrared remote control to launch applications, navigate in DVD movie menus, or set the fans to silent mode. Asus also provides a line-in cable, which simplifies the process of hooking up your MP3 player or other audio device to the system.

To facilitate connecting power, reset, HDD LED and all the other cables to the motherboard, Asus provides the Q-Connector. It is a connector block that takes all these cables and then can be connected to the motherboard easily.

Finally, EZ Flash 2 is a BIOS extension that allows you to upgrade your BIOS directly in the BIOS setup menu.