Synthetic, Continued
Conclusion
The four motherboards were split into two different price segments: Asus and Intel retail at approximately $260, while Foxconn and MSI sell for about $190, which is quite a difference. Is it worth spending the extra money on the Asus or Intel motherboard?
The Asus P5W DH Deluxe comes with a long list of features that include virtually anything you can think of. From this point of view it is worth the $269, but since it suffered from teething problems during our tests and didn't overclock as smoothly as other Asus motherboards, we would rather not spend the money on this product.
Intel's D975XBX is equally expensive and comes with a sophisticated fan control system. Intel offers the best overclocking utility and the sound system with the best signal-to-noise ratio, but the motherboard lacks additional features to justify its high price tag.
The Foxconn 975X7AB-8EKRS2H offers a decent feature set, but we found several of these features did not work as expected with the BIOS version it came with. Since the updated BIOS version did not arrive in time we could not run the memory faster than at DDR2-667 speed for the benchmarking.
You should also have a look at the MSI 975X Platinum Power Up Edition, because it offers more for the same money. It ran properly at 333 MHz (FSB1333) system speed, and allowed us to overclock the Core 2 Duo E6700 from 2.66 GHz to 3.0 GHz easily. Obviously, MSI got a grip on its former issues, so due to its superior price/performance ratio we recommend the 975X Platinum Power Up Edition at this time.
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