Market Survey, Part 2: Six Premium Pentium 4 LGA775 Boards

Asus P5GDC-V Deluxe (Intel 915G)

The P5GDC-V Deluxe looks like a good choice for ambitious upgrades.

Board revision : 1.03

BIOS version : 1007 Beta 006

The P5GDC-V Deluxe is a lot less expensive than the P5AD2-E. Thanks to its 915G chipset, it offers Intel’s latest graphics accelerator, though it doesn’t support 266 MHz FSB clock speed.

Despite the lower cost, the typical Asus features are all still present. A Stack Cool layer is again deployed to deal with temperature hot spots around the processor and power converter, providing for better heat distribution. The additional layer also keeps the board from bending too much when installing a CPU cooler.

The board did display one aesthetic flaw : our Corsair DDR400 memory (CMX512-3200LL, XMS3205v1.2) with ideal timings of CL2-2-2-5, was run by the Asus board with timings of CL2-4-4-8. The overclocking functions though were nice. Asus’ board also provides the performance requirement bit unlock feature for use with CPUs having a multiplier of 14x and 04B stepping or later.