The Pentium Elite, Part 2: 955X versus nForce4 IE

Asus P5WD2 Premium, Continued

Above and beyond these normal extra functions, the manufacturer has provided a WLAN chip with 802.11b/g (54 mbps) including an external antenna. And that's not all: this is surpassed by a TV card corresponding to the digital DBV-T standard, including corresponding antenna, cable splitter - S-Video and composite - and IR-USB remote control. Asus provides three Firewire ports, four additional USB 2.0 connectors, a game port and a COM port by means of three additional slot modules.

For some time, overclocking functionality has reached the upper limit of what is possible on a motherboard. The AI NOS software can, however, "only" overclock and not underclock as well. We were unable to install the AIBooster from the Asus website because of the error message: "Failed to Install IO Driver". But the reason for this was the Windows installation we were using, which the program doesn't like - for reasons that we have not yet been able to discover - the AIBooster functions perfectly well everywhere else.

The release lever for the PCIe graphics cards is now located on the right side, so you can remove the card without spraining your fingers. The BIOS version that we used was the most up-to-date available at the time of the test. Since then, a much better developed and improved version has been released, which also makes it possible to turn off Hyperthreading in the Pentium Extreme Edition.

If you consider $250 to be too much, or if you feel you can do without the TV card, you can also obtain this motherboard in a slightly slimmed-down version without the card for under $200.