Board layout and BIOS

With two Gigabit Ethernet controllers to place on the board, two external storage controllers, FireWire, audio, and wireless controllers, not to mention the three PCI slots and four different PCI Express slots (two of which are x16 graphics slots), you’d think we’d run into more than a few cases where crowded component placement would rear its ugly head on the board layout of the P5W DH Deluxe WiFi-AP. But thankfully it didn’t. That doesn’t mean we don’t have a few complaints though. We’ll start with the positives first however.

For starters, there’s plenty of room in the areas that are the two biggest hot spots on any modern motherboard: the area around the CPU socket and the space separating both PCI Express graphics slots. We discussed this on the previous page, but we couldn’t help but repeat it again, as this is important to any enthusiast. ASUS also places the ATX power connectors along the top edge and right edge of the motherboard, so these components are mostly out of the way of CPU/system fans where they can get caught. It is a bit strange to see that ASUS elected to use a 4-pin connection for the ATX12V connector though, after all, this is supposed to be a high-end motherboard.

With three PCI slots and two x1 PCI Express slots the P5W DH Deluxe has plenty of options in terms of expansion. Sitting in between the PCI Express graphics slots are one x1 PCI Express slot and one PCI slot, so you’ll lose these slots if you plan on running X1900 XT/XTX CrossFire, but that still leaves you with one additional x1 PCIe slot and two PCI slots, so those power users with CrossFire, a PCIe TV tuner card, and a PCI sound card should love the P5W DH Deluxe. ASUS hangs an eSATA port off the backplate of the P5W DH Deluxe for additional storage connectivity as well.

Like the P5B Deluxe, heat pipe cooling is used to cool the board’s North Bridge and MOSFETs, while the ICH7R South Bridge is cooled passively with a small aluminum heatsink, allowing the motherboard to run silently.


In terms of complaints, we wish that ASUS provided four SATA ports that were driven natively by the system chipset, but as we discussed earlier it’s just three. You can literally see where ASUS has silkscreened the fourth SATA port. The retention mechanism used on the P5W DH Deluxe can also be difficult to manipulate when a dual-slot graphics card like the Radeon X1900 XTX or GeForce 7900 GTX is in place, in order to grab it you’ll have to reach directly under the graphics card’s heatsink, which can be a difficult task. It would’ve been better if ASUS had placed the retention mechanism on the top of the PCI Express slot like they did with the P5B Deluxe.

All this aside though, it’s a minor miracle ASUS was able to pull off the P5W DH Deluxe’s board layout so well.

BIOS

The BIOS of the P5W DH Deluxe supports the same BIOS layout and all the key features found in the P5B Deluxe’s BIOS, including OC Profiles, only it supports slightly different bus speeds and voltages. We tested with ASUS’ recently released 1405 BIOS, which adds (among other things) the ability to adjust the CPU’s clock multiplier downward for Core 2 CPUs, as well as boasting more performance and bus speed options than the 701 BIOS we were using previously.

The P5W DH Deluxe doesn’t have the 650MHz bus speed ceiling of the P5B Deluxe, but with bus speeds up to 550MHz, the P5W DH Deluxe should still have more than enough bus speeds to satisfy the overclocking crowd. The P5W DH Deluxe also has a few memory bus speeds that aren’t available on the P5B Deluxe.

P5W DH Deluxe BIOS Features
Bus Speeds	100-550MHz in 1MHz increments
PCI Express Speeds	90-150MHz in 1MHz increments
Memory Speeds	400, 533, 667, 711, 800, 889, 1067MHz
CPU Voltages	1.225-1.7V in 0.0125V increments
Memory Voltages	1.85-2.4V in 0.05V increments
PCI Express Voltages	NA
Front-side bus Voltages	1.2V, 1.3V, 1.4V, 1.5V
North Bridge Voltages	1.5V, 1.55V, 1.6V, 1.65V
CPU Multipliers	Yes, downward multiplier adjustment supported

In addition to the standard settings, ASUS also includes a “Digital Home” setting, when enabled the BIOS will automatically lower fan speeds and voltages to help the system run quieter, although for finer fan speed control you can still go in the BIOS’ power management settings and manually tweak the fan speeds of your CPU and system fans.

Note: One quirk with early P5W DH Deluxe motherboards is that they didn’t support all Core 2 CPUs. ASUS has since released newer BIOS revisions that fully support all Core 2 CPUs, but unfortunately a few motherboards with earlier BIOS versions slipped out that didn’t fully support Core 2.

Overclocking

In terms of overclocking, we were able to hit a bus speed of 427MHz with our P5W DH Deluxe motherboard. That’s not quite as high as the speeds we hit with the P5B Deluxe, but impressive nonetheless.