Asus P5GD2 Premium Wireless

This motherboard from Asus is loaded with features.

Price: £132.76

Manufacturer: Asus

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Verdict

Pros:
Amazing amount of features for the price.

Cons:
Complicated to set up all the functionality.

Overall:
The P5GD2 Premium may be overladen with features but it's still a quick stable board that could form the heart of a hugely capable system.

PC Magazine Team, PC Magazine 31 Aug 2004

One of the most feature-rich motherboards we have ever seen, the P5GD2 Premium from Asus is so full of extras that one of the LAN connections is supplied on an expansion plate, as there is just no free real estate left on the board for it.

When it come to the feature list you'll need to take a deep breath: triple RAID array support (Ultra ATA/133 and two SATA), onboard Wi-Fi 802.11g, dual Gigabit LAN, FireWire 800, loads of Asus software utilities and the biggest bundle of accessories you?re likely to see.

With the P5GD2, Asus has taken a close look at the heat generated by Prescott motherboards. If you turn the board over you'll notice the proprietary Stack Cool cooling system, an Asus patented technology that conducts heat away from the power components.

The system is a miniature circuit board that is stacked against the main PCB - Asus claims this gives a heat reduction of 10 deg C.

Passive heatsinks are used on the Northbridge and Southbridge and even the power phase circuits are cooled by a passive copper heatsink.

The P5GD2 uses the R version of the ICH6 Southbridge so you get RAID 0 and 1 support for four of the eight SATA ports. A Silicon Image 3114R chip provides support for SATA RAID 0/1/10 and JBOD ('just a bunch of disks') arrays on the other four SATA ports.

RAID 5 can be added via software patch, available as a download from www.asus.com. If this still isn't enough there are two Ultra ATA/133 ports that support RAID 0/1/0+1 and JBOD arrays.

As well as a 16X PCX graphics card slot there are three 1X PCX slots and two standard PCI slots. One of the two Gigabit LAN controllers also uses the PCX bus. The second Gigabit LAN port is provided via an expansion plate that plugs into a header on the motherboard.

When you first open the box, you might wonder how Asus managed to close it in the first place. There are 10 SATA cables, four dual-plugged SATA power cables, two Ultra ATA/133 data cables, plus an 80-conductor EIDE cable and a floppy cable.

There are also four expansion plates, one with an RJ-45 LAN port and two FireWire 800 ports, one with just a single serial port, a game port that also has two USB 2.0 ports and a plate with two SATA connectors for use with external SATA drives. Last, but not least, there's an antenna for the Wi-Fi adapter. It has a huge number of features, but unless you need them all it might be a little over the top.

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