Asus P5WDG2-WS and P5WD2-E Premium - 975X Motherboard Showcase

Name: Asus P5WDG2-WS and P5WD2-E Premium - 975X Motherboard Showcase - Page 6
Brand: Asus

by Marco Chiappetta — Friday, April 21, 2006, 12:01 AM EDT

Like the Asus P5WDG2-WS, Asus' P5WD2-E Premium motherboard is equipped with an AMI (American Megatrends, Inc.) BIOS. Each boards' BIOS has a very similar look and feel. In fact, they were both updated on the same day recently, which further hints to their similarity.

From within the BIOS users have the ability to configure, enable or disable all of the board's various integrated peripherals, and can monitor fan speeds, voltages and clock speeds.

Asus P5WD2-E Premium: Exploring the BIOS

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Just like the Asus P5WDG2-WS, the P5WD2-E Premium's standard BIOS menu screens will likely look familiar to anyone who has worked with an Asus motherboard before. Each individual screen has a host of menus that tunnel deeper and deeper as the options get more complex. And the P5WD2-E Premium incorporated Asus' HyperPath 3 feature as well, to reduce memory access latency.

Asus P5WD2-E Premium: Overclocking Tools

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The P5WD2-E Premium's BIOS is also equipped with a host of options geared for tweakers and overclockers. From within the BIOS, the processor's front side bus frequency can be set to any value between 100MHz and 450MHz in 1MHz increments, as can the PCI Express clock (between 90MHz and 150MHz). The CPU Voltage can be set to "Auto", or configured for any value between 1.325v and 1.700v. DRAM voltages between 1.8v and 2.4v are available, FSB termination voltages between 1.2v and 1.5v, MCH chipset voltages between 1.5v and 1.65v, and ICH chipset voltages up to 1.20v.

Overclocking with the P5WD2-E Premium yielded similar results to the P5WDG2-WS. We overclocked our CPU by altering the multiplier, voltages and the FSB. As we mentioned earlier, we bumped our memory voltage to 2.2v and increased the processor core voltage by .1v. Then we jacked up the FSB until the test system was no longer stable. When all was said and done, we were again able to take our CPU up to 4.26GHz, by upping the multiplier to 15 and raising the FSB to 285MHz (This seems to be the limit of this CPU without using more exotic cooling). If we dropped the multiplier down, however, we hit a peak FSB of about 355MHz with the P5WD2-E Premium.

Tags: Asus, Motherboard, WD, case, Pre, OWC, EMI, Premium, 975, ium, g2, Show, showcase, board, SHO, WS, AR, and

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com