Asus P5AD2 Premium (Intel 925X) Review
Expansion options
On Asus P5AD2 Premium, there is the ICH6R south bridge with a radiator. Therefore, the board offers support for 4 SerialATA ports and allows merging disks into RAID arrays of levels 0,1 or MatrixRAID.
Besides, four extra SerialATA devices can be plugged to the Sil3114R controller made by Silicon Image.
This controller supports RAID arrays of the following levels: RAID0, RAID1, RAID10, RAID5 and JBOD.
But that is not yet all about plugging in hard disks! On the board, there is a dual-channel ParallelATARAID controller ITE8212F to which you can plug in 4 disks and merge them into RAID arrays of levels RAID0, RAID1, RAID0+1 and JBOD.
Therefore, to the two ParallelATA hard disks you can add 4 more ParallelATA and 8 SerialATA disks. Thus, as many as 14 hard disks altogether can be plugged in to Asus P5AD2 Premium:
Then, there are eight USB2.0 ports onboard. Four ports of them are on the rear panel, with 4 more plugged in via headers (the board comes bundled with 1 header for 2 ports).
Besides, Asus P5AD2 supports for the other type of serial bus - the IEEE1394 ("Firewire"). To this end, two controllers are fitted onboard: TSB81BA3 and TSB82AA2 (both made by Texas Instruments).
Therefore, the board offers support for 3 Firewire ports: one IEEE1394a (on the rear panel) and two IEEE1394b (plugged in via a header). P5AD2 is the first board in Asus' assortment to support the IEEE1394b (at 800 Mb/s). By the way, the set of controllers is completely identical to that used on Gigabyte motherboards (e.g. Gigabyte K8NSNXP).
Then, Asus P5AD2 offers 8-channel audio - Intel High Definition Audio,with CMI9880 is used as the codec.
A couple of words on the overclocking: there are two high-speed Marvell Yukon 88E8053 (Gigabit Ethernet).LAN controllers onboard. They are connected to the PCI Express bus running at 500 MB/s bandwidth per channel.
One of the network connectors is on the rear panel, with the other plugged in via a header (quite a smart solution :). Also, of mention is the Asus AI Net 2 technology which allows diagnosing network connection (in particular, to locate a cable breakdown (of ~100 meters reach)).
Another distinguishing feature of P5AD2 Premium is support for the WiFi (IEEE 802.11-g) standard of 54 Mbit/s bandwidth. Actually, support for the WiFi appeared on Asus boards quite a long time ago. that was first the BlueMagic PCI slot for SpaceLink expansion cards (which no one has ever seen live:), then there appeared specialized WiFi slots (the way it is on Asus P4P800-E Deluxe), and now Asus is either supplying PCI cards with support for the WiFi (like on the Asus A8V Deluxe board) or fitting a controller right on the motherboard. In our case, the latter option was taken:
The aerial is plugged in directly to the connector on the rear panel. By the way, the board's rear panel offers somehow non-standard configuration.
The way the PS/2 connectors are positioned is a bit awkward: by habit, you plug in the keyboard to the connector on the edge which is reserved for the "mouse" on P5AD2. Then. the rightmost connector is designed for the WiFi aerial, with a signaling LED positioned between them. Also, note the lack of COM and GAME ports implemented as headers (available in the packaged bundle).
Traditionally, a jumpers layout diagram:
There are six jumpers on the Asus P5AD2: the CLRTC1 used for clearing the CMOS (near the battery), the USB_PWR12 - USB_PWR78 used for wake-up on USB devices, the KBPWR1 used for wake-up on pulses from the keyboard.
Now on to the BIOS settings.
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