Asus P5AD2 Premium (Intel 925X) Review
Performance
There were no surprises during the detection of the starting FSB: as it should be, the board runs at the intended 200 MHz.
In our testing system, we used the following hardware:
Test configuration |
Processor |
Intel Pentium4 LGA775 540 (3.2GHz) |
Cooler |
Gigabyte 3D Cooler GP Edition |
Video card |
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5750 (PCI Express x16) |
Sound card |
- |
HDD |
IBM DTLA 307030 30Gb |
Memory |
2x256 MB DDR2-533 SDRAM made by Kingmax (latency timings set to SPD) |
Case |
Inwin506 with PowerMan 300W power supply unit |
OS |
Windows XP SP1 |
Let's first take a look at the results of synthetic benchmarks.
Now on to the gaming benchmarks.
You could see these results in the review on Abit AA8 DuraMAX. So, for a change we decided to add the test results for FarCry and X2-Threat.
Findings
Once again, Asus confirmed its high rank in the motherboard manufacture. In fact, Asus P5AD2 has no shortcomings except the only one - the very high price (so far, 250$). But keep it in mind that this product is absolutely new in all regards.
The board offers the maximum abundant package bundle to date, as well as wide expansion options, of which the integrated support for WiFi merits a separate mention, two additional RAID controllers, support for the Firewire-800 (IEEE 1394b), as well as two Gigabit LAN controllers. Along with that, the board offers a great number of Asus' proprietary features onboard.
At overclocking, the board demonstrated fantastic results. This equally applies to overclocking the processor and the memory overclocking. A word of gratitude to the special technology for cooling the power supply module - the "Asus Stack Cool".
ConclusionPros:
- High stability and good performance level;
- Support for SerialATA/RAID (8 channels; ICH6R + Sil3114R);
- Integrated 8-channel audio and two LAN (Gigabit Ethernet) controllers;
- Support for USB2.0 (8 ports) and IEEE-1394a/b (Firewire, 3 ports);
- Support for WiFi-g (IEEE 802.11g; 54Mbit/s);
- A rich selection of Asus' proprietary utilities (PC Probe, POST Reporter, CrashFree BIOS 2, MyLogo2 etc.);
- Additional set of features AI Proactive (NOS, AI Net 2,);
- Additional cooling for the power supply module - Asus Stack Cool.
Cons:
- High price;
- Passive cooling of the chipset
The board's specific features:
- "Native" support for DDR2 600;
- Excellent overclocking results for the processor (3,2->4.0) and memory (533->666).
Read more on this topicAbit AA8 DuraMAX (Intel 925X)
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