The P5WD2 socket 775 motherboard is the second in line to its slightly higher featured Premium version. This model offere nearly all of the same features, but lacking a few of them. It still offers all the best featues and is a good pick if you want to save that little bit of money.

In terms of performance, this board compares almost identically to its bigger brother, the Premium. It’s features are nearly the same except for a few notable differences.

Here is a listing of the main features…

• Socket 775
• Supports up to 4GB of memory
• PCI-e 16x, 4x and 1x slots and 1 PCI slot
• SATA controller with RAID 0, 1 and 5 support
• USB 2.0 and network

In a nutshell, the differences are, no extra network port, missing pair of SATA headers from an extra chip, no firewire and no wireless support.

These features are good things to have, but for many people they may be overkill. One network port if fine for most uses and if you need more than 1 you probably have an add-in card to do the job. The better SATA solution has been left in. The missing firewire could be bad for those that use it for video. Wireless would have to be bought seperately. And considering that the WiFi on the Premium model is not that good, it’s no loss.

Besides these notable ommissions you get a top of the range board for less than the top of the range board. Provided you can do without those parts, you are in for a good deal for your next Intel based system.

Pros

• Fully featured
• Priced well
• Good audio

Cons

• No firewire

Get it online right now at the internets most trusted retailer

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 8th, 2005 at 10:29 pm and is filed under Motherboards, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.