ASUS P5GD2 i915P & P5AD2 i925X Premium
I used the P5AD2 in my look at the Far Cry 1.2 patch, allowing it to host a PCI Express graphics card for the purposes of that article. Before passing the board and its Grantsdale baby brother to Tarinder for the discrete reviews, I noted that both boards seemed to be of insanely high quality, so I was keen to see what our returning reviewer (he had a nasty touch of food poisoning!) would think. Here's a snippet.
Intel's 900-series of chipsets attempt to modernise motherboard design from almost every angle. The cost of such modernisation is mediocre speed and, perhaps, limited overclockability. ASUS has done a good job in releasing a couple of boards that are packed to the rafters with useful features, from dual Gigabit LAN to integrated WiFi. Given the P5GD2 Premium's P5AD2 Alderwood-matching performance, it has to be the pick of the two. So if you absolutely want to run the latest cutting-edge kit, it's a good a choice as any. My reservations, however, lie more with Intel's chipset than with ASUS' efforts.
ASUS certainly pack the boards full to the brim with extra features. Find out what Tarinder thinks in full, here.
Rys
two questions re: P5DA2E (925XE) mobo
Hi !
I wonder if anybody could help me with two issues (so far) around
the P5DA2E (925XE) mobo.
I have assembled the custom system around this mobo. :thumbsup:
It works fine. I am just trying to tune it a bit.
1. I have two optical drives. :shocked2:
I connected one to the Primary IDE controller on the ICH6R.
The other one I connected to the IDE RAID ITE8212 controller
(I did not have a rounded IDE cable with the master / slave sockets). :heckle:
I am considering buying a different IDE cable to connect both drives
to the ICH6R port (as master and slave).
Would it make any difference to the system performance ?
I could try to test it in practice but if the answer is simple (yes or no) then
it would save me some time (and, possibly, the cost of the cable)
2. ITE8212 again.
During the BIOS POST the controller attempts to detect any devices
connected to the two ITE8212's PATA ports.
It does it quickly but ... then it "freezes" for about 10s or so. :confused:
It is a bit annoying (I would love the system to boot up as quickly as possible).
There is an option in BIOS that controls the detection time limit
for ICH6R but I found no similar option for ITE8212.
Has anybody come across the same "issue" ?
Is there any way around it ? Or is something wrong with my system ?
Possibly the BIOS update ?
(I need to wait for my broadband connection before I am able to download any updates from the web - the system is not on any network either).
Any suggestions will be appreciated.
Thanks and Regards
Robert