ASUS P5GD2 i915P & P5AD2 i925X Premium

[Rys]

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

[nichomach]

Something that strikes me regarding the PEG link mode story on the front page; warranties. Asus may be right about being able to secure greater performance, but regardless of whether this is sneaky or merely clever, quite a lot of hardware (and some graphics cards) are only covered by warranty if they're not run out of spec. Does this mean that by clandestinely overclocking manufacturer A's graphics card, Asus are potentially automatically voiding the end user's warranty cover? As great a board as it may be, surely overclocking other components in the system ought to be the user's choice?

[DR]

I think people are making a mountain out of a mole hill. PEG rocks, and it isn't cheating at all.

[nichomach]

Not sure I agree, actually. It may boost performance very effectively and from that point of view it may be a good thing; but if all it's doing is OCing the core and memory on your graphics card and just not telling you about it, then I rather think that IS cheating - if you wanted to do that, you could do it on any board, the key difference being that you could choose to do that. What it means is that in any review of the Asus boards against the competition you're not getting like-for-like comparisons, because one will be running its graphics at stock speeds and one will be running overclocked. I also note that it's only in response to being caught and called on this that Asus have admitted that that's what they're doing and have added an option in the BIOS to enable or disable this.

[rmaciag]

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.
It works fine. I am just trying to tune it a bit.

1. I have two optical drives.
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).
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.
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