ASUS P5GD2-Premium Motherboard

Conclusion

Justin West’s Thoughts

As we have seen thoughout this article, the ASUS P5GD2 Premium Wireless Edition has its pros and very few cons. The major benefit here is the feature-rich, Cadillac series qualities integrated on this motherboard. Features like Triple RAID, support for 12 SATA devices, 8-channel audio, onboard WiFi-g, and Dual Gigabit LAN are not part of your everyday motherboard. All of these features are very welcome to the market and I’m sure a few of you out there will use this board the way its meant to be run with everything enabled.

My experience at stock speeds was great. My experience at manual overclocking was basically as expected. With reaching over 1 GHz on the FSB, this board is very close to being able to run 1066 MHz FSB processors! We would expect that a few owners of the P5GD2 Premium would, in fact, be able to run at those speeds. However, you should not expect this behavior because many, like the board we tested, will not quite be able to reach those speeds.

Overclocking with the AI N.O.S. feature was a disappointment given that the memory divider decided to ruin performance by setting itself to the 1:1 divider. This caused our DDR2 memory to only run at 400 MHz, which is not very efficient for DDR2. I also have my doubts about the performance detection ability given the cycle from 202 MHz to 215 MHz I observed while the system was sitting idle. Running a game like Half-Life 2 with AI N.O.S. caused the system to crash and restart. This issue was really the only issue holding this board back from being considered “perfect,” and given that most of the overclockers out there would rather manually overclock anyways, this problem area can basically be ignored by most users.

In general, the stock-speed benchmark results were very much as-expected. The ASUS P5GD2 Premium was able to give comparable or better results in CPU-only or Memory-only benchmark tests. However, in overall system tests, we noticed that the multitude of features caused a small performance hit on the P5GD2 Premium when compared to the Intel i915 Reference Motherboard. This is not a big issue, though, because while the numbers showed a slight performance difference, the actual system operation showed nothing noticeable between the two platforms.

All in all, this board is a perfect fit for someone who is looking to use most or all the features included on this board. With the word “Premium” in the title, many resellers are currently assuming this means to add a price-premium to the board’s cost. I say this because the current market lists this board anywhere from US$175 to US$250 at the time of publishing this article. Even though I did not compliment the AI NOS feature, it seems that ASUS has a very solid platform on their hands because all of the other features seemed to hold up as expected. At stock settings, I was able to use this board for the past couple of months with no issues what-so-ever while also running Folding At Home 24/7 for team 38296, of course!

Legit Bottom Line

The ASUS P5GD2 Premium Wireless Edition will be a perfect fit in a high-performance, high-storage, high-quality audio system for a user who is also looking to start a home wireless network.

Product Give-a-way for LEGIT FORUM MEMBERS!

Like the title describes, we are going to give the motherboard featured in this review away to a registered Legit Reviews Forum member in 7 days! If you liked what you saw in this review and would like a chance to own it yourself, JOIN THE LR FORUMS TODAY!! Our only restriction in this push to increase our forum volume is that you must have at least 5 relevant forum posts in any of our Topics besides “Off Topic.” To find out how to become registered for this Give-a-way, click on the forum link below!