ASUS P5WD2 Premium 955X Motherboard Review

Board Layout continued

Looking a little deeper into ASUS’ emphasis on cooling, they bypassed active cooling for the 955X board and instead focused on a variety of passive cooling solutions. While this will undoubtedly bother some, I think with people using 92mm to 120mm high flow fans for cooling their processors, ASUS simply devised a simple yet a great idea. Why chance an active cooling solution that could fail, taking your whole system with it. Instead, why not use a more powerful and efficient cooling fan from the CPU’s HSF?

ASUS joins the growing list of companies adding heatsinks to the boards mosfets. With systems drawing more power and enthusiasts pushing these boards to the limit, cooling the mosfets improves the systems stability as well as its longevity. Again, the orientation of the cooling solution allows it to use air circulated from the CPU fan to cool the mosfets as well as the capacitors behind it. Simple but ingenius design.

Continuing on the cooling topic, the ASUS P5WD2 Premium includes ASUS’s new Stack Cool 2, much like ABIT’s “O/C strip technology, Stack 2 is ASUS’ concept that further cools the board by wicking heat away from key components by using solder points and a very thin heatsink layer which draws the heat away from the key components, through the stack cool, to the back of your case.

Overall, the layout of the ASUS P5WD2 Premium is as close to flawless as I have seen. I was extremely impressed by the clean, uncluttered layout that ASUS devised. It is obvious that this board was built with an incredible amount of flexibility. as well as built around the feature rich 955X chipset, and topped off by an extensive cooling system, anyone and everyone should be happy with this board. Lets check out the BIOS before we move on to the actual performance.