ASUS P5W DH Deluxe vs ASUS P5W DH Deluxe

I'm in the market for new system, I cant decide which MOBO to get. I was leaning toward Asus P5B Deluxe. Can someone tell me which would be better?

Wow by some strange coincidence I am building two machines for people and after a quick trip to the computer show I bought the Asus P5B for the lower end machine and the P5W DH Deluxe for the higher end machine.

I'm still waiting for a few parts to ship from an online retailer to complete both machines but from inspecting the MB, the DH Deluxe is more suited for the gaming machine since it does come crossfire-ready and the version I bought seems to be engineered to handle 65nm quad core processors but will almost certainly require a bios update (so have a duo core processor in thier first) to handle it. But that leaves a nice upgrade path for a least the next year or two.

Plus it comes with a wireless card already added in so you only need to connect the included wireless antenna up to get wireless network access which saves you from having to buy a card if you want to go that route.

If you're going the multi-video card route I'd defintely go with the DH, as I can't find anything that definitely says the P5B supports nvidia or crossfire despite having the two card slots.

If you're going single video card route with no ideas for going multi-video and want to save a few bucks so you can spend elsewhere in your system (like upgraded CPU) I'd say go with the P5B. Can't say for sure if its going to be Quad core compatable but its Duo core compatable and the non-deluxe version.

Both boards (non-deluxe version of th p5b) are certified as Vista ready as well.

As Eurasianman noted it all depends on how you plan on using the machine.

Gaming machine I'd go for the DH deluxe for upgradability. Otherwise I'd stick with the P5B as it should serve nicely.

Of course I'll know more once I have all the parts and can torture both machines.

Have you had any problems with that board?

Thanks for the comments.

I am also struggling to decide which MB to get. It will not be until February so perhaps a better MB will be out. I am a gamer, I want to overclock and have dual graphics (DX10!!). Not one board seems to be the best for all of that, am I wrong? the P5B uses Intel P965 which is better for overclocking. But the P5W, P975, is better for gaming? Is that because it allows for crossfire and the P4B does not? What overclocking limitation are there with the P975 compared to the P965 MB?

Any specific recommendations? I have a feeling that i will be getting a different board all together by February. I may go with nvidia but I have always been an ATI fan (boo AMD, why did you have to buy them?) oh well. Anyway, Ill go for the best performer at the time.

*sigh* its taken a bit but I can finally report of the P5B deluxe...if you are on the fence, avoid this board.

In the last 10 years I have only had 1 other motherboard that has given me this much trouble and that was because it died and took random components with it.

I bought the board and some memory that another person on recommended and said ran with the board. It hated it ( PQI pc 5400 DDR2 667).

I did however manage to get some OCZ Platinum PC DDR 800 PC 6400 ram to run with it. BTW that ram was *supposed* to go on the gaming machine I mentioned before.

I did like the fact that I could do a bios update with a thumb drive before installing an OS, unfortunately the latest BIOS vers 806 didn't really help.

If there is a problem with a component, the board will not make a sound it just won't post. You troubleshoot it by removing components one by one and if it makes any noise then the problem was the last component you removed.

When it wasn't making any sounds I was blaming everything from the CPU to the case.

I'm used to the MB telling me wtf is going on, so this was quite frustrating.

Then there was bios problems, everytime I made a change in BIOs a reset wouldn't do it. I had to power down fully before it would reboot.

Then I made the mistake of using the Asus disk and installing the Intel ICH USB update that was included on the disk, which promptly disabled every USB port (don't install pls, it works just fine without). I stupidly thought it actually was an update to impove the USB 2.0 performance..it wasn't.

BTW one of the things slowing down the POST is the IDE. I'm at work at the moment so I can't see the screen, but there is an option in there to switch the IDE from RAID, to IDE to ACHI (sp?). If you can disable it, if you can't, it just going to post slow since it displays that stupid thing for a good 3-5 seconds and I can't find an option to turn the stupid wait screen off.

I don't think its the Q-Fan since I didn't bother with that until I had the system fully up and stable. Though I've noticed that this board really doesn't manipulate the fan speed very well as some fans it will run 100% and others it will run at min, even just after startup when temps are cool.

I put a Vanessa -L on the CPU and its running the fan at 100% even though CPU temps are in the upper 30's celcius.

However once I got the system up and stable, it was rock solid, laughing at Prime 95 and 3d Mark 6 (ran Primte 95 18 hours and 5 minutes before I finally stopped it). I had no trouble installing any software and it got win xp on fairly fast (little more than an hour start to stop, including drive format)

Even though it works fine on anything I throw at it now, my biggest fear is I'll get it to my friend and thier family will plug something in and it will die.

The P5B pretty much destroyed my enthusiam for this dual build as I stare at the P5W DH Deluxe with trepidation. Even though I hear good things about it...well, that's for next weekend. I'm going to spend the rest of the week trying to stress test this first machine to make absoutley sure it doesn't drop as soon as I hand it off, because its a 1.5 hour one way trip to fix something.

If yer in the market for a new board consider the new Nvidia chipset for the gaming machine. This merger between AMD/ATI has knocked both companies for a loop and it may be a while before they catch up.

Actually I have had almost no trouble with the P5W Deluxe board. I did notice after I installed the OS that I had the bios setting to IDE instead of AHCI and that of course changed the way the hardware reads the drive so I'd need to reinstall windows. For now I have left it as IDE.

THe board even used the slower DDR2 RAM I had setup for the p5b machine that didn't like it.

The reboot cyle on this board however is stupid, taking up to almost a minute at times and that's because it sits there checking to see if any drives have been added. This shouldn't take more than a second or two but I've seen it hang for nearly 15-20 seconds on the Asus splash screen.

Once up the board has show much love as compared to the P5B which showed much hate.

Everything works as advertised and its fast but not quite as fast as I was expecting. I may just bite the bullet and reinstall the WinXP with the drive setting to AHCI to see if i get some speed improvement.

For the record the systems were:

Intel Core 2 Duo 6400
Asus P5B
2 GB DDR2 800
WD Raptor 74GB
Nvidia 7600GT

System #2
Intel Core 2 Duo 6600
Asus P5W DH Dexluxe
2 GB DDR 667
WD Raptor 150GB
ATI X1950XTX
Creative Sound Blaster X-FI Fatality

heh I made the same mistake and tried reinstalling but even setting the dvd-rom drive as the boot drive and telling it that there is no hdd doens't help as it completely ingores the dvd rom and tries to boot the hdd every time.


I finally gave up and just left it as SATA as IDE.