it would have been better to include a fx-55 as competition

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on page 2, you might want to add that NF4 supports SATAII, not just SATAI.

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I actually plan on returning the P5WD2 Premium that I purchased. I bought this board for going to dual core but was really sold on the Wifi-TV card that was supposed to come with it. It's the first board in Asus's Ai Life Series and the major component of this series is the Wifi-TV Card.

Well, surprise my Asus Premium doesn't come with one. It's optional. I spoke to people at Asus US in Technical Support, Customer Service, Pre-sales and RMA groups and they all confirmed to me that there was only one model and it's optional. Every retailer that carries the P5WD2 Premium has it without the Wifi-TV Card. Yet, the reviewers have them, making you think that the card comes with the board.

Also, things have been down-graded on this board from previous premium boards. The mosfet heatsink is aluminum compared to the copper heatsinks used in my P5AD2-e Premium. Contrary to what some have said, the P5WD2 Premium does not have IDE Raid when the P5AD2-e Premium did. The P5AD2-e Premium also has 1394b where the P5WD2 Premium does not. And obviously no built on Wifi.

Why did they call this board a Premium when it's missing all of the premium items that we're used to getting? Why didn't they just call it the Deluxe since this board does not have the premium features as it's other premium boards?

I believe Asus is misleading folks. I have yet to receive a reply back to several emails that I have sent also.

Sad thing is that I was a huge fan of Asus til getting this board which I must pay a 15% restocking fee to return.

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Can someone tell me why they decided to bench both at DDR-667 and DDR-800?

Wesley: are you planning on testing all Intel mobos like that with two different memory speeds?

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On page 5 you mention 2T having less of an impact than with AMD boards.
Does that mean it has absolutely zero impact then?
There's a thread on the forums showing 2T for AMD haveing REAL WORLD impacts of maybe 3% slowdown, nothing more except in synthetic tests, so I suppose on the Intel board it makes maybe 1% difference.

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i thought hypertransport was an amd thing, not an intel or nforce thing.....

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overclockingoodness -
Both boards are rated at DDR2-667, but both easily ran DDR2-800 with the right memory, which is the next logical memory speed. We mainly wanted to see if DDR2-800 made any real performance difference, and the answer is no in Office and Multimedia, and yes in most gaming. For the future this also gives us a full set of benchmarks at DDR2-800 for comparison if we choose to use them.

We also found the Asus 955X did a marginal DDR2-1066 in early testing so it seemed reasonable to at least test and report benchmarks at the very stable DDR2-800 in addition to DDR2-667. We won't be doing this with all future boards, but the tests did provide some answers to our questions.

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"it would have been better to include a fx-55 as competition "

Not for INTC;)

Man that's a nice chipset they got though so missed from nV:)

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#5 - We didn't measure the difference in nF4 Intel and nF4 AMD at 2T. It was a subjective comment. So I have tried to better explain what I found in the paragraph you quote:

"On the nF4 Intel platform, the performance impact of a 2T Command Rate appears to be rather small, as the nF4 Intel performance remains very competetive with the 955x as far as it goes. However, at just over DDR2-900, the nF4 Intel appears to hit a wall . . ."

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"i thought hypertransport was an amd thing, not an intel or nforce thing....."

nVidia uses HyperTransport between NB and SB. They have since nForce1 on AMD and they also use it in X-Box, if you didn't know.

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