ASUS P5AD2-E Premium Motherboard

In case any of you were wondering where I have been lately, I wasn't ignoring anyone or quitting writing reviews and articles as so many others have done. No, I simply had my computer zapped by a power surge. My surge suppressor under my desk had gone bad (red light indicator was on) and I never noticed it until my computer bought the farm. It took a big hit when our power went off and on six times in less than two seconds before finally failing altogether.

My list of casualties from the incident were as follows:

1) Motherboard
2) Processor
3) 2x 512MB DDR 3200
4) Graphics card
5) Sound card
6) PCI Network card
7) Power supply

I basically had to rebuild my system using a few left over parts that weren't damaged and the beautiful full tower server case (luckily cases don't get damaged by power surges). I guess I was lucky in reality because I managed to save my new DVD-RW drive I just bought and the four hard drives that were attached to the motherboard. I still have all my fans and lights as well but the most expensive parts that got toasted were the processor, graphics card, sound card, memory and motherboard.

So here in the next few weeks I will be reviewing all the new parts I had to get to resurrect my computer. The first will be the motherboard. I was happy with my old board and it would have probably lasted another three or more years easily but this new board is just simply awesome. However, most people will never need or use half of the features of this motherboard. Unless you are a Power User, Videophile or are setting up an Enterprise Server with tons of storage, this motherboard may be a little "over-the-top" as far as price at $200.00 or more.

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The ASUS P5AD2-E Premium

I have been using ASUS motherboards ever since I had the problem with cheap capacitors going bad on the Abit boards I used before. The board I replaced was an ASUS P4S800D-E Deluxe which was a really good board for Pentuim 4 and Celeron processors in the 478pin configuration. The P5AD2-E Premium is designed for the Socket T or 775 pin Intel processors.

The board supports bus speeds of 800/1066 MHz and dual channel memory architecture with four slots for DDR2 memory up to 4GB. It also supports up to eight SATA hard drives and four ATA 33/66/100/133 devices. This board does not support AGP, instead it has one PCI-Express 16X for graphics card, one PCI-Express 1X for other devices like network cards or modems and three PCI v2.1 slots.

Motherboard features
NOTE: This list is simply here for technical information. If you are not interested in the technical specifications, you can skip to the next section for the details and performance.

Processor Support
LGA775 Socket for compatible Intel PCG 04A and 04B processors.


Chipset
Northbridge: Intel 925XE Memory Controller Hub (MCH)
Southbridge: Intel ICH6R


Frontside Bus
800/1066 MHz


Memory
Dual channel architecture supports 4 240-pin DDR2 DIMMS at 400/533/667/711 MHz up to 4GB total with native DDR2-711 support.


Expansion Slots
1 PCI-Express 16X slot
1 PCI-Express 1X slot
3 PCI slots

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Controllers

Intel ICH6R Southbridge supports:
1 Ultra DMA controller 33/66/100/133 – 2 devices (hard drives or CD/DVD devices)
4 Serial ATA controllers – 4 hard drives with support for RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration with Intel Matrix Storage Technology.


Silicon Image 3114R RAID controller supports:
4 Serial ATA controllers – 4 hard drives with support for RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10 and RAID 5 configurations.


ITE 8212F IDE RAID controller supports:
1 Ultra DMA controller 33/66/100/133 – 2 hard drives with support for RAID 1, RAID 0, RAID 0+1 and JBOD configurations.

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On board Wireless LAN
Onboard WIFI-g wireless networking supports 802.11b/g. Using Windows XP/2003 Server you can use the software access point for other wireless connections.


On board High Definition Audio
Intel High Definition C-Media CMI 9880 7.1 channel audio codec with Dolby Digital Live technology support. Coaxial and optical SPDIF out ports and SPDIF in connector on board.


LAN
On board dual 10/100/1000 LAN ports (Two Marvell 88E8053 PCI-Express Gigabit LAN controllers). Supports Marvell virtual cable tester technology (accessed in BIOS) and supports POST network diagnostic program.


USB
Supports 8 USB 2.0 ports


IEEE 1394
The TI 1394b controller supports two 1394b ports and one 1394a ports.


BIOS
AMI BIOS in 8 MB Flash ROM supports PnP.

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Ok enough tech talk, tell me what is so special about the motherboard

This board is cutting edge technology. It supports the latest and fastest processors based on the consumer Pentium 4 and Celeron lines of processors. It also supports the fastest network connections available and wireless as well. The motherboard supports 7 point digital surround sound and you can have up to 10 hard drives and 2 CD/DVD drives without having to buy any add on cards.

This motherboard also can control the fan speeds for the quietest system available. The fans speeds are controlled by temperature, so if your computer is nice and cool the fans will run at lower speeds for quiet computing and when necessary they will speed up to cool the system.

This motherboard supports 8 USB 2 ports which means it has 4 USB hubs. You can attach up to 127 devices (including hubs) to each USB hub for a grande total of 508 USB devices that can be controlled from this motherboard. I don't know if any office buildings have that many USB devices but it's nice to know the capability is there. Personally, I have six devices attached at any given time which means each device can plug directly to the board (no need for extra hubs) which is nice too.

RAID controllers give you the option of taking two identical drives and making them work as one. This is beneficial for either striping (speed and storage capacity) where data is written across both drives as one giving you one logical disk with double the capacity or for redundancy (which is slower and uses both drives as one of the same size) where data is written on both drives identically for backup purposes.

I use the RAID in striping configuration for speed and capacity. I use my computer to record lots of digital audio and make music videos so I need the large capacity storage and speed for these tasks.

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This motherboard talks to you. It will sing as well if you have a music CD in. ASUS has a feature called "Instant Music" (which was also a feature on my last ASUS motherboard) that allows you to play music CDs without turning on the computer. As long as your computer is plugged into the wall you can play music CDs through a set of multimedia speakers without powering up the PC. This is a feature provided by the onboard sound which is also responsible for announcing messages during the POST when the computer is booting up. The computer will "speak' POST messages during the boot sequence.

ASUS also provides easy to use software to update the Flash ROM BIOS and even allows you to create your own personal boot logo. If you have ever seen a Hewlett Packard computer booting up and seen that infamous "HP" logo or Compaq's "COMPAQ" in big red letters across the screen during boot, you can create your own personal logo like that for your computer. You can use pictures in the format of Bitmaps or JPEGs. I created one with Adobe Photoshop and flashed the BIOS with it. The entire process only took as long as to reboot the computer once.

You can also update your BIOS from the Internet while using Windows with this motherboard. ASUS provides state of the art software for updating your BIOS from within the Windows environment. With this motherboard it is as easy to update your BIOS as it is to install a game. You can download the new BIOS from ASUS and install it from the same program.

You can also control the RAID configurations from within Windows using the provided software for each controller. This is so much easier than the old days where if you wanted to change a RAID configuration you had to reboot and set the parameters in the controller BIOS then reboot again. This way you only have to reboot once for the changes to take effect.

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The P5AD2-E Premium motherboard also supports the latest technology in graphics, so if you're a gamer this may be a big deal. AGP is not supported on this board. Instead, the board uses a PCI-Express bus for graphics cards which is much faster than previous types of graphics adapters. The PCI-Express bus allows for faster data transfers from peripheral cards to the processor. Here is an example of data transfer rates from previous graphics cards on their respective busses compared to PCI-Express.

PCI Graphics accelerator - 132 MB/sec
AGP 1X Graphics accelerator - 262 MB/sec
AGP 2X Graphics accelerator - 525 MB/sec
AGP 4X Graphics accelerator - 1050 MB/sec
AGP 8X Graphics accelerator - 2100 MB/sec
PCI-Express Graphics accelerator - 4000 MB/sec (single direction)

Also note that PCI-Express is a serial based technology which means data can be transferred to and from at the same time which effectively makes PCI-Express graphics adapters capable of 8000 MB/sec transfer rates. This technology also effects any PCI-Express peripheral cards used in the PCI-Express 1X slots as well. PCI-Express 1X is capable of 250 MB/sec transfer rates in one direction and effectively 500 MB/sec using both directions.

The onboard Gigabit LAN controllers on this motherboard are PCI-Express 1X, and notice I said "controllers" because there are two of them and they can be bridged to connect two networks together or to allow you to plug your laptop into your computer and let it share the internet connection. It also allows you to make your PC a DHCP server for other computers on a network "and" act as a Firewall and Gateway to the Internet.

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The P5AD2-E Premium also takes advantage of the new DDR2 memory. DDR2 is basically the next generation of Double Data Rate memory. DDR2 is available at bus speeds of 400, 533 and 667 MHz. One thing to take note of with DDR2 is that the CAS latency is higher than DDR. What this means is that it takes longer for DDR2 to send and receive data but it travels faster along the bus. It is an interesting trade off and so far I haven't noticed much difference in speed. However, I am using DDR2 400 which is the same speed as the PC3200 DDR I had in my last computer.

Two big differences with DDR2 compared to DDR is the prefetch is larger increasing from 2 bits to 4 bits and the voltage is much lower (reduced from 2.5v to 1.8v)which means much less power is needed to read and write data in memory.

Like I said, I haven't noticed any difference in speed either way but I may upgrade to the DDR2 667 in the future and if I do I will try to remember to update this article with any new information I have.


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Conclusion

This motherboard is chock-full of features and capabilities. Loaded with the latest technology, it offers a lot to anyone needing or wanting the kind of power it holds. I would recommend this board for network file servers, video processing computers or anyone who just wants one of the biggest and baddest motherboard out there for a decent price. When I say a "decent" price I don't mean you'll find it for $99.99 at Best Buy. Your best place to look would be http://www.pricewatch.com and run a search for ASUS P5AD2-E Premium. I found it on that site for $220.00 but the prices will be going down soon.

Thanks for reading,

Gr8ful :-)