Legion Hardware has the lowdown on the ASUS P5WD2-E Premium Intel 975X Express motherboard. This baby comes loaded with Serial ATAII (3Gb/s) supporting RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, and RAID10 with a total of 8 ports (total of 8 SATA ports onboard). The there is the excellent Realtek ALC882M audio chip supporting 8-Channel High Definition audio with the S/PDIF interface. The board's network support is taken care of by dual Marvell 88E8053 Gigabyte LAN controllers featuring AI NET2. Not only does this motherboard offer a total of 8 USB 2.0 ports but it also supports Firewire with a total of 2 ports.

The P5WD2-E Premium is an exceptionally good motherboard, but then so are most ASUS brand motherboards. For this reason I have found a few small issues with the P5WD2-E Premium that would have normally gone unmentioned, had this not been an ASUS motherboard. Take the P5N32-SLI Deluxe for example, another LGA775 motherboard from ASUS, though this one features the NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset. Now more importantly this motherboard featured an 8-phase power design and thermal heatpipe cooling.

The integrated feature list of the P5WD2-E Premium is impressive and it certainly puts the competition to shame. The onboard audio solution, being the Realtek ALC882M HD Audio Codec, was most impressive once again. The software included supports jack-sensing, S/PDIF out support, interrupt capability, and Dolby Master Studio support. Furthermore the ALC882M can encode digital audio contents to real-time Dolby Digital streams for pass through via the S/PDIF ports to an AC-3 decoder for playback.