FIRST LOOK: Asus P5AD2-E - 1066FSB & DDR2-711
by Wesley Fink on November 29, 2004 12:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Our Take
Take our Gold Editors Choice P5AD2 Premium, update the chipset to 925XE, and further refine the BIOS adjustments. You've just created the P5AD2-E. The latest Asus Intel board does a great job of extracting whatever performance is available from a 1066FSB 3.46EE. This will come as a surprise to no one, as Asus has a long tradition of tweaking their very best boards to make them even better.It would be a mistake, however, to overlook the potential of the P5AD2-E to extract even more performance from an 800 CPU than you can achieve with the regular 925X version of the Asus. New to the 925XE version is the option to run memory at DDR2-711 while the CPU runs at 533. You also have really excellent adjustment ranges for squeezing the most from any quality DDR2 memory that you care to install in this 925XE board. Most of these enhanced adjustment ranges will likely find their way into the earlier P5AD2, but keep in mind that support for both 1066 and 800 will not be an option for the earlier 925X board.
Does 1066 support really matter? From a stock performance standpoint, we would say' "No, it doesn't." But the added flexibility for squeezing top performance from other components is very useful. If and when more processors show up that support 1066, we may actually find the 1066 option even more useful.
For now, we would definitely choose the 925XE Asus over the 925X if the prices are close. It is just a little bit faster and a lot more flexible; that is, if you are looking for and insist on an Intel motherboard. The Athlon 64 processor is faster than Intel in most applications and the A64 boards are a better choice if top performance is your goal. However, Intel has narrowed the gap recently with the introduction of the 3.8GHz and next year, things will likely get tighter between Intel and AMD. Our biggest concern, and it's a huge reservation, is the super premium price demanded for the Asus P5AD2/E motherboards. While the price has dropped in the past 3 months, these boards are still priced between $250 and $300 - a lot of money for a motherboard. However, if you want the best Intel motherboard that you can buy, the Asus P5AD2-E is still likely your best choice. The 1066 processor cost is also a hard pill to swallow at over $1000, especially when the 3.46EE is outperformed by many lower cost Athlon 64 processors.
It is still early in the 925XE introductions and something better might yet come along. For now the Asus P5AD2-E is the best Intel motherboard that you can buy. The Asus matches the overclocking capabilities of the Abit AA8XE, and the Asus P5AD2-E is consistently the fastest board at stock speeds.
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mkruer - Monday, November 29, 2004 - link
I love Intel’s comment a while back when they stated that their version of dual core would be better because it “shares resource” between the cores.Monkeydonutstick - Monday, November 29, 2004 - link
#22 can you not read?classy - Monday, November 29, 2004 - link
LOL Dothan. Unless you can oc that bad boy extremely it will get crushed by an A64. It does better at gaming than desktop Intel chips, but performs poorly at rendering and the like. Stop with Pentium M Dothan nonsense. And by the way, the motherboards are priced in server board territory. Lets OC an Athlon 64 platform and see the scorching the Dothan will get.Monkeydonutstick - Monday, November 29, 2004 - link
http://translate.google.com/translate?sourceid=nav...ariafrost - Monday, November 29, 2004 - link
But Dothan doesn't scale up to high clock speeds and won't compete directly with Athlon 64 procs...Monkeydonutstick - Monday, November 29, 2004 - link
Try Dothan with a faster bus. preliminary benchmarks show a clock for clock intel advantageWesley Fink - Monday, November 29, 2004 - link
#17 - This is a First Look review and not a full motherboard review. As we explained when we launched First Look, we will use that format to bring more motherboard reviews more quickly to AnandTech readers. PCMark 04 is used to provide a braod General Performance comparison that includes media encoding in the benchmark.We did run a full suite of benchmarks for future comparisons, but nothing really changes.
925XE/3.46EE - 925X/3.6E - nF4/FX55 - Benchmark
34.1 - 34.4 - 39.3 - MM Content Creation 04
26.7 - 26.5 - 31.1 - Business Winstone 04
73.1 - 73.4 - 69.1 - AutoGK DivX 5.1.1
danidentity - Monday, November 29, 2004 - link
#13 - Ugh, Intel's answer is EM64T, which is functionally identical to AMD64 and is fully compatible with it. CPUs supporting it will be on sale before WinXP-64 is released.About the review, WHY do you have a ton of gaming benchmarks and only a single solitary non-gaming benchmark. Do you think the people who read your reviews do nothing but play games? I'd like to see an equal number of non-gaming benchmarks. Content creation, business apps, encoding, etc.
Also, why didn't you test an 800MHz FSB CPU in this board? The overclocking potential is much better because of the 1066MHz FSB support.
smn198 - Monday, November 29, 2004 - link
No. I didn't have a pre-production 50MHz CPU ;)I meant 550MHz
smn198 - Monday, November 29, 2004 - link
Haven't bought an Intel CPU since I had my K7 50Mhz a long time ago but I really did like my PII 233 @ 350. I'd switch back to Intel in an instant if they offered better price:performance.