"Blair Wilson" said:
HELP NEEDED!!
I want to buy a ASUS (P5WD2 Premium) mother board. Are then any known
Gothas? I want to use a pata hdd and cdrom, are there any known issues
with the two devices? I plan on getting memory from Corsair, a 600W PSU
from Enermax. Can dual video cards be installed? If so, what brand is
recommended?
ANY/ALL suggestions are welcomed. As always, thanks in advance.
Blair
With all that crossposting, you didn't even manage to post in
the Asus group...
Most people would check the CPU support page first, to make sure
there is a good reason to purchase the motherboard in the first
place. You didn't say what CPU you were getting.
http://support.asus.com/cpusupport/cpusupport.aspx?SLanguage=en-us
For feedback, check these two links, the Asus-hosted forum,
and Newegg customer feedback. Every nasty comment they could
think of, would have been put in these two places.
http://vip.asus.com/forum/topic.aspx?board_id=1&model=P5WD2+Premium&SLanguage=en-us
http://www.newegg.com/Product/CustRatingReview.asp?Item=N82E16813131534
I don't see the keywords "SLI" or "Crossfire", so what good
will two video cards do you ? Note that this board has
a x16 and a x4 slot, so the slots are not equal.
http://usa.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=493&l1=3&l2=11&l3=184
"Expansion Slots
1 x PCI Express x16 slot for discrete graphics card
1 x Universal PCI-E Slot ( x4 mode)
1 x PCI Express x1
3 x PCI "
That means you can use two video cards, but the second video
card would experience about 80% performance level in 3D mode,
due to the x4 lanes connected to the x16 sized slot. That is,
assuming you can actually run four monitors in 3D mode, which
I don't know for sure. You could certainly run four monitors in
2D mode, like if you are a stock trader and need lots of monitor
space. There would not be a visible performance problem with
that. And if you wanted to run two monitors, you can do that
with just one video card (many video cards have two or more
output connectors, and support two monitors or a monitor and
a TV set).
For IDE drives, I recommend the Southbridge drive connector.
That means your PATA HDD and CDROM go on the same cable and
plug to the Southbridge connector. There is also an
ITE controller on the board, but that is not a chip you
can rely on (too many little surprises, expecially as you
load up the connectors). So, for you, the fun begins when
you bring your third IDE drive into the box, and have to
use the ITE chip. A Promise Ultra133 TX2 PCI card can solve
that problem.
If you wanted a board to run two ATI video cards in
Crossfire mode, there is a board like this. Much the same
as P5WD2, only it has two true x16 video card slots, and
claims to be Crossfire ready.
P5WD2-E Premium (975X chipset)
http://usa.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=981&l1=3&l2=11&l3=248
This one would be suitable for a pair of Nvidia video
cards running in SLI mode. It uses an Nvidia chipset.
P5N32-SLI Deluxe (nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset)
http://usa.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=745&l1=3&l2=11&l3=227
Crossfire and SLI, are two methods for allowing two
video cards to work as one, producing a signal for
one computer monitor. In the case of your P5WD2 Premium,
I don't think it supports either of those methods,
so two video cards is only really useful if you need
to connect 3 or 4 monitors.
It might be better to state what your objectives are
for the system: how many monitors, resolution or size
of monitor (30" LCD, 2560x1600, or whatever), and whether
you want to use SLI/Crossfire on a pair of video cards
or not. You might not need two video card slots.
HTH,
Paul
