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DriverHeaven Review |
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Those of you with good memories may recall a picture from
CeBit of a new ATI based motherboard on the Asus stand aimed
at the Intel platform. Boards from that family are nearing
completion at Asus and today we have a preview of the first
to be released, the P5RD1-V Deluxe. This board is very interesting
for many reasons though the two most important are that
it’s based on the excellent Radeon Xpress chipset
(with integrated DX9 graphics) and that the board is the
first available in the world to come with an integrated
TV tuner.
The board
The P5RD1-V is pictured above, as you would expect from Asus the board layout is excellent and there really are no complaints in this department. The IDE and floppy connectors are placed well and keep cable clutter to a minimum, likewise the 24pin PSU connector is also placed well and as it is at the top of the board you won’t have your main PSU cable trailing through the case. SATA on the board is provided by a ULi M1573 controller and there are 4 SATA ports available for use (which support Raid, Sata 1.0 and Sata II ), as with other Asus boards the P5RD1-V has the excellent feature that you can boot from the driver CD and create a Raid driver floppy for using in your Windows install. I can’t emphasise how important this simple feature is, especially if you only have one PC and I hope that more manufacturers follow Asus’s example in the future. Memory support on the P5RD1-V was something of a surprise to us initially; Asus have chosen to go down the DDR1 route with this product. We can see the thinking behind this move and that is that the P5RD1-V is obviously aimed at the multimedia market where DDR2 is a nicety rather than a must have. The memory used in the system can be PC2700-PC3200 and of course can also run in Dual Channel.
Another design feature which is a huge selling point for the P5RD1-V when looking at it as the core of a Multimedia system is the absence of active cooling. The board is entirely passively cooled which of course ensures a low noise system when paired with a good CPU cooler. You can see below the various passive coolers on the board…
In the last heat sink picture above you can see the integrated graphics cooler. As with ATI’s Socket 939 AMD boards the P5RD1-V includes the Radeon Xpress graphics chip. The chip is an X300 based core and is therefore fully Direct X9 compliant. Memory can be shared with the system up to 128mb which is more than enough for basic gaming. The onboard video out on this model is 1 VGA port rather than a DVI however this can be expanded which we will look at in a few moments. Audio on the P5RD1-V is another highlight of the system; the board runs an 8 channel Azalia based High Def audio system. Again this is an ideal feature for multimedia however will also enhance your gaming experience over standard onboard audio. One aspect of the board which we found to be excellent is the placement of a 1x PCIe slot above the 16x graphics slot. This higher 1x slot is ideal for an additional network card and means that you can install an add-in card without restricting airflow to the graphics card. A wise move by Asus. Of course you do also have 2 further 1x slots and three older PCI slots below the graphics card should they be required.
So that’s the normal features you would expect to see on most motherboards, in fact the addition of DX9 onboard graphics and high def audio is more than most boards would offer however there is one final “special” feature that the Asus board offers and that’s an integrated TV tuner… that’s right, straight out of the box your ready to be watching and recording TV on your PC! Next: Continued
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