Overall thoughts…

We’ve been impressed by the P5RD1-V Deluxe, considering it’s a pre-release board we would have expected the occasional crash here and there however nothing has occurred and the system ran without issue throughout the duration of our testing. Setup was a breeze and within an hour we were up and running in Windows.

DDR2 support would have been a nice to have however isn’t a big issue, and certainly if you’re upgrading from a system which already uses DDR1 you’re not going to have to buy new memory when building your new system around the P5RD1-V. Our only other concern is the lack of support for 1066fsb chips at the moment however this should be added by a future bios update…the reference Radeon Xpress chipset does support them so it’s only a matter of time for this board.

As mentioned in the software section of this article the integrated TV tuner was also easy to set up and within 5 minutes of installing the software you could be watching TV on your PC. An integrated Tuner also has the benefit that it is guaranteed to work with your motherboard without conflict or issue.

The inclusion of the integrated graphics and High Def audio is also a big plus point, as the centre of a multimedia system the P5RD1-V will be ideal. Providing all of the video and audio features you are likely to need, and doing so with only the CPU cooler to consider on the noise front. You could also make a near silent system by adding a passive CPU cooler, something which is ideal for a media PC. (There really is nothing worse than watching a movie with system fans whirring away in the background.)

Of course just because it’s going to be the multimedia motherboard of choice doesn’t mean its limited in the 3D Graphics front. Quite the opposite really. The P5RD1-V performs admirably at this point when paired with a High End GPU. Nearly 5000marks in 3Dmark05 and 30fps at high detail in Doom3 means that all of the latest games will play on your system with excellent display quality. Currently the onboard graphics are not quite up to playing Doom3 however as we saw in a previous article the Radeon Xpress chipset is more than capable of playing many other recent releases such as Half Life 2 and Need For Speed Underground 2 (including use of their DirectX 9 features).

Finally on the performance front is the overclocking options for the P5RD1-V. Asus have also included many useful features in the bios which include CPU Lock free, FSB increasing and CPU parameter recall so not only can you overclock your CPU to its limits you can also be sure that the board will recover should you push the CPU too far. Further overclocking enhancements in the BIOS include Locked PCI/PCIe frequency but unlocked DDR/FSB speeds.

The final revision P5RD1-V Deluxe boards are going to be something worth looking forward to.