ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe WiFi+TV

Performance:

As the ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe WiFi+TV motherboard boasts support for the latest innovations such as DDR2-667, SATA2, and PCI Express, thanks to the Intel i945P + ICH-7R, we used the following components throughout all of our testing:

As we had mentioned in some of our other articles, the latest Intel Chipsets currently have some compatibility issues with NVIDIA's display drivers. After some vigorous testing, we believe this Intel Chipset NVIDIA conflict is BIOS related, however, the latest AMI BIOS used by the P5LD2 has yet to adequately correct this issue. Surprisingly, Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) had no problems using the NVIDIA 1.0-7667 drivers where as with FedoraCore4 and several other distributions would experience a black screen of death with Xorg 6.8.2 on initialization. However, Ubuntu 5.10 was only released days ago and Colony 3 serves as a developer snapshot for the progress for the upcoming stable release, which should tentatively be released in September or October of this year. For comparison purposes against the P5LD2, we used a recently reviewed ASRock 775Dual-880Pro. Although the ASRock motherboard utilizes a VIA PT880 Pro it supports much of the same features as the Intel i945 and in our Linux testing, we've found it to perform surprisingly well for being so inexpensive. Although we're using a single-core Pentium 4 today for testing and overclocking, if you're interested in dual-core Pentium D results with the P5LD2 and a NVIDIA GeForce 7800GTX, we would recommend you look at our recent benchmarks in this article. Although we hadn't used Fedora for benchmarking due to the NVIDIA situation, we had done some compatibility testing and found some conflicts between the ICH-7R and the FedoraCore4 installer; Anaconda. When the DVD-ROM drive was connected to the IDE connector provided by the ICH-7R, the installer would fail to properly initialize but when reverting to the secondary IDE controller we hadn't experienced these faults. This is quite interesting, as other motherboards we've tested that boast the ICH-7/R had absolutely no IDE conflicts with Red Hat's Anaconda. Other than that minor hiccup, there were no real other hardware incompatibilities we experienced with the motherboard. ALSA had no troubles detecting the audio sound card. The integrated LAN controller worked with both Ubuntu 5.10 and FedoraCore4 once the adequate drivers were built. Another recent occurrence we've seen with the latest Intel Chipsets is LM_Sensors failing to detect the motherboard's sensors and like wise, the P5LD2 failed to work with the latest release. No SLI testing was involved as mentioned repeatedly, NVIDIA has yet to support the i945 Chipet for use with Scalable Link Interface let alone there currently is no Linux SLI support. However, at this time we will confirm that Linux SLI capabilities should arrive with their drivers by the end of this year. NVIDIA's 1.0-8XXX Linux drivers WILL support Scalable Link Interface (SLI) and we can expect these drivers out to the public arena within the next couple of months. Other than these few points, the ASUS P5LD2 Deluxe worked fabulous under Linux but the benchmarks will prove its true performance. For benchmarking today, we used our standard set of motherboard benchmarks that consisted of Return to Castle Wolfeinstein: Enemy Territory, Doom 3, HDparm, Gzip compression timing, LAME compilation, LAME encoding, BlueSailSoftware Opstone Sparse-Vector Scalar Product, BlueSailSoftware Opstone Singular Value Decomposition, and FreeBench v1.03. As always, all settings in the benchmarking programs were left stock unless otherwise mentioned on the results page, all benchmarks were run three times with the average of the three being displayed, and all other Phoronix benchmarking practices were applied. For the ASUS P5LD2 overclocked values in the benchmarks we ran the processor at a respective 3.795GHz with stock memory and CPU voltages and the memory was ran at 675MHz. Although we had hit 4GHz on air, it was un-stable in Linux as we were also limited in our overclocking abilities due to air-cooling.