09 - Asus P5AD2-E Premium - Conclusion

Everything you ever asked for in a motherboard is supported by the Asus P5AD2-E Premium. Wireless LAN, PCI-Express, Gigabit LAN, HD-AUDIO, SATA RAID, Dual Channel, N.O.S. and lots of other features. As we mentioned earlier, about the only thing missing is a serial COM port.

Performance-wise, the P5AD2-E Premium did very well compared against the 915G-powered motherboard from MSI. All games seem to run better with the Asus board and in any benchmarks where it seemed to be lacking, the performance difference was too small to notice.

The BIOS settings will satisfy everybody, tweaking expert or not. Overclocking is made easy with N.O.S. and AiBooster, from 3.00Ghz to 3.53Ghz with just the single press of a button is absolutely great, but still, all the advanced options are there for anyone who feels like experimenting with the settings manually.

The motherboard costs aproximately $240. That's a large amount to pay for a motherboard, but the board's features, performance and the Asus product quality justify the price. This product is the richest feature-packed motherboard we have ever tested.

Pros:
Excellent features
Excellent performance
Monitoring utility from Windows

Cons:
Expensive solution
No COM port(?)

Features
Performance
BIOS/Overclocking
Value for money