The Asus P5W DH Deluxe has been on the market for quite a while now and has certainly made an impact. We tested the board's performance and in general we are satisfied with what it has to offer. First of all, this motherboard supports all currently sold Intel processors for 775 socket, Intel® Core™ 2 Duo/ Intel® Pentium® D/Intel® Pentium® 4/ Intel® Celeron® D processor. In some tests, it was faster than the P5W64WS Pro/ P5B Deluxe, especially in CPU benchmarks. The Asus P5B Deluxe was faster in the memory tests, since the P5W DH Deluxe failed to set our Crucial PC2-8000 modules to run at 1:2 (FSB:RAM). We hope that this "problem" will be fixed with a newer BIOS revision.

The board itself is of a good overall design. There's plenty of space around the CPU area, allowing for installation of large 3rd party fans. There are both IDE and floppy connections as well as five SATA II connections for HDD and optical storage devices. Asus has included all the needed cables in the retail package.

In overclocking, the board proved to be easy to overclock and with very little effort reached a top of 390MHz FSB, without voltage tweaks. Despite the fact that we also raised voltages, we couldn't go any higher. Both the Asus P5B Deluxe and P5W64WSPro appear to offer better overclocking capabilities, reaching up to ~500MHz FSB, with of course a different cooling system, CPU and memory modules.

The DH Remote, WiFi-AP Solo and MP3-In features are very enticing. The WiFi-AP Solo in particular could prove invaluable to anyone using the P5W DH Deluxe as a central hub for their home wireless network.

We should note that as with the P5B Deluxe, there might be some bootup problems when you are using a SATA HDD and an IDE CD-ROM drive. We are not aware of a possible workaround, but Asus knows the problem and hopefully will fix it ASAP.

Overall, the Asus P5W DH Deluxe is a very good board for the Core2Duo platform. Its CPU performance confirmed this and with a very good price (US$219.99 ~ $259.00). We should indicate that the Asus P5B Deluxe is somewhat cheaper at $193.99 ~ $243.6, while the Asus P5W64WS Pro is at US$295.00 ~ $337.48. If money is not an issue, then it really comes down to features/bundle of each board. If you are thinking of putting together a home entertainment system, then the Asus P5W DH Deluxe may just be the ticket.