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| ASUS P5W64 Wall Street Qartet Professional We Avoid Temptation | |
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(Review by MS, November 16, 2006) |
Thermal Management
Another feature of the ASUS board is the ASUS Stack Cool 2 cooling solution, meaning that a passive heat spreader is integrated into the backplane of the motherboard for additional heat dissipation. The bold claims that the extra structure reduces temperature of critical components by 20 centigrades appear somewhat unsubstantiated, though. Chipset cooling is done passively, at least in the case of the ICH7R and the IDT switch (as logical extension of the chipset); the MCH sports a passive cooler which uses the airflow generated by the CPU cooler for direct cooling and further features a heatpipe extension that combines with the VRM heatspreader - also situated in the airflow path of the CPU cooler
In terms of legacy support, the P5W64 offers two 32-bit PCI slots along with the EPS parallel port, serial port (via expansion bracket) and floppy, all of which are supported by the Winbond LPC controller at the upper right corner of the PCB.
Power Connectors and VRM
The P5W64 WS features three power connectors, that is the extended 24-pin ATX connector, the Auxiliary 12V CPU power supply and the 4 pin Molex connector first introduced under the name EZ-Plug. The 24-pin EPS connector and the EZ-Plug are next to each other about halfway up the right edge of the PCB where they are arguably out of the way. The 8-pin auxiliary 12V connector dedicated to deliver power to the CPU VRM is behind the PS/2 keyboard / mouse connector at the upper left corner of the PCB, directly adjacent to the actual voltage regulator module.
The VRM itself is a piece of art by its own rights, centering on the Analog Devices ADP3198 programmable 2-4 phase synchronous buck controller, interfacing with the MOSFETs using the ADP 3110A drivers. The controller is 8-bit programmable, meaning that it offers 256 voltage levels, it and operates at 330 KHz switching frequency per phase. Interestingly, ASUS has actually eight physical phases on the P5W64, however, in contrast to the documentation, the controller only supports a four phase circuitry. The second four phases are essentially mirroring the primary phases in dependent mode.
next page: => Integrated Peripherals =>
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