I’m not happy - not happy at all. The P5WD2 is Asus’s top end intel motherboard, based on the new 955X chipset. It’s been well reviewed all over the net but I’ve had nothing but problems with mine. Initially I had random problems getting past the BIOS POST - sometimes it would insist it had been overclocked (it hadn’t) and moan about settings. I think I sorted that out by rewiring the optical drives to only use one of the IDE ports. (bizarre, huh)

Then when it finally got into windows it was random lockups time. (I’m not talking about some simple blue screen, I mean the “mouse pointer stops stops dead and num lock doesn’t work any more” kind of freeze).

The latest thing, and the issue that’s probably going to make me give up and buy the Abit version instead - It randomly falls off the LAN! Leave a download going for a few hours, come back and windows will not be able to see anything. Pings just drop in to a black hole never to return. A reboot sorts it out, for another few hours and then it’s gone again (yes, I’ve updated the BIOS and all the drivers I can find)

The thing that *really* annoys me is that none of this can get me an RMA on the board, because the chances are that if anyone just plugs it into a test bench and fires it up it will work for a while. So basically I have to trash it because I certainly can’t trust the thing.

The rest of the components (RAM, PSU, video card) are all new, top quality and tested to work as far as I am able - so all I can do is try another board to see if that makes a difference.

So all in all a very UN-cool gadget

That’s it - rant over and now I’ll get back to posting about more fun stuff, honest!