Asus P5W DH Deluxe

THE BAD:
Incompatible !!!!
Hard drive interfacing problems, controller conflicts.
Memory management problems (bugs in BIOS)
Abysmal tech-support, unwilling and incompetent to address problems.

SUMMARY:
This is a very bad board, from a company that used to make good stuff, but now has gone bad.

1) The on-board JMICRON RAID/SATA/PATA controller does not work properly, causing conflicts with Promise Tech RAID controllers. If you install "Promise Card" RAID controller, your second IDE hard drive pair won't work.

The on-board JMIcron HD controller (which is needed for the second IDE master / slave bus) stops working and the JMicron bios won't load, so you cannot utilize all the HD ports on the board.

2) The HD interface is poor, not compatible and extremely difficult to set up with three separate RAID controllers to consider: The Intel South-bridge, The Intel easy backup, and the JMicron RAID controller.

The physical layout is also not great, the two parallel IDE connectors (Intel and JMicron) are located at opposite ends of the board, so long cables are required.

3) The dual PCI-express video ports do not work in 4-monitor mode. Only the master video card works. I Did not try ATI cross-fire, since I have no application for it.

4) The A20 Gate control is incompatible with many operating systems due to an error in BIOS design, which apparently reports running in compatible mode while running in fast mode. This error causes memory managers such as himem.sys to crash and burn, leading to major headaches when trying to run DOS/based disk-management or data-recovery tools such as "Partition Magic 8.0" which boots into Caldera DOS from the recovery / installation CD.

If your Windows XP gets phuquified, for example, and you want to recover from a hidden partition using Partition Magic for example, you will have to modify the Norton's Partition Magic CD to get around the A20 problem, before you can boot from it, unless you want to run Partition Magic with no mouse and a host other problems.

MS, IBM, Free and Caldera DOS all have problems with this board. I haven't tried OS-X nor Linux, but "Good Luck"

Although this bug could be easily fixed with a BIOS upgrade, Asus refuses to address the problem.

5) Abyssmal tech-support, staff are totally unwilling to address any problems, with the exception of telling you how to setup Windows XP. They refuse to give any support for non-XP based systems. They are arrogant and (extremely) incompetent !!!!!