Motherboard Installation
In this section we take the Asus P5W DH Deluxe motherboard and install it in a standard, very popular ATX case in order to see if any of the design decisions made by the Asus engineers will affect the installation process or accessory usage. This section was started with my Asus A8R32-MVP motherboard and received a lot of positive feedback.
After simply mounting the motherboard into the case, all is well in installation-land.
One of my favorite, yet incredibly simple, features that Asus created is the Q-Connector that allows you to connect all of your case wires for power and lighting, and then put the entire block down on the header located in the lower right corner of the board. That means no more flashlights and squinting to find out what the hell the silk-screening on the board is trying to tell you.
Here is the Q-Connector installed; how easy!
After getting all the motherboard connectors in place as well as running power to the components the case begins to clutter up but nothing from the Asus board is doing anything I don’t like yet.
Next, I attached the additional headers that Asus includes in the box with the P5W DH Deluxe board including an addtional FireWire connection, two more USB ports and the green Asus MP3-In connection. This, another of Asus’ unique features, allows to plug in any stereo headphone connection and have it play through your PC speakers when when the PC it turned off.
Here we have added two X1800 GPUs into the case to show what two cards in CrossFire mode are going to add to the installation confusion. This obviously takes up all the remaining slot space on the motherboard. If you’d like to include another sound card and not use the integrated audio, you’d be required to get rid of one of the three dongles that Asus includes.
The Asus engineers did a good job trying to give you access to your SATA connections even with PCIe cards installed. Though difficult to see in this photo, the three primary SATA connections are accessible as are the two from the Silicon Image controller at the bottom of the board. The IDE connections are somewhat more difficult to get to though the side-mounted nature of the primary one makes it easier by far.
This is what the back of your PC could potentially look like with all the components we installed shown here. The far left black item is to support the Asus DH Remote, the center cable and white disk is the antenna for the wireless connections and finally the green cable is provided so you can connect any audio device to the MP3-In connection.
