At the time sales began in 2005, the Asus P5LD2 Deluxe board was positioned by the manufacturer as a premium level solution. It supported the most productive processor devices at that time and made it possible to assemble the fastest computing systems.
Contents of delivery
The list of configuration of the motherboard under consideration included the following components:
- Asus P5LD2 Deluxe.
- Installation and configuration instructions in multilingual version. It also contained a warranty card.
- Metal plate for mounting in the back wall of the system unit.
- A disk with a full set of necessary drivers.
- Interface cords for connecting drives.
- Additional power wires and adapters.
Socket. System Logic Set
The LGA775 processor socket was equipped with an Asus P5LD2 Deluxe motherboard. Its characteristics indicated that it was based on the Intel 945R chipset. More precisely, this is the name of the northern chipset microcircuit. The south bridge, in turn, was designated ICH7. A similar implementation of motherboards today is completely and completely outdated for the reason that the current similar solutions are based only on one south bridge, and the north manufacturers have safely included in the processor device.
Additional controllers
An impressive list of additional controllers boasted Asus P5LD2 Deluxe. With their help, the level of functionality of this board has significantly improved. The manufacturer included the following microcircuits in this list:
- 8211F from ITF, through which the connection of drives via the IDE interface was implemented.
- Silicon Image SATA allowed to connect drives of a new format to this motherboard.
- Realtek's ALC 882L delivered sound in an 8-channel format.
- Marvell Gigabit provided the ability to connect to a computer network using twisted pair. As it is not difficult to guess from the name, the maximum speed could reach 1 Gbit / s.
CPU models
By the standards of 2005, Asus P5LD2 Deluxe boasted an advanced list of chips that could be installed on this motherboard. Supported processors belonged to one of three families:
Budget Class Solutions - This is Celeron. One core, minimum cache size and low frequencies allowed them to be used only as part of office PCs.
Mid-range chips are Pentium 4. Improved specifications, a larger cache and increased frequencies made it possible to play most toys quite comfortably.
The flagships in this case were the Pentium D series devices . They had 2 computing modules, and this provided a significant increase in productivity and speed.
RAM
As noted earlier, the Asus P5LD2 Deluxe random access memory controller was part of the north bridge. He could only work with RAM modules of the DDR2 standard, whose clock frequencies could be equal to 400/533/667 MHz. It was also possible to install more high-speed RAM strips, for example, DDR2 - 800 MHz. But at the same time, the clock frequency of the latter would be artificially reduced to the maximum possible in this case 667 MHz.
The amount of RAM that this motherboard was able to address was 4 GB. There were 4 slots for installing RAM in this case. That is, in each of them it was possible to install only a bar with a capacity of 1 GB. The controller of the operational device was able to work in two-channel mode. Therefore, it was more preferable to install 2 modules of 512 MB instead of one per 1 GB. This allowed in some cases to increase the performance of the computing system by an additional 10-15 percent.
Expansion slots
Asus P5LD2 Deluxe motherboard was equipped with the following expansion slots:
2 slots format PCI-E version 16X. The main one was blue, and the additional one was black. These slots were designed to install discrete graphics accelerators. Moreover, it was necessary to install 2 immediately and use it in SLI mode (only NVidia video cards were supported), it was possible to significantly increase the speed of the video subsystem. This circumstance allowed creating full-fledged graphic stations on the basis of such a motherboard.
In total, the PCI-E slot version 1.0 was equipped with the motherboard in question. New modifications of expansion controllers could be installed in it: TV tuner, sound card, network adapter.
This solution was also equipped with 3 PCI slots. Their purpose was similar to PCI-E revision 1.0, but only in this case outdated modifications of external expansion controllers were used.
Connectors and Ports
A fairly good set of integrated communication ports was equipped with the P5LD2 Deluxe. The manufacturer included in this list:
2 PS / 2 connectors for switching with the pointing device (it was green) and the keyboard (purple).
1 parallel port of the LPT standard. With it, printers and scanners were connected.
4 USB 2.0 ports. In this case, it was possible to connect various peripheral devices to the PC.
RJ-45 without any problems allowed switching to a computer network.
A set of 3.5 mm Audiojack jacks could output sound to an external speaker system.
Reviews, cost and results
The Asus P5LD2 Deluxe was quite expensive, even by today's standards - $ 250. And this is its main drawback. Given that this is a premium solution, there was nothing supernatural in such pricing. But there were much more advantages in this case: the high functionality of the motherboard, support at that time for all available models of processor devices, a large amount of RAM, the presence of a PCI-E slot for installing a discrete graphics system. As a result, it was not difficult to implement almost any system units based on this solution. But still, the use of such a motherboard was more justified in the case of assembling a high-performance PC.