Core 2 Duo MBO Round-up: Part 3 - ASUS P5LD2 SE
Author: Josip Brombauer
Date: 15 Nov 2006

ASUS P5LD2 SE

This Intel Lakeport 945P MBO from the ASUS Ai Lifestyle line has been present in the market for quite some time, but recently it has received a PCB revamp in order to support the Core 2 CPUs. So if you are shopping for this particular board, make sure that you get the PCB revision 2.0 (or later), otherwise getting a Conroe CPU to run on it will be impossible. Furthermore, the highest officially supported DDR2 speed is limited to DDR2667, although there are options within the BIOS to select DDR2-711 and DDR2-889 speeds. Strangely enough, there is no mention of the standard DDR2-800. We attempted to solve this problem by downloading a new BIOS version, but the only ones available on the ASUS webpage were even older then the one we had. As a result, benchmarks were run with the memory clocked at DDR2-711.
The board itself clearly targets the lower mainstream market and does not come with any additional features that would attract your average computer enthusiast. One PCI-E x16, two PCI-E x1 and three standard PCI slots are available, though if you install a 2-slot GPU one of the PCI-E x1 slots will become inaccessible.
Four SATA 3G and two IDE devices are supported. The rear I/O panel consists of four USB 2.0 ports (four more available through additional brackets), an RJ-45 connector for the Realtek RTL8111B Gigabit LAN controller, a 6-channel ADI SoundMax (AD1986A) sound solution, a coaxial S/PDIF, two PS/2, one serial and one LPT port.
When it comes to overclocking, serious limitations such as the maximum selectable DIMM voltage of 2.00 V will hamper any real attempts, but let?s face it, for this particular board it is not really expected.