just re-reading the Anandtech review.
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2797&p=3
my God, talk about a glowing review, it's full of superlatives. like their review of
the Asus P5N32-SLI - but they like it more than the P5N32 for C2D.
"As you will see below, overclocking was outstanding, but we suspect that higher voltage adjustments on the MCH would allow even higher overclocks. The ASUS stops at 1.65V, while the Intel BadAxe goes on to 1.725V. We would welcome ASUS raising the top voltage on the MCH. There are reports that modding the ASUS to reach 1.9V MCH allows FSB overclocks to almost 500 instead of the current limit of around 440 to 450 FSB."
"All-in-all the ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe is one of the best Conroe boards we have tested. The 975X chipset is definitely more mature than current P965 chipset motherboards. Having said that, there were still several BIOS revisions during our testing to update certain peculiarities in the current steppings of Core 2 Duo."
"The ASUS board was every bit as stable with Core 2 Duo as the Intel BadAxe, which for a long time was the only board that would operate with Conroe. The ASUS also implements the ability to adjust X6800 (2.93EE) ratios both up and down, which is a feature of this processor, but is not supported on all boards. The ASUS overclocks further than any other stock board we tested, and it recovers from bad overclocks gracefully. If the OC is close a reboot will usually allow further adjustment. If the OC is far off you need to physically turn off the power then restart to further adjust the BIOS. This is a much more friendly board for OC than the Intel BadAxe, for instance, that will not recover from any failed OC without a full power down and sometimes a CMOS clear."
"We liked the board enough that it became our new standard board for our DDR2 memory testing platform."
"the stock E6700 reached a 50% overclock at 4.0 GHz. Our new OC test bed uses an excellent air cooler in the Tuniq Tower, and you are likely to experience lower overclocks with stock cooling."
- - -
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2797&p=19
"The board we would choose for our own Conroe system is the ASUS P5W-DH Deluxe. Performance is rock solid and the feature set is superb. It is the best overclocker of the eight boards here and it is based on the 975X chipset, which allows the X6800 to be set to both higher and lower multipliers. You cannot set higher multipliers on the P965 and 965 overclocking is poorer on every board we tested than 975X overclocking."
guess i'll wait a few more months for BIOS Revs. to get sorted out & prices to fall.
my only wish for this board - that it had more SATA connectors.