Asus launched its Digital Home line of motherboards at Computex, and the P5W DH Deluxe is the first one we've had in the labs. At just under $250 online, it's also the most expensive Core 2 motherboard currently on the market. That's not terribly surprising, though. After all, the P5W DH is based on Intel's high-end 975X chipset, and it is bundled with a gratuitous array of extra features and goodies.

The P5W DH also sports a new orange and black color scheme. I'm not sure what that has to do with the digital home, but Halloween is coming up, so perhaps it's not completely inappropriate.

With more onboard peripherals and auxiliary chips than either of Asus's other Core 2 boards, the P5W DH is a layout nightmare waiting to happen. Fortunately, Asus has done a reasonably good job of averting disaster. We only have a few things to quibble about, and power plug placement isn't one of them. Like the P5B and P5N32-SLI, the P5W DH's power connectors are located along the top and right edges of the board. However, unlike the other two boards, the P5W only has a four-pin connector for its auxiliary 12V line.

The P5W still has an eight-phase power design, though. A passive cooler keeps some of the voltage circuitry cool while also cooling the north bridge chip via a heatpipe. That still leaves plenty of room around the socket for larger heatsinks, although Intel's LGA775 socket spec probably deserves the credit there. Intel's heatsink retention holes carve out plenty of space around the CPU socket, allowing for larger coolers that were a virtual necessity with recent NetBurst-based processors.

Asus does a good enough job of arranging most of the P5W DH's storage ports in the bottom right-hand corner of the board, but how the ports are all connected is a bit of a mess. The ICH7R should have four Serial ATA ports; on the P5W DH, it only has three. The fourth port actually runs to an auxiliary Silicon Image SiI 4723 "storage processor," which splits it between two auxiliary Serial ATA ports. That creates problems for those looking to run four-drive RAID arrays, especially RAID 10, which actually requires at least four drives. Asus has a solution, but it's far from elegant. One of the SiI 4723's SATA ports can be reclaimed by the ICH7R for use in four-drive arrays, but in Intel's RAID BIOS, the drive appears as an "external disk." Intel's RAID management software can't read the drive's information, either.

The impetus behind this odd storage arrangement appears to be a feature called EZ-Backup. This gem is supposed to simplify creating and managing RAID arrays, and it comes with appropriately-branded RAID management software for Windows. But get this: you have to change an onboard jumper to define whether EZ-Backup is configured as a RAID 0 or RAID 1 array. Forget, for a moment, the lunacy of associating RAID 0 with anything called EZ-Backup—Better-Backup, maybe. Asus apparently thinks switching jumpers is easier than popping into Intel's RAID management BIOS. It's not. If it were, we'd still be changing the front-side bus speed with onboard jumpers.

We're not quite sure what Asus was thinking with the P5W DH's PCI Express graphics card retention levers, either. On the P5B and P5N32-SLI, the retention levers stick out of the top of the slot where they don't interfere with double-wide coolers. The P5W hangs its retention levers out the bottom of the slot, putting them right below heatsinks on Nvidia's GeForce 7900 GTX and ATI's Radeon X1900 series graphics cards. Getting either card out of the board takes effort, especially when a system's installed in a tight enclosure.

Apart from hard-to-reach retention levers, the P5W's slot stack looks pretty good. PCI Express x16 slots are paired with a couple of x1 slots and three standard PCI slots, giving users plenty of upgrade options for the future while retaining compatibility with existing expansion cards. A double-wide CrossFire configuration still leaves you with two PCI slots and one PCI-E x1, as well.

The P5W DH's port cluster is identical to that of the P5B, so we won't linger here long. Note that like the P5B Deluxe Wifi-AP Edition, there's also an integrated wireless networking riser.

802.11g Wi-Fi is provided by the same riser that we saw on the P5B. This time, however, Asus has hidden a extra Serial ATA port just above the wireless module. This takes the cake for the worst Serial ATA port placement we've seen, especially since the port is also backed up against the board's north bridge heatpipe. That's the price you pay for external Serial ATA, I suppose.