Between these 2 motherboards, which one can overclock CPUs to a higher frequency? P5WDG2 WS Professional or P5W DH Deluxe ? Thanks.
you mean it overclocks better? Also I've seen that the P5W DH Deluxe's PCIe is maximum x8 in crossfire... are all the motherboards like that? or are there some that support up to x16 in CF?
Well, having x8 worth of PCIe lanes to a 16x PCIe slot has shown to be a non-issue so far. AGP 8x provides up to 2.1GB/s. Now, let's go to PCIe. Each slot has a number of lanes going to it, typically denoted by the numeric value: x1 PCIe has one PCIe lane, x16 has 16 PCIe lanes. The thing about PCIe is that the lanes can be adjusted to suit a condition, which is how they can have a full 16 lanes to a slot on a motherboard when using 1 PCIe x16 slot and only 8 when using 2. Furthermore, each PCIe lane offers 250MB/s in each direction for a total of 500MB/s per lane. With 8 lanes, you still get 4GB/s transfer rate maximums...nearly double the amount of AGP 8x. Also, AGP 8x hasn't been eclipsed yet...although I doubt you'll see any DX10 cards in AGP format. In any case, having only 8 PCIe lanes per slot won't be an issue. If you want full x16 lanes when running Crossfire, the only board I'm aware of that does this on the Intel front right now is the DFI ICFX3200-T2R/G, using the ATi Xpress3200/SB600 chipset combo. Otherwise, you're going to want to look at nForce 680i motherboards and go with SLI, since there no official support for Crossfire on nForce and no SLI support on Crossfire boards. The WS is designed for workstations (hence, the "WS" part). From the little I've dug up on the WS, it's overclocking capability is the same as the P5WDH. For reference, it looks like the DFI ICFX3200 overclocks about the same as the Asus boards, but that could improve with BIOS updates.
