I need to know if i'm making the right decision by getting an Asus P5W-DH
I975X motherboard for ati crossfire mode. This is for a new Intel core 2 duo pc i'm getting which has the following specs: intel E6600 2.4 ghz, Corsair 2GB XMS2 PC6400 DDR2 memory and ati radeon x1950 pro video card. Thats what i decided upon for now, and yes, only 1 video card for now as well, i'll go over the budget if i gety 2 of them. However several months down the road when i get some more cash i'll get the second one.The reviews i read were faviorable, including the one here at techspot, but i want to hear what the pc community thinks as well. I kinda been torn between sli and crossfire modes, but right now leaning towards crossfire so thats why i want to find out if this is the motherboard for crossfire mode. I'm especially eager to hear from people that actually have it and tried it out.

Asus P5W-DH Deluxe? If so, it's a great board for using Crossfire (pre-dongle mode).

I don't have any experience using the "new" Crossfire modes on this motherboard, but have built a few in the past using Master/Slave cards + dongle. This works great. It can even work with SLI if you use older NV cards and hunt around for the "hacked" drivers for this purpose. NV is off/on in court over this issue, so perhaps eventually you wont have to use hacked drivers for this.

It's a great performing mainboard and has adequate northbridge cooling, which is important for the i975X. It can be a tricky motherboard to install Windows on though, so be sure to fool with the "EHCI Handoff" bios options if you run into trouble with the install.

Yea,i know people who have used it for sli aswell, i think they even used cards from the geforce 7000 series, but thats not what it is for, thats why i'll be putting an ati card in there if i do decide to get this one and go crossfire. I'm glad you told me about possible windows installation problems, i dont know how to tweak bios settings though. But it will install if someone does it for me, right?

Also i wanted to ask you to explain pre-dongle mode, you mentioned that at the beginning, what does that mean?

Crossfire no longer needs the dongle/connector as well as no longer needs a master crossfire and std. edition card. Newer ATI drivers allow people with just two X1000 series cards to enable/run Crossfire with them in their systems.

I've only seen/heard this working with ATI chipset motherboards, not the i955/i975 chipset motherboards. I'd assume it should be just as feasible/work great too, but haven't had the time to personally set one of these up or test it.

I think it should work fine, afterall the asus board is on the list of ATI certified i975X motherboards. There is only 5 boards on that list, just in case anyone is intersted in this here's that list:

The abovementioned Asus P5W DH Deluxe
Gigabyte GA-G1975X
Intel D975XBX
Intel D975XBX2
MSI i975X Platinum

I only settled on the asus board because of positive reviews and because they are among the top board manufacturers in the world.

And Sharkfood, thank you for your input.