DNS Wildcard entry and Subdomains

What's the difference?

[fischermx]

In my hosting panel, I've notice all new domains created have a DNS wildcard entry, that means, that anything I type of a subdomain would work : www.asdf.mydomain.com, www.qwer.mydomain.com.

But also, I have the option to manually create subdomains on any domain, which also looks and appears, from the user perspective exactly as the subdomains accepted by the DNS wildcard.

What's the difference in both approaches?

[Dijkgraaf]

Do the wildcard domains all point to the same site?

With actual subdomains you can point them at different web sites and servers, without having to do rewrites.

[freeflight2]

here's my setup for example:

domain.com -> web IP
*.domain.com CNAME domain.com
mail -> mail server IP
images -> image server IP

this way everything (ncluding 'www') hits the webserver, besides mail.domain.com and images which hit different servers.