ASUS P5Q PRO

A well thought out mobo from the A-team.

ASUS has, and will continue to be, a large presence in the PC market, with a veritable flood of products ranging from motherboards to sound cards. Here we have its budget P45 offering, so let’s have a look and see if there’s anything interesting on offer.

Using a milk-chocolate coloured PCB, with small darkened heatsinks and components, most colour choices on the board seem to to be in keeping with aesthetics rather than for any practical purpose. Even the solid capacitors on the board are a red colour, a good match for the brown PCB. Thankfully these remain relatively clear of the CPU socket, leaving plenty of room for oversized coolers. The memory slots are also in a great location, with plenty of space around them to install and remove modules without removing the graphics card. Similarly, the main power plugs and the IDE port are all in good places too, allowing for neat cabling when installed. The floppy port is at the bottom of the board, which disrupts this layout – or it would if floppy drives were common any more.

Down the bottom corner are the SATA ports arranged in a neat row, out of the way of all but the widest graphics card coolers. Also present here is a strange LED with full cover – similar to what you’d buy from an electronics shop. This seemingly only shows power to the Southbridge, and lights up whenever the power supply is plugged in.

The headers down the bottom are quite normal, including the audio header, and all are in a good spot. On the back panel are six USB ports, Firewire, Ethernet, audio and PS/2 ports.

We had quite a few issues getting our DDR2 to run at 1066, such as refusal to POST and other similarly fun Windows errors. We finally just settled for lower frequencies. The BIOS is relatively easy to navigate, though be prepared to look around for specific options for a small while until you become familiar with it.

Performance was pretty good, and it certainly is far from expensive. We’d definitely put this one on our shortlists, and we think you should too.