ASUS P5Q DELUXE

A motherboard that isn’t afraid to declare its status in all-caps.

ASUS’ offering here is their premium, or ‘Deluxe’ version, of the P45 chipset, complete with many features and niceties that the cheaper boards simply don’t have. The most obvious physical difference is that the heatsink array has grown (like a tumour, but less deadly) to cover the Southbridge, as well as all the power regulation at the top of the board. In the area around the CPU socket, there are intricately arranged components that feed the CPU electricity, with many power phases here, and a further two for the memory.

The back panel has six USB, eSATA and Firewire, two Ethernet, audio and PS/2 ports. Just beneath this area, the expansion slots are rather full-featured, and even include what looks like a flash drive mounted in between the lower PCI slot and the bottom two slots. Well, that is because it is flash memory, ASUS’ ExpressGate in fact, containing a Linux distro that allows internet surfing, chat, photos and skype. This boots in about five seconds, and is a good feature for those who use their computer for quick emails.

Headers lie along the bottom of the board, as well as physical power and reset buttons that light up when the board has power. Sadly there’s no reset CMOS button, nor is there an obvious header – requiring the removal of the battery. This is directly under the top PCIe slot, which means that the graphics card will have to be removed if you want to do this, which is rather annoying. The memory slots are also in an annoying place, with the graphics card in the way of the bottom clips, preventing easy access to the modules.

All the SATA, IDE and FDD ports are along the right hand edge of the board, some even right-angled, making plugging them in easy when you have larger graphics cards.

We had some issues when overclocking this board on the BIOS it came with (0204), but all these issues became immaterial after a simple flash.
With some good placements, and a Linux distro built into the mobo, this is a board that is definitely worth a good, long look at.