Elitegroup P45T-A

The motherboard that could have been a Ninja in another life.

When you first take this motherboard out of the packaging, your eyes are met with an all-black PCB, dark copper heatsinks adorned with a brushed silver logo, and ‘Black Series’ etched onto the board. With blood red PCIe slots and darker colours used throughout, this board certainly looks the business. Sadly, the only business here is show business.

The back panel of the motherboard contains six USB ports, four of which are stacked vertically, and this makes plugging in multiple gadgets annoying – especially if you have larger sticks. A single Ethernet, eSATA, PS/2 and audio ports are also present, as well as the extremely puzzling addition of a serial port. For a board aimed at enthusiasts, surely they could have put more USB ports here, or even a clear CMOS button.

The area around the CPU socket is very bare, with room for larger heatsinks, and you’ll also find solid capacitors here – but nowhere else. The remainder of the board (save for two others) are old electrolytic capacitors that are less reliable under load, run at a higher temperature, and have a shorter lifespan.

Another strange choice was a four-pin CPU power socket, which reduces stability and capacity for Quad core overclocking – and placed in the middle of the board as well, disrupting airflow. The RAM slots are in their usual place, and will need the graphics card removed to access. Six SATA ports are present, and about three will be easily accessible when running Crossfire. Power and reset buttons are present, as well as the usual USB headers, IDE and FDD.

When we actually got around to testing this board (and not just looking at it), we discovered that the USB ports refused to work with any mouse or keyboard, but would work with flash drives. The latest BIOS did not fix this issue, so we managed to scrounge an old trackball mouse to allow our benchmarks to actually run!

The overclocking menu is very limiting, with options few and far between. CPU voltage is not stated, and is simply ‘+097Mv’ and other seemingly random amounts of voltage.

With performance down across the board, and some very poor choices, we really can’t recommend this to anyone – unless you must have the board for the looks.