Asus P5B Deluxe Wi-Fi

A top notch combination of circuit board and silicon to power those top notch processors.

Hands up who doesn’t own a Core 2 Duo yet? Right, hurry up and get on the bandwagon already! The world keeps on spinning and you’re being left behind. Sheesh, we’ll be up to Core 2 Quad soon, and then it’ll all be over. Mind you it’ll be some time before the majority of applications actually use four cores, but at least if you grab a 965 board right now, compatibility is only a flash away when the need becomes pressing.

The P965 boards are now the darlings of the industry, with the new Memory Controller Hub and ICH8 southbridge dancing around the older boards, and the inclusion of a somewhat hobbled CrossFire support making it a tempting acquisition – now all we need is NVIDIA to enable SLI (hah!) and we’ll have one of the best boards on the market to date. With ATI’s RD600 nowhere to be seen (supposedly DFI will be gracing the world with it soon), NVIDIA’s nForce 590 for Intel rarer than Eminem singing Barry Manilow tunes, and its 680i yet to come, Intel has a near exclusive market.

ASUS’s P5B Deluxe is its P965 entrant into the rapidly expanding Core 2 Duo market, and like most boards these days is adorned by a snaking silent heatpipe connected between passive sinks to keep the noise down.

The usual configuration of ASUS ports sits at the back, with the archaic serial port, optical/coax SPDIF, FireWire, eSATA, HD Audio, four USB ports and two Marvell Yukon driven Gigabit Ethernet ports. Here ASUS have been a little cheap though, as one of the ports sits on the PCI bus rather than the PCI-E, giving it a higher chance of saturating the poor aging interface, especially if you have other devices sharing it such as a sound card. Quite frankly we’d rather have that Ethernet port on PCI-E than have the included Realtek 802.11g wireless card, and while a non-wireless edition of the P5B Deluxe is available, the offending port is still wired through PCI. Tsk, tsk. Still, that’s one port more than the Gigabyte offers, so if you need dual Ethernet and lust after the P965, this is the puppy for you.

Sound is provided through the ADI1988 chip, which much like the Realtek alternative does the job, but isn’t crash hot. Seriously, somebody buy out Creative’s sound card division already. With the dwindling sound card market and Creative being all too focused on taking out Apple, now is prime time. C’mon ASUS, you know you can. Or at least get your buddy NVIDIA to do some investing and bring back Soundstorm.

Unlike Gigabyte’s offering, ASUS has been sensible with the allocation of PCI-E x1 slots, only including one while giving three PCI slots, and the requisite two PCI-E x16. This means that those with older dedicated sound cards, TV tuners or physics cards will find this board a lot more palatable than some other offerings.

SATA allocation is also acceptable, with six ports at the front, and one internal and one eSATA being driven by the JMicron JMB363 controller at the back. This also controls the PATA port at the front of the board.

In the overclocking stakes it had almost as much grunt as the Gigabyte, managing a 330MHz FSB stable to the Big G’s 335 – a matter of a whole 5MHz. An almost negligible difference, but to those trying to set records, an important one we guess. In saying this the range of voltage options are nicer than the Gigabyte, and the ASUS logo on the board does glow pretty colours. That has to count for something, just like LEDs on HSFs clearly make them a lot cooler.

There’s nothing much more to say about the board other than it displays the usual ASUS attention to build quality and presents a solid investment on anyone’s behalf. If you’re in the market for a Core 2 Duo board and need dual Ethernet, snaffle this one up now.