With Intel's new mid-range P45 Express chipset at its heart, the P5Q Deluxe offers exceptional performance and features without needing a second mortgage.
PC scrooges rejoiced when Intel released its mid-range P965 chipset. It was basically the P975 in beggar’s clothing, offering most of the goodies at a fraction of the cost; excellent overclocking headroom, tight memory timings and a feature-set unheard of at its wife-pleasing price. When we heard Intel was releasing a new mid-range chip, the P45 Express, we were very keen to see if it lived up to its predecessor. The first P45 baby has been delivered by the ASUS crane, in the form of the P5Q Deluxe.
Obviously the big new feature of the P5Q is the Intel P45 Express chipset at its core. This includes a new ICH10R southbridge, which appears to be a die shrunk ICH9R, offering identical functionality. The northbridge supports PCI Express 2.0, with 16 lanes up for grabs. ATI’s CrossFire technology is supported, but SLI users are still out of luck. The board has a total of three PCI Express x16 slots (though only two are PCI Express 2.0, with the third being 1.1), two PCI Express x1 slots and two old-school PCI slots.
Dual Gigabit Ethernet ports are included, and ASUS has even gone the extra mile with the included 802.11n Wi-Fi. The new Analog Devices AD2000B chip takes care of the onboard audio processing, a solid sound chipset that surprisingly lacks DTS support.
ASUS has made a big deal about its EPU-6 engine, which uses automatic phase switching to lower the board’s 16-phase power used by the CPU, Chipset, video card, fan, HDD and memory. While we’re not equipped to test ASUS’s claims of power reduction, we’ve seen results that suggest this is one of the most power efficient boards on the market.
A passive cooling system removes heat from the capacitors around the CPU, northbridge, southbridge and, courtesy of a special adaptor, even the memory. It’s a new design from ASUS, and based on our overclocking results, actually works. Speaking of which, based on the P965’s excellent overclocking abilities, we were expecting great things out of the P45 Express chipset. We weren’t disappointed.
This is the last motherboard chipset from Intel to offer a frontside bus (the Nehalem CPU has the memory controller embedded in the CPU, thus removing the need for a frontside bus), and in this motherboard the maximum official speed is 1600MHz. However, we managed to extract a maximum frontside bus speed of a whopping 2000MHz. It wasn’t quite as solid as Venus William’s thighs at this speed, but dropping it back to around 1900MHz gave us 100% reliability. We didn’t even need to install the optional chipset fan on the board, as it was happy to purr away at this blistering speed, without incurring blistering temperatures. Pair this up with a vast array of BIOS tweaking options and you have a board that is an overclocker’s delight.
You needn’t be an overclocker to appreciate this board’s performance though. As expected, the Intel heritage shines through with exceptional memory performance, and even with everything set at default it’s one of the fastest Core2 Duo boards on the market.
It looks like ASUS is on to a winner with the P5Q Deluxe, but there’s one area we haven’t mentioned yet – the price. Given how great the rest of the board is, is it any surprise that the price is also fantastic? Shop around and you’ll be able to pick it up for less than $250. It might not be quite as affordable as the budget boards you can find, but it offers performance and features that leave them choking in its dust.
Intel has given the frontside bus a perfect swan song in the P45 Express chipset, and ASUS has built the perfect motherboard around this chipset. Highly recommended.