Asus P5B Deluxe WiFi-AP Edition

Richard's Thoughts...

I have good vibes about this board. With a solid set of features, and everything I'd use I would consider purchasing this board to accompany a Core 2 Duo processor: 6 SATA 3Gbps ports, 8 USB 2.0, Firewire, a passively cooled chipset and onboard WiFi.

CrossFire, or even SLI, is just too expensive for a casual gamer like myself to justify the cost, but I would consider spending a decent amount of cash on a good third party hardware RAID card. The second PCI-Express x16 slot is ideal for this use, and it guarantees data security when upgrading your PC. This is not because Intel's Matrix RAID is particularly bad in any way - in fact the software supporting it is the best in the business alongside NVIDIA's - but it's still an onboard disk controller.

This means it is a software based implementation, and it uses CPU cycles. Also, when you upgrade there's no guarantee you can migrate the array onto your new board. There's also no caching functionality that you often find on dedicated RAID cards, along a bunch of additional features you expect to get considering the cash you're paying. It's a shame the extra PCI-Express x16 slot is only somewhat capable of providing the option of an extra graphics card for four monitor support, though.

The abundance of PCI slots is also great for the reason of the sheer lack of PCI-Express x1 cards on the market. With so many people still owning perfectly capable PCI TV tuner cards, sound cards and the like, PCI slots are still very much necessary on enthusiast motherboards. Not only that, as always the Asus boards look good with their "copper on black", or bumblebee, alternating yellow and black memory slots. It looks like a serious worker (despite the fact I've just described it as a bumblebee. Perhaps, an angry bumblebee then?).

Then there's the downside: Price. The P965/ICH8R combination is an expensive chipset, and with all the features put into this board it comes in around a wallet busting £145 mark in the UK and the cheapest in the US we could find at the time of writing was $210 but seems to go up to $230+. In comparison the basic Intel P965 Broadwater motherboard is $100 cheaper at $120 but can't hold a torch to the features on the Asus P5B Deluxe.

As ever, it seems you get what you pay for and this example is no exception. At the end of the day it is a high end workstation board with oodles of features and you pay the price for such an item.

Tim's Thoughts...

I think that Rich has pretty much summed up my thoughts on this board already, but there are a few more things to add. We had very few problems with the P5B Deluxe WiFi-AP Edition from the start and on the whole, it seems that the board is another job well done by Asus.

There are a couple of chassis fan headers and a SATA port that are in awkward positions in between the WiFi card and primary PCI-Express x16 slot. It's obvious that the two chassis fan headers are for fans on the back of the case, but they're not easy to get to if you're one to install hardware before plugging fans in. Thankfully, they are not the only pin headers on the board - there are four more pin headers, excluding the CPU fan header.

The positioning of the SATA port is incredibly awkward and we doubt that it will ever be used unless you are looking to use the port for an external device. However, the back panel has a single eSATA port already, so we find it hard to believe that you'd want to use more than one external SATA device albeit with a bunch of cables hanging out through one of the PCI blanking brackets.

Another strange choice that Asus made on the P5B Deluxe is that it only opted to cool half of the PWM area surrounding the CPU. This may be because of the lack of space for larger coolers once the second PWM heatsink is added. Having said that, the choice didn't seem to affect the board's overclocking performance all that much.

Overclocking & Stability: We overclocked the board looking for both Max FSB and Max CPU overclock - the board performed well in both departments, and we got quite close to the Max CPU overclock when we were looking for the Max achievable front side bus. In order to find our best overclocks with this board, we used a Zalman CNPS9500 cooler on the board and a Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU.

I was able to get the board running stable with three instances of Prime95 running at 8x455MHz with 1.5V vCore, equating to a CPU clock of 3640MHz. The Corsair XMS2-6400C3 memory was running at 910MHz DDR with 4.0-4-4-12 timings. At anything above 455MHz, I encountered problems where the board would occasionally fail to POST. I did get the board running three instances of Prime95 for an hour at 465MHz though - a new BIOS may well fix this issue and unlock even more headroom.

In order to find the maximum CPU overclock, I used the X6800's default 11x multiplier. I managed to get the board and CPU running stable at 340MHz FSB, resulting in a CPU clock of 3740MHz and a memory clock of 1020MHz with 5.0-5-5-15 timings and the same voltage settings. Again, the board was Prime95 stable (three instances) at these frequencies.

Along with our overclocking tests, we also ran the board through our stability test. The P5B Deluxe successfully completed a 24-hour loop consisting of two Prime95 instances, IOMeter and also Far Cry running at 1600x1200 4xAA 8xAF. There were no problems to report and the board came through the test flawlessly.

Final Thoughts...

If you have the money to spend and are not insistant on multiple GPU configurations, the Asus P5B Deluxe mobo performs as well as Intel's current flagship D975XBX motherboard. Along with that it comes with some additional features and improvements in the newer ICH8R southbridge. It also overclocks like an absolute demon without too much effort - our overclocking experiences with the board were incredibly trouble and hassle free; when an overclock failed, we power-cycled and the board POSTed again. With the exception of updating the BIOS, we didn't have to use the CMOS reset switch at all!

If you're in the market for a high-class motherboard and don't require multiple GPUs, the Asus P5B Deluxe is an incredibly strong contender.