|
Page 2 of 3
ASUS P5Q Pro
As we said before, ASUS P5Q Pro motherboard is based on new Intel P45 chipset. It is characterized by very good layout (every component is in right place) what will perfectly fit to all devotees of neat cabling. Bundle is adequate to price tag for this motherboard (around 130€). You will get only necessary cables, backplate and disc with drivers and accompanying applications. Cooling solution is up to what is expected and heatpipe extends from NB to CPU power unit. The interesting fact is that Asus didn’t choose to cool north FETs, above socket, even though manufacturer left holes in motherboard for optional mounting of passive cooler. This motherboard is technical sample so we can’t say with certainty if this tested specimen of P5Q Pro is actually crippled or unfinished (incomplete), or every P5Q Pro will be available without cooler on north FETs. We came up with another assumption that maybe circuit board of P5Q is more likely in near future to become base of, for example, Deluxe model of Asus board originate from P5Q series.
High quality capacitors are used on this motherboard and we didn’t expect anything less from ASUS. Clear CMOS jumper isn’t on a perfect position. It’s placed right beside PCI slots, so if you have, for example TV card, it can cause a lot of problems if you wish at some point to reset BIOS to default settings. CPU power filtering unit is made in eight phases with Yageo R68 inductors (we’ve met with R68 before and we give them all compliments). RAM memory will be also supplied with stabile voltage, as a result of 2-phased filtration. Even chipset has 2-phase voltage filtration, which is not any novelty, but is good to know that even this part of motherboard is well engineered. However, motherboard itself without good BIOS doesn’t means that much.
|
 |
We should mention a few things before BIOS P5Q Pro portray. Things like Realtek ALC1200 audio chip. As far as we are concerned, we have met with Realtek audio codec for the first time. It supports 8 audio channels. Sound quality on ALC1200 is very good and we can say that is just a little bit better than older and omnipresent “brothers” (ALC888 and ALC889). Second item that’s interesting is ASUS Express Gate. In reality part of P5Q Pro BIOS is reserved for some variant of Linux. 5 seconds after starting up P5Q Pro model, menu will appear that can be used to start some applications (Web Browser, Skype etc.). The best thing is that this feature doesn’t demand installation of any OS or presence of HDD in general.
BIOS
As expected BIOS is raised to the occasion, as we mentioned earlier and we won’t waste words on descriptions of every possible BIOS option. We can only notice that BIOS is rich in options intended for OC. For every segment of motherboard voltages can be set in a range that demands careful handle or otherwise will follow guaranteed “death” of processor, RAM or chipset. The bottom line is that you’ll never have problem such as lack of voltage for any of mentioned components.
What really gives us a great pleasure is fact that ASUS P5Q Pro turned out great in practice. We succeed to overclock Intel C2D E6850 at stabile 3.65GHz while keeping voltage at 1.4V which is for 65nm CPU that is air cooled more than good result. For Core2Extreme QX9770 processor we achieved stabile working overclock at 3.7GHz with 1.35V voltage. This result is also excellent for one Quad Core CPU.
|
MotherBoards 
