Asus P5Q Deluxe.

Yet another chipset from Intel who evidently appear to be somewhat dissatisfied with the 10 perhaps chipsets they've released prior to now year. The P45 is basically a cut-down, lower-priced version of the high-end X48 chipset-based boards. It's also set to be the last socket-775 chipset till the release of the desperately awaited Nehalem range at the end of the year.
So what makes the P45 as good as its predecessor, the P35? Firstly, the P45 ups top side bus to a maximum of 1, 600Mhz over the P35's 1, 333MHz, which in turn gives overclockers a somewhat more headroom to play using. It also boasts PCI-Express couple of. 0 support for twice the graphics bandwidth along with supports Intel's 45nm-based processors, the latest, more efficient and slightly bigger Core 2 chips. It features the ICHlO southbridge far too, which includes a 10GB ethernet controller and built-in wireless support, while dropping the aging PS/2 plus LPT ports.
Asus has a reputation as one of the more innovative companies sold in the market - the Eee to be a testament to that - this also latest PSQ Deluxe is no exception. The board itself is well laid-out, with the usual, aesthetically pleasing black PCB. And, strangely, we had no slicing-our-fingers-into-salami problems with the cooling fins as many of us installed the CPU buff. One of Asus's much more brilliant innovations (actually forget the Eee) has to be the power and reset buttons that are part of the motherboard itself - immensely handy to the test-bench overclocker or if you're just having teething concerns.
Fight the Power
In addition to the P45 chipset, Asus has crammed its EPU-Six Engine into the PsQ Deluxe. This power-saving system monitors the power draw of the brand, graphics card, memory, chipset hard drives and CPU fan, and adjusts them automatically to get different application environments. So if you're simply browsing the net it switches to Energy-Saving way, but when you boot up Crysis it can go into Turbo way. The settings can be adjusted to the fly, and it even says to you how many milligrams of carbon monoxide you aren't going to pumping into the oxygen. Asus claims it might significantly save on power bills, which is likely so that you can please some polar requires.
On top of a power-saving features, Asus has incorporated its Splashtop Instant-On operating system into the motherboard. One of those ‘ why did no one think of this before? ’ ideas, the Splashtop is a bespoke Linux installation that allows access to the internet by way of a customized version of Safari, chat with Skype including a basic photo browser. It's quite underpowered, but when you're desperate for a rapid map or cinema moments it's immeasurably handy. It's also getting rolled out through its entire mobo vary, stored on a chip along at the high-end and offering HIGH DEFINITION installation via support CD on the rest.
The Splashtop software is built onto the motherboard while in the deluxe. With its own concentrated 512MB of RAM there's no need to worry about not with the ability to get on the Net whenever you fry your hard storage. ASUS is also touting this for an energy-saving feature, as users will be less likely to leave their PCs running as long as they know the web will boot in a matter of seconds.
Although it's an awesome bit of software, it still needs a little polish - it did not detect our microsoft personal computer mouse and we were left tabbing around the various menus. A BIOS upgrade should fix that, and given time we could see an evolved variation of Splashtop revolutionize exactly how we use PCs.
Against the Odds
So energy-saving and innovation in one, but how does a P45 platform perform? We tested it against Intel's P35 plus X38 chipsets, as very well as Nvidia's 790i chipset, and performance was surprisingly underwhelming. It's not that it's bad, it's just unimpressive. The biggest surprise here is that the P35 outperformed that P45 slightly on RAM and processor tests - although this could be down to early drivers issues. But impressively for a board at this amount, 3D performance was the fact is only slightly behind ASUS's holier-than-though nevertheless hideously expensive 790i-based Striker II. And that's without any overclocking.
When compared to the X38 we noticed significant improvements round the board, which is shocking when you consider that Intel was touting it to be a high-end chipset barely this past year. Even the P35 managed to outdo the X38. Hopefully the Nehalem won't go through so many mind-bogglingly unnecessary iterations, but that does seem to be Intel's penchant du jour.
It's also worth bearing in mind that although the P45 chipset facilitates DDR3 RAM, the P5Q Luxury only supports DDR2. All motherboard manufacturers currently have released their P45 boards in a range from stripped-down funding to fully-featured expensive, and the P5Q Deluxe sits more into the value end of the actual spectrum, so no DDR3 for us. Although given the ridiculous prices and minimal operation gain from DDR3, it hardly seems worth it.
If you've got the P35-based board it's not always worth upgrading at show. But if you've got anything less, and you're after a solid, competent motherboard with lots of handy features, the P5Q Deluxe is undoubtedly worth considering.