ASUS P5Q PRO - motherboard - ATX - iP45

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Very fast
Ease of Installation	Good - quick to install
Stability	Very stable
Value For Money	Excellent

Advantages:	soo many, cannot describe them in just few words
Disadvantages:	none apparent

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

As a proud owner of this state-of-the-art piece of harware I've decided to tell you a little bit more about this Mother-of-all-boards.

(let me share a little story first)

Being in love with computing technology can be (is!) sometimes pretty expensive hobby especially if you want to be constantly up-to-date with latest harware and yes, games. It was not a long time ago when I decided that my rig needs a little bit of extra power for certain purposes such as getting best out of Crysis and some photo editing and so on. (all right, I wanted the highest hardware score in Vista:)
So I prepared a wee coffin for my old Intel Q6600 and went to look for it's replacement. What caught my eye almost instantly was glorious masterpiece from Intel with codename Q9650. When I got home one day a little box was lying in the hallway of our house and so I went to open it and so I went to install it and so on only to find out that my old motherboard wouldn't support it. Its BIOS was un-upgradeable (plus few more other reasons) and so I went out again to look for new motherboard. This time I had to have it instantly (yes the very same day) but you wouldn't believe me how very few shops in London sell motherboards. I managed to find one and only ( Asus P5Q PRO ATX iP45) and there I was on my way home with smile totally excited to set it up and get it running. Well again to my dissapointment I realised that this motherboard just won't fit in my old Dell chassis because Dell's speciality is probably custom made hardware or at least motherboards which are fitted in the chassis basically upside down + few extra weird things which are here (in my humble opinion) to prevent you from upgrading their computers with other than Dell's hardware. I was a little bit sick for a while and again I went in the same shop to get suitable chassis and yes, even new power source (1050W). Luckily this time was everything fine and now, please, let me share my (good) experience with Asus P5Q PRO ATX iP45.

ASUS P5Q PRO ATX iP45 supports:
Intel processor family:
(socket LGA775)

Intel® Core™2 Extreme
Core™2 Quad
Core™2 Duo
Pentium® dual-core
Celeron® dual-core
Celeron®
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with FSB frequencies:

1600 / 1333 / 1066 / 800 MHz
(front side bus - connects processor to memory - higher number means faster performance)
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Up to 16 GB of RAM (not 4 as stated in previous review)
Type: DDR2 1200 / 1066 / 800 / 667 MHz
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6 x SATA connectors - A type of connector for devices such as hard disks, optical drives etc
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6 x USB 2.0 connectors - connectors for ie. webcam, printer, external hard drive....
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2 x PS/2 ports - ie for mouse or keyboard
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1 x IEEE 1394 connector - high performance serial bus (also called Firewire)
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Also includes: power fan connector, system panel connector, floppy disk drive con.,
chasiss fan connector, front panel audio connector, TPM connector (trusted module platform for hard drive security), CD/AUX in, Ethernet LAN port.
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Audio system: Realtec ALC 1200, 7.1 channels (basically supports 7 satelite speakers and 1 subwoofer)
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Expansion slots: (for extra device such as graphic card, sound card etc...)

2 x PCI Express 2.0 x16
3 x PCI Express x1
2 x PCI
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Networking feture: PCIe Gb LAN
LAN controller is AI NET2
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Standard dimensions of 305mm x 244mm
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Pretty impressive, isn't it? Well read on there's a lot more to know about this motherboard. Actually this is probably the best part:

I am certain that these are the top-class features you will be interrested in:

Support for PCIe 2.0 device for double speed and bandwith

ATI CrossFireX Technology for boosting image quality and rendering speed

Superb features enabling you to take full control in adjusting CPU and chassis fan speed, voltages, noise and many others.

I do advise you to read full product and its features description on manufacturers website. (It's really worth it)
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Certainly good buy for everyone!