ASUS that comes to my mind is the motherboard creators of all time, some people might agree with me, with the better range of motherboards, media and to the high-end users and also the inclusion of the high-end market is the introduction of the republic of gamers series, to where I don’t know were we register, but is a great proposal to have input gamers want and need. Other than in the motherboards, they also create great video cards and other forms of electronic goods.
The P5Q3 motherboard
ASUS had just release the new P45 series from Intel, for the media centres it is the P5Q3 Deluxe, WIFI included. To give a little interesting on the board is the onboard Linux Os system built in the board, for easy access to the internet like to Skype and also to email, for those people like my grand-mother who don’t have time installing windows, to type her last wills on the internet. With the new P45 Intel chipset can now have a good support on the new crossfireX with a quad crossfire limit, to add two new 4870X2’s for the ultimate gaming performance for Intel, rather than buying the expensive X series Intel motherboards.
With the newer Southbridge chip the ICH10R that, only controls only six SATA ports, and still support the older PATA connectors, but ASUS added a marvel chip that added two SATA connectors for RAID 0,1 arrays with its own system to set it up, for a much easy add-on from the standard Intel based matrix RAID system. A more new strive from ASUS is the 16-phase choke chips near the CPU from the form factor of the Gigabytes 12 phase one, is a new move from ASUS.
A few technical specs on the ASUS, CPU support with a FSB 1600/1333/1066/800, with DDR3 memory with 1200/1333/800 MHz frequency, eight SATA connectors and one eSATA connector one PATA connector and three PCIe with two with native PCIe2.0 and support with crossfireX, two PCI 1x and two peripheral PCI connectors.
The test
As the improvement on the P45 series of ASUS, with the new P5Q3 which is the high-end media board, really played well with the core 2 Duo E8500 with a reasonable time on video and media encoding, and also on the memory bandwidth and latency with the Corsair dominator XM3. for the gaming sector there is a mix, on the DX10 games, I added with the 3870 X2 in the P5Q3, really pushed the Quake wars and supreme commander game in the high 50’s fps while the Crysis is just staying 30 to 40fps in high and with Anti-initialising at 8x in 1024×796.
Stability and the result
The stability results are not really convincing, with the 16-phase choke would have helped the stability, but not that much as I would evet wish to do; able to over-clock an E7200 to about 3.6 GHz in an EOM fan before we have stability problems or install in a performance fan or water-cooling rig before we have any other heat-prgressive incidents, overall the ASUS P5Q3 series is a much better option to the extreme boards from ASUS.
salam