After seeing the performance of the Asus P5B deluxe compared to the P5W it seemed an obvious choice for some serious FSB/overclocking. The 965 chipset shod boards currently seem to pull much higher FSB's than their 975 chipset counterparts (although this might change soon with Abit's latest Max series board) which is ideal for some high speed running. The only downfall of this is that to reach these heady speeds, above 400 FSB the chipset internal latency is increased which leads to a slight performance hit compared to 975 boards. The P5B Deluxe has a large amount of extra and useless crap which bumps up the price. Essentially the P5B vanilla is the same mobo with a few bits lopped off and a few less bios options. This isn't really an issue as these options will (hopefully) be re-added via a bios update, or via vmods. Board specs - Intel LGA775 Platform - Intel® Core™2 Extreme / Core™2 Duo Ready - Intel® Pentium® Extreme / Pentium® D / Pentium® 4 / Celeron® D Ready - 1066/800/ 533 MHz - Dual-channel DDR2 800/667/533 - 1x PCI Express x16 - 6x SATA 3Gb/s - RTL8111B PCI-E Gb LAN - 8-channel HD Audio - AI NOS™ / AI Gear / AI Nap First thoughts The board is no frills! Single 16* PCI-E slot along with 3 PCI-E 1* thats enough for most if you don't plan on running Crossfire/SLI - the latter of which isnt official supported anyway plus the chipset itself only offers 16* and 4* slots. The top of the 3 PCI slots would be rendered useless by any sort of double slot gfx cooling, however the remaining 2 wouldn't be a problem. The only slight issue is a cap sat at the end of the bottom PCI slot, which prevents my PCI graphics card fitting. Not sure if this is the same with the P5B deluxe - anyone confirm this? As with the 975 chipsets, theres a lot of clutter around the CPU socket, makes insulation for sub-ambient cooling a pain but for most thats not really an issue. Board layout is good, everythings easily accesible and where you'd expect to see it. The board runs the ICH8 version of intels southbridge, compared to the ICH8R found on the deluxe. This provides 5 Intel SATA 2 ports along with an external eSATA and 1 IDE channel the board also supports RAID 0, 1 an JBoD. There's also a distinct lack of USB ports on this mobo. Currently have 6 filled on my SLI-D and there's a total of 4 onboard + 2 via breakout panel available on the P5B. Again though as this is a budget mobo you wouldn't expect to have a huge number. The P5B supports 8 channel HD audio and has a optical and co-axial line out outputs. Setting up Setup is pretty standard really, locations of ATX and ATX 12v are towards the edge of the board, and there's no extra molex connection to worry about. The board booted fine first time with E6600 Conroe and 2 gb GSkill HZ 6400. Bios options were somewhat limited with the stock bios, flashing to the latest official (0509) provided a few more however and improved overclocking dramatically. Windows installed quickly and without bother, running both the IDE and HDD off the same channel didnt prove to be an issue. Now onto the fun stuff - overclocking "Fun Stuff" System setup - E6600 Conroe "L628" Asus P5B "vanilla" w/ bios 0509 2GB GSkill HZ 6400 - 4,4,4,12 @ 400 fsb. Uses D9 GMH chips DD TDX waterblock on CPU OCZ 520w Powerstream 120mm fan over NB As noted initially this board was purchased due to its bigger brothers overclocking ability. Wasn't really sure when it arrived how well it would actually compare to the Deluxe on the overclocking front. The stock bios had fairly modest options, with the max FSB available being 450 mhz. Flashing to the 0509 bios however increased this limit to 650mhz, more than enough! Vdimm is still limited to 2.1v, not a huge problem for most if you're running up to ~ 430 fsb as even voltage hungry D9 based modules should hit this speed at 4,4,4,x timings. Anything tighter than this and you'll probably run into problems. Overclocking with the board got off to a shaky start. Couldn't make it into windows at 350 fsb with a vcore of 1.5 set. Dropping the multiplier allowed me into windows so it looked like a crap clocking Conroe.. Bugger After speaking to Persivore, we found some vCore read points on the board, checking with a meter showed the CPU was actually running at ~ 1.35v with 1.5 set in bios. Running the max the board allows (1.7) gives a real vcore of ~ 1.575. Setting this allowed booting to windows all the way up to 442 fsb. Here the limit of the CPU was reached yet again with this voltage, vmods are needed for sure! The northbridge on the P5B gets VERY hot indeed, it required extra cooling from a 120mm fan to keep temps down to acceptable levels. Might well get away without a fan using air cooling as there's a little air circulation from the CPU cooler. After a few hours playing, the system would pass Pi 1m @ 440*9 - 3960mhz on 1.574v. Ram running 1:1 @ 4,4,3,6 on 2.1v. This isn't hugely stable as Cinebench fails to run, probably due to one of the cores being slightly weaker than the other. Need to do some in-depth testing to confirm this however. Carried out 3 windows installs without a hitch at 400*9 (3.6 ghz) with 1.574 vCore so that looks to be a fairly stable speed. Again further testing required there. Really impressed with the overclockability of this mobo so far. It's managed 440 fsb + out of the box without mods. It seems a LOT easier to setup than the gigabyte DS3 which falls into the same price bracket. There were no issues with booting and the board seemed to respond nicely when overclocked too far. Simple press of insert on boot and bios defaults loaded allowing things to be backed off as required. Wider voltage ranges would be nice, 2.1v limits this ram somewhat, with closer to 2.5 (as offered by the Deluxe version) the ram runs a lot further. Again the lack of vcore was also an issue, with 1.6+ 4ghz shouldnt be an issue. The board doesnt offer vMCH in bios, which can also help with FSB scaling - though with the board reaching 440 mhz (and probably higher with a lower CPU multi) it's not a massive issue. For a cheap, cheerful overclocking board this is certainly a great way to go. The only downside is the lack of features the board offers. If you're after a cheap board and want to overclock a little then the P5B is a great way to go however. Will post a full set of results from various benchies later on today. For now, here's a Pi 1m run and some shots of the mobo itself!
That's bloody impressive, and makes me wish I hadn't just taken delivery of the Deluxe WiFi yesterday!
got 4 of them in some new workstations I built for work...solid as ever, but didnt expect less from asus...knowing that it clocks ok, is just a bonus
