Intel 965/975 mainboards for Core 2 Duo tested

ASUS P5B Deluxe Wifi-AP Edition

The P965 might be positioned by Intel as mid range solution, but ASUS has made the P5B Deluxe one of the most complete motherboards loaded with extras. The board uses passive cooling for the chipsets, the northbridge heatsink is connected with heatpipes to another heatsink on the voltage stabilisors, that in its turn catches airflow from the CPU fan. An additional small fan is supplied for users that overclock or use watercooling in their systems. The board has two PCI-Express graphics slots, however the lower slot can only utize 4 lanes max. On the board we find three conventional PCI slots and an additional PCI-Express x1 slot. The south bridge used is the ICH8R, but a JMicron JMB363 chip is placed on the board for a PATA connector and another two SATA connectors, of which one is used as an external SATA connection. The P5B Deluxe sports two Gigabit network connections, one on PCI-Express, the second on a standard PCI port. Unique is the supplied WLAN connector placed on a small PCB on the board, the antenne is found in the box. As we are used from ASUS the P5B sports extensive overclocking features, the CPU voltage, memory voltage, chipset voltage and PCI-Express voltage can all be adjusted and in the BIOS you can set specific profiles for overclocking. For users with a case windows ASUS has placed LED's under the board for additional eye candy. Additional extras in the box are an array-microphone and the Q-connector, a handy tool that takes all the case connections and can be placed on the motherboard in stead of loose connections. It is not a big surprise that the price of this board is slightly higher than that of other 965 boards, but we think that its price is not over the top for what you get.

Pro: Integrated WLAN, external SATA, Q-connector and lots of overclocking features
Cons: We couldn't really find any
Conclusion: A loaded P965 motherboard, that will please both hardware enthousiasts as well as overclockers.