ASUS P5Q Pro motherboard

When we looked at ASUS' P5K Pro earlier this year, we noted how simple it looked in stark contrast to many other boards, and the P5Q Pro has unsurprisingly taken a leaf out of its book, eschewing pure form over function well and truly.

Rare are the days when we find much to criticise about an ASUS motherboard layout these days, and once again the P5Q Pro gives us little to complain about.  If I had to nit-pick, I found the placement of the board's IDE connector so close to the ATX power connector a little annoying, but it really didn't cause much of an issue at all aside from a brief moment of cable rearrangement.  Apart from that, the layout is clean and simple, with everything easily accessible and plenty of room for two dual-slot graphics boards without getting in the way of any Serial ATA ports or the like.  Another job well done.

Taking a look at the P5Q Pro's backplate, we find both PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors, six USB 2.0 ports, a coaxial audio output together with six analogue outputs (with the lack of an optical output a bit of a downer for me I have to say), and a solitary FireWire and RJ-45 Gigabit network connector.  eSATA isn't present here, but can be added to this motherboard thanks to the bundled connector - It'll take up an expansion slot, so I'd rather see it directly on the backplate, and having to run an eSATA port via a cable to an internal SATA port isn't anything like as elegant, but it's better than nothing.

Cunningly disguised as a bumblebee, this motherboard can accept as much as four 4GB DDR2 modules clocked at speeds up to 1066MHz, allowing for a maximum of a massive 16GB.

Aside from two PCI and three PCI Express 1x slots, we find ourselves with two physical PCI Express 2.0 16x connectors for graphics boards.  These can either be configured as a single sixteen lane slot (with the secondary slot disabled), or for multi-GPU configurations as two eight lane slots.  Considering that every lane of a PCI Express 2.0 slot has double the bandwidth of a PCI Express 1.1 slot, this should be ample for any real-world situation.

The P5Q Pro has plenty to provide as far as Serial ATA connectivity goes, with eight ports available in total.  Six of these come from the ICH10R southbridge... 

While the other pair utilise Silicon Image's SiI5723CNU chip as a Serial ATA to eSATA adapter.

The board's eSATA capability is handled by Marvell's 88SE6111 chip.

FireWire support is provided by LSI's FW3227 chip.

Gigabit Ethernet support is provided by Atheros' AR8121 part.

Finally, Realtek's ALC1200 chip provides the P5Q Pro's eight-channel 'Azalia' HD audio capabilities.