ASUS P5Q Deluxe Review :: ASUS P5Q Deluxe Layout

ASUS generally does a great job with the layout of their motherboards and the P5Q Deluxe is not an exception to this rule. The CPU area is surrounded on two sides by capacitors but is pretty clear of obstructions, allowing for the installation of after-market cooling solutions. There is a heatpipe assembly that flows out from the EPU out to the P45 chipset to a heatsink on the rear of the board. This surrounds the CPU area on two sides.

CPU Area

Chipset Cooling

EPU

ASUS has eight SATA ports on the board, which is more than the standard of six on the Intel P45 chipset. Four of the SATA ports are at a right angle, meaning that cabling is easily accomplished on the board by using the right angled SATA cables. Two SATA ports are controlled by the Silicon Image Sil5723 controller. There is also a Marvell 88SE6121 controller on the board to support the External SAATA Port and the UltraDMA 133/100/66 PATA port. ASUS has really gone the extra mile with the storage.

Back PCB

Stack Cool 2

SATA Ports

Port 0,1

Expansion options on the board are varied with two PCI Express x16 Generation 2.0 slots on the board. When two ATI cards are installed on the board each slot operates at x8 speed, meaning that a maximum of 4GB/second bandwidth is provided to each video card. A third PCI Express slot is also on the board. This slot has a maximum x4 link (electrically wired). Two PCI Express x1 slots allow the use of PCI Express cards like Gigabit LAN cards or other expansion devices. There are also two PCI slots for legacy expansion.

Expansion

PCI-E x16

Capacitors

Winbond

ADI provides the onboard audio CODEC in the form of the ADI AD2000B 8-channel High Defini0tion Audio CODEC. This CODEC offers support for 7.1 audio and 2 channel audio output simultaneously via Multi-Streaming. The ADI 2000B has all of the capabilities of the Creative X-Fi cards including the ability to use EAX 4.0 HD special effects. The AD2000B supports Jack Detection, Multi-Streaming and Front Panel Jack Retasking.

Reset

24-Pin

LSI

Marvell PHY

The board supports up to 10 USB 2.0 ports (4 ports via bracket and 6 ports on the rear panel I/O. The P45 chipset supports up to 12 USB devices but ten is enough for even the most hardcore enthusiast. Two IEEE-1394a Firewire ports are supported as well, with one on a bracket and the second on the rear I/O panel. The ASUS P5Q Deluxe has Dual Gigabit LAN controllers controlled by Marvell 88E8056/88E8001 PHYs. The rear I/O offers 1 PS/2 keyboard/Mouse combo port, 1 Optical and 1 Coaxial S/PDIF Output port, 1 External SATA port, 1 IEEE1394a port, 2 RJ45 jacks for the onboard LAN, 6 USB 2.0/1.1 ports and 8-channel Audio I/O ports.

USB/FW

8-Pin

ICS

I/O