ASUS P5Q Pro Turbo Motherboard Review :: Layout

Starting from the CPU socket we can tell that there's a lot of room for after-market CPU coolers as there's plenty of headroom around the socket for them. The Northbridge is cooled by a small heatsink with a heatpipe leading to the rear heatsink. There are MOSFET heatsinks on the right of the CPU Socket. Low profile solid capacitors line the top of the CPU socket and the right of the socket.

In terms of expansion the P5Q Pro Turbo has two PCI Express x16 slots. Slot one is colored blue and should be the position where you install the first video card. Slot two is black and is electrically wired to operate at x8 mode. When two ATI cards are installed they both operate in x8 mode. Also on the board are three PCI Express x1 slots and two PCI slots. Note that there are two slots between the two PCI Express x16 slots, meaning only one PCI Express x1 slot will be covered in Crossfire mode.

In terms of HDD storage the motherboard comes with eight SATA ports including one dedicated for external SATA. Five ports are controlled by the ICH10R Southbridge. Two are controlled by the Silicon Image Sil5723 chipset. These support EZ Backup and Super Speed functions. The external SATA port is controlled by a JMicron JMB361 which also controls the Ultra DMA port. EZ Backup allows one HDD to back up the other HDD automatically. Super Speed allows two HDDs to access data simultaneously.

The 24-pin power connector is on the bottom center of the board which is the normal position for the 24-pin power connector. The 8-pin power connector is on the right edge of the board meaning easy access from the PSU to it is ensured. Moving to the left edge of the board the FP IO is located. Next to the FP are three USB 2.0 headers. To the left of that is the IEEE1394 header. The CLRTC jumper and the chassis jumper are next followed by a COM1, the CD, the SPDIF Out and the AAFP headers.

Onboard sound is provided by a VIA VT1708S 8-channel High Definition Audio CODEC. This CODEC supports 7.1+2 channel simultaneous output (Mult-streaming) with 4 Stereo DACs Output Pairs supporting 16/24-bit 48K/96K/192K/44.1K/88.2K sample rate. Two additional Stereo ADCs supporting 16/24-bit, 44.1K/48K/96K/192KHz sample bit. S/PDIF TX and RX are fully supported. The VT1708S supports jack-detection and ASUS Noise Filtering to offer excellent onboard sound capabilities to the board.

The Rear I/O on the board consists of a PS/2 Keyboard port, a PS/2 Mouse port, an Optical S/PDIF Out port, an External SATA port, an IEEE1394a Firewire port, a RJ45 jack for the onboard LAN, 6 USB 2.0/1.1 ports and jacks for the onboard audio. This brings the total USB 2.0 ports on the board to a possible 12 with the headers and the Firewire ports on the board to two with the additional header. ASUS really outfits their board with enough ports to please even the most USB heavy user. This will come in handy when connecting a lot of external devices to your PC.