Asus P5Q Deluxe

Good Review - I am very interested in this board for the storage capacity as I have run out of SATA port on my current media server. With my 2port PCI-E card installed I can have 9 hard drives and an optical drive in the same system - plus extra on the e-sata.

Point of note is that the Red sata ports are all on the P45 ICH10R southbridge (which is specc'ed at 6 max and has its own RAID configs). A Marvel controller provides the e-sata and IDE ports and finally a Silicon Image controller provides the additional 2 Orange sata ports. Therefore not all drives will be available in the same RAID set.

Also note the gigabit ethernet ports (one on PCI-E and one on bottlenecked PCI) are both Marvel controlled too - which is different to previous Asus boards I have used where one port was on the Intel southbridge.

I don't think the additional graphics port is totally useless - can't it be used by non-gaming multi-monitor freaks..?
If not then there is no reason a pci-e x1 card can't be used - especially if you want to space out your cards for better airflow....

Do you plan on re-testing the board once a better BIOS is available..?

Those screenshots show the guy with the amazing overclock was using a different motherboard - Asus P5Q Deluxe WIFI-AP edition - that supports DDR3 ram. Does this explain why he was able to take his FSB significantly higher than a DDR2 based board that proved not to be too flexible regarding memory settings?

Also, your review was apparently of the MSI P45 Platinum edition, not the more expensive Diamond, which (like the more expensive Asus board mentioned above) also features support for DDR3 ram.

I agree about the third PCI-Express slot. It's less than useless if it means the 16 lanes result in even less bandwidth going to the main GPU. If you could maybe run each slot with independent lane assignment then fine, perhaps a very small minority would find it useful.

Is it true the MSI board still offers the best overall performance and reliability? I hope so, as I've ordered one in preference to the ASUS models since they appear to be extremely finicky and more than a little troublesome to operate. Oh lastly, a lot of people still use XP for gaming systems and the use of a floppy disk drive to load SATA/RAID drivers during Windows installation is essential. It's the reason I'm having to change my motherboard as the damn header appears to be missing a pin so no attached floppy drive is recognised. I'll know for sure if that's the cause when the new board arrives.

Cheers for the reviews. Perhaps, akin to the power supply round up and technical explanation into their operation, something could be done to explain the ins and outs of motherboards more thoroughly? Maybe not though, on second thoughts as they have enough features already I guess. Such a wide range of choice though - it's definitely a headache choosing one that's for sure.