Anyway, I'm a sucker for a black PCB, so I went for the Asus P5Q3 Deluxe. I got chance to install it this week, so here are some pictures I took, along with my impressions:
(click to enlarge photos)
Ooh, look at the shininess
The instructions on one side, and the a box for the accessories.
I'd already had this out of the box and bag once, so the stickers off of the motherboard are stuck on the outside of the bag.
The accessories box, there's a lot of stuff in here.
And here is all the stuff laid out, there's a nifty additional fan for the northbridge, and the IO shield caught my eye...
Instead of being just a thin bit of metal with stupid, pointy, spiky bits on it, to keep the motherboard in the right place (the ones that always seem to hinder rather than help), the IO shield is covered in a spongy material which is in turn covered in a metallic fabric. This is so much better and easier to install!
And here is the whole motherboard layout
A random shot, thought it looked nice >_>
The back I/O connectors, they (and I) love that spongy back panel thing
A CPU area shot
And this chip is the fancypants epressgate
And this chip is the fancypants epressgate, from a different angle!
The back of the board, with the stackcool things
Awww, look at the little caps!
After faffing about taking pictures, it took much longer than it should, but here is the final install:
You know what, black is a very sexy colour.
I've not had chance to play around with overclocking the board yet, but I'm excited to see how far I can push my E8400. I hear it is a pain overclocking with DDR3 as there are so many more settings to tweak. I have however enabled the XMP profile for the RAM and it set itself up to run 1800Mhz like a dream, so the FSB is at 450Mhz and everything else is set as it needs to be.
The rest of the system specs are as follows:
- Asus P5Q3 Deluxe Wifi@n
- E8400 @ 3.15Ghz (450FSB)
- 2GB GSkill 1800Mhz 7-7-7-18
- ATI Sapphire HD4850 512MB
- WD6400AAKS x2 in RAID0
- Lian Li Maxima 850W PSU
- Thermaltake Spedo Case
Ironically, although this rig is specced much higher than my P180 rig, I find myself using my P180 system the most. Its probably got something to do with all my files being on my P180 rig and I don't get on with moving them all over, so the above rig is mostly acting just as a gaming system!
When I find a case that I like better than my P180 I might just move it all across and use the 'gaming' rig full time.
Dan
ive actually found ocing ddr3 to be easier in terms of screwing with teh memory because you know you can always drop it down to 1:1 nomatter how high your fsb goes 
but since its a p45, your going to be screwing with it a while: 
it got me looking for a pencil mod
