Legit Reviews

So I came into possession of some rather nice DDR3 (2GB GSkill 1800Mhz at CL7-7-7-18 timings), and couldn't pass them up, so decided to buy a board for them. I'm glad I stayed somewhat in touch with what's going on in the mobo world (It's so easy to ignore it all when you know you don't need to buy any!) as there is so much going on out there it would have hurt my head to wade through it all from scratch.

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

very nice build... Lots of upgrades to motherboards in the past 2 years... from the shielded backplates to the solid-state caps the build quality of boards is better than ever.

mine didnt come with a spongy back plate 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: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/05/12 ... el-s-p45/1 but i got a p45 mobo to so well be in it together those fans on the ram coolers get there power from the ram slots? btw: lucky bastard yours has holes cut in it already mine are cooler though

martini161 wrote:mine didnt come with a spongy back plate 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: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/05/12 ... el-s-p45/1 but i got a p45 mobo to so well be in it together those fans on the ram coolers get there power from the ram slots? btw: lucky bastard yours has holes cut in it already mine are cooler though

Man, I am going to have to do some reading up then as I have no idea what any of those settings do that they say you will need to know.

You didn't get a pretty Asus board is why your backplate hasn't got sponge

The fans have molex connectors on them to power them:



But the cables are untidy, the fans are loud and they are orientated so that they fight against the CPU fan for moving air (and I can't swap them round because the graphics card is in the way). So i took the fan things off and have left them as passive spirally things, which seems to work great.

Holes cut in and pre-painted black, It's actually a very feature rich case, and doesn't look too bad to boot.

Dan

yeah they probably get more ciculation like that anyways because im sure the nocturna fan was overpowering those pathetic looking thermaltake things anyway. what kinda vdrop you seeing? i rember mine had something like .08 volts when i was using it it got me looking for a pencil mod

Yeah, first time I saw that spongy backplate was a couple of weeks ago when I helped a buddy with a build - Asus P5N-D board. Good stuff, nice looking rig.

Very nice looking setup! I ALWAYS hated those stupid tab things on the backplates... Why the pad hasn't been a standard feature is beyond me.

As usual you get some points for keeping it clean!

Just checked vdroop with a DMM and with the E8400 (at stock 3Ghz) I get 0.032v of droop.

CPUz was reading consistently 0.026v below what the DMM read, and I'm not sure if there was a BIOS voltage discrepancy as the BIOS voltage was on auto for the CPU. Might check it again some time with the voltages manually set.

stopthekilling77 wrote:As usual you get some points for keeping it clean!

It's the obsessive compulsiveness kicking into overdrive that makes me do that tidy

Dan