Review Conclusion of ASUS P5Q-E Intel P45 Mainboard review
Bluetooth 7 Jun 2008

Conclusion

ASUS P5Q-E is the mid range board for most end users would go for. This is because it is more affordable and has the best price/performance ratio compared to the more expensive RoG boards from the same brand maker ASUS. Although it doesn't come with all the bell and whistles you see on the RoG boards, it does have pretty advance feature set that not even myself uses it.  

Performance wise, this board wins some and lose some when compared to the boards when paired up with 2GB of DDR3-1066 modules. We observed that the performance obtained in 3Dmark isn't representative of the 'real world' benchmarks. One thing is for sure though, the P45 chipset runs cooler than the nVIDIA variants we have tested before.

In terms of overclocking, the BIOS comes pretty complete with large range of FSB and voltage options available. You can see the BIOS options here. In our o/c test, we used a E6550 processor that clocks at 7x333 and o/c it by lowering the multiplier to 6x and increase the cpu clk to 560MHz x 6. That is with just a bump of the voltages and settings.

To conserve energy, you can enable EPU. Basically, EPU works very similarly to those speed step on your notebooks. For EPU, according to the manual, it lowers the clk speed of your processor and not by decreasing the power phase. That is quite different from what other does.

In conclusion, ASUS P5Q-E overclocks well, has all the necessary features that most users would probably use. The board also supports CrossFire if you intend to boost up graphics speeds with 2 pieces of HD 4850 or 4870. This board is able to handle it well.

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