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The Board

By now, we've gotten rather used to the design the P5B Deluxe is sporting. We've seen this design on most of ASUS' recent motherboards, right down to the placement of components and colour scheme. Generally speaking, I've grown to like the design, as it relatively accessible and professional-looking. As can be expected, ASUS has also implemented their trademark passive cooling solution, with heat sinks over the CPU VRMs and north bridge, connected together via a heat pipe.

While things seem to be just dandy, I would have preferred if the last two expansion slots were swapped around. Right now, a double-slot video card in the second PCI-Express x16 slot obstructs the PCI-Express x1 slot. Sooner or later, hardware for these PCI-E x1 slots is bound to become a commodity, while legacy PCI hardware will begin dying a slow death. As it is now, two dual-slot video cards in both PCI-E x16 slots leaves you with two legacy PCI slots available. With my preferred change, you would have one PCI and one PCI-E x1 slot in the same situation.

With that out of the way, let's take some closer looks at what the P5B Deluxe has to offer us.

First off, we have a whopping 8 SATA ports. Six of those are provided by the Intel ICH8R south bridge, while a JMicron JMB363 controller adds an additional internal port, as well as one eSATA port. Only one IDE port, as per the ICH8R, graces the board -- but we knew IDE's death was fast-approaching. The typical goodies that you'd expect from a deluxe/premium motherboard are all present -- dual Gigabit Ethernet, two Firewire ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, and high-definition audio via analog, digital coaxial, and digital S/PDIF all enjoy a place of residence on the P5B Deluxe.

Now things are going to get interesting. To my knowledge, this is the first motherboard I've reviewed that advertises support for up to 8 GB of RAM. With its four DDR2 memory slots, and officially supporting up to DDR2-800, the P5B Deluxe and its chipset are designed to take 2 GB modules. Currently these are rather price-prohibitive, but this is great news for anyone with distant future-proofing in mind. Along with its 1066 MHz FSB support, ASUS is clearly hoping that the P5B Deluxe won't go out of style too quickly. That might be a little difficult to achieve, however, with the impending refresh of Intel's Core 2 desktop line due sometime next year, which will feature a new bus (and socket) design.

With its sights clearly set on home-theatre/multimedia implementations, the P5B Deluxe also ships with an 802.11g wireless card installed right alongside its rear I/O panel (you can see the antenna connector on the far right in the above photo), riding off two USB 2.0 port headers. ASUS provides an external antenna/stand unit for use with the card, though users in a walled-in location may want to buy something with better reception, as the small antenna provided might not cut it. This leads us into the other bundled accessories ...

The Bundle

ASUS' "tried and true" Deluxe-series bundle remains the same. If you've read Page 2 of our M2N32-SLI review, then you have an exact view of the P5B Deluxe's bundle. However, we'll run through the list quickly anyway.

The staples of any motherboard bundle are the manuals, driver CDs, IDE/floppy cables, and rear I/O shield cover -- check, check, check, and check. Next up, we've got the USB 2.0 and Firewire rear I/O brackets. In order to conserve space, it'd be nicer if ASUS combined the functionality of both into one -- my now-archaic MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum did this very thing.

Next up are the six SATA cables and three SATA power adapters with two plugs each. For the extra money that you shell out for a "Deluxe" edition board, it's pretty much expected that you get a load of various cables, so I'm glad to see that ASUS has not disappointed here. Lastly, we have a fan module that is designed to clip on to the heat sink mounted over top of the VRM modules. ASUS recommends that this module not be used with an active CPU cooler, as it will interfere with the air flow inside a case -- but heck, most of you will probably clip it on anyway.

An accessory that somehow managed to sneak out of the photoshoot is SoundMAX Superbeam Array Microphone, which we discussed somewhat in-depth in our M2N32-SLI review. Rest assured, it did in fact come bundled with the P5B Deluxe.

To sum it all up, there's nothing terribly new about the P5B Deluxe and its feature set when compared to previous ASUS "Deluxe" motherboards, but the 8 GB of RAM support, 8 SATA ports, and future-proofed CPU compatibility are extremely nice touches that help to propel the P5B Deluxe into that ultra-enthusiast camp. Next stop ... the BIOS.