ASUS P5B Premium Vista Edition Motherboard Review

Conclusions

What can be said about a flawless product? Everything about this motherboard is great: great performance, great features and great overclocking.

If you are looking for a socket LGA775 motherboard with a truck loaded of features this is the motherboard you are looking for: support for DDR2-1066 memories, support for the forthcoming 1,333 MHz FSB (even though Intel P965 does not officially support it), two Gigabit Ethernet ports, eight USB 2.0 ports, two FireWire ports, eight SATA-300 ports including one eSATA, two PCI Express x16 slots, terrific overclocking capability, above-the-average performance and 7.1 really high-quality audio.

The on-board audio is really high quality and its 92 dB input signal-to-noise ratio will allow you to work professionally capturing and editing analog audio. And its 101 dB output SNR plus on-board optical and coaxial SPDIF connectors will make it easy for you to hook up your computer to your home theater receiver.

The overall quality of this motherboard is great, as all its capacitors are solid (aluminum) and the voltage regulator circuit uses ferrite coils instead of iron coils.

And there is, of course, the array mike, the remote control and the ScreenDuo LCD display, which allows you remotely control and manage your PC, and even see weather forecast or be alerted whenever a news is posted on your favorite website or a new e-mail arrives at your inbox. This display works as a secondary display for your PC. We were really impressed by the high image quality of the LCD display that comes with this motherboard.

The only drawbacks we found on this motherboard were the impossibility of playing videos on its LCD display, the speed of the second PCI Express slot, only x4, the absence of an option for locking and/or configuring the memory clock separately from the FSB clock and its name – as we mentioned, its name can lead people think that this motherboard is similar to the plain P5B or that it runs only on Vista. Everything else about this motherboard is great. Even its price – USD 250 – isn’t that expensive if you think about the number of extra features it has. It could me cheaper, of course. But everything in the world could be cheaper, right?