ASUS P5B Deluxe LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard

Pros: I bought this board in February of 2007. It is still alive and kicking. Only issue I have had over almost 5 years of ownership is that a few of the SATA ports have stopped recognizing anything plugged into them. Not a huge deal though as right now I only have one HDD and one DVD drive installed anyways. It has been a trooper and an absolute champ these past (almost) 5 years. I can honestly say I made an excellent choice when I bought this board.

Cons: I guess the SATA ports that don't work is a con, but with the board as old as it is and the fact I'm using 2 of the 6 I don't really care.

Other Thoughts: I am still running this in my PC as unfortunately I cannot afford to build myself a new PC. I am actually looking at getting the LGA775 Wolfdale Dual Core on sale today as I am having issues with my processor being old as well and starting to give me headaches.

Pros: Excellent Motherboard. Builded my computer back in 2007 and it is still working solid without any problems.

Cons: None. If you have sound card problems just update the drivers to the latest one.

Other Thoughts: None

Pros: It was a motherboard with adequate features and a wide amount of leeway for peripherals.

Cons: Onboard sound is SoundMax. There was a terrible crackling noise during sound playback. Resolved with a SoundBlaster Audigy.

After a year, USB external HDDs started to throw errors. Thought they were the drive. Eventually computer stopped recognizing USB HDDs altogether. Reformatting did not resolve. Updating Windows did not resolve. Contacted ASUS Support and received no help at all. Mouse has started to give out randomly as well. The problem is spreading!

Other Thoughts: It worked fine for a year with the only downside being SoundMax. Randomly the USBs gave out and stopped recognizing devices. Avoid this board like the plague! Because of it, I have to look into a new motherboard.

I have never had good luck with ASUS but this board didn't come DoA so I considered myself lucky. Unfortunately my optimism fell short due to the aforementioned USB issues.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear Valued Customer,

We are sorry for this inconvenience. Please contact our Technical Support Department at http://vip.asus.com/eservice/techserv.aspx and reference case number "NE289710" so that we may get more details about your system configuration and assist you in resolving these issues you are experiencing.

Best Regards,

ASUS Support Team

Pros: bios is easy to work with. nice setup, seems durable. good instructions.

Cons: onboard sound sucks.

Other Thoughts: get a soundcard, the onboard sound that comes with this mobo is horrible. if you get lost trying to plug something in or trying to figure out beep codes read the instruction book.

Pros: Worked great for about a year. Used a C2Duo 6600, 2GB DDR800, ATI 1950XT. SB XFI. Played movies fine (main use) and gamed great (secondary) Tons of features.

Cons: After about a year, the USB ports all died. In windows XP they would just constantly 'pop' with errors in windows, complaining about unknown devices, unplug errors, and the popping windows sound would go off every 3-5 seconds. No devices worked using the ports, had to disable them in bios. In linux, the USB ports spewed all sorts of errors on boot, and likewise nothing could be used on USB.

Other Thoughts: Other than the apparent hardware failure after a year of use (almost always on basically as a HTPC) the board was great. Had some issues though installing windows. It would take 3-5 install attempts to install windows XP. Same problem with roommate's similar Asus P5b line board (not a deluxe). Windows instal would blue screen and windows boots would occasionally fail after loading the SATA driver. Never figured it out, replaced his board, and I stopped using windows altogether.

Pros: When it worked, it worked well.

Cons: Intermittent failure of certain SATA ports, causing RAID-0 write failures and lockups, system corruption.

Other Thoughts: Operated nominally with ~20% system overclock (core, FSB, RAM timings, and RAID-0) for about a year and a half but SATA port failures began to cause periodic RAID errors. Failure frequency was related to which port was used. System was usually recoverable, but after my third OS reinstall for the bad failures, I have decided to replace the board with DFI BloodIron P35-T2RL.

Pros: Excellent for OC'ing. Had board for almost 2 years, and never had a major malfunction.

Cons: ASUS BIOS update program over internet sucks.

Other Thoughts: My system This MOBO
Intel E6700 OC'ed to 3.0 GHz
2 GIG Kingston 333 soon to be PC6400
Win XP SP 2
Dual ATI X1650 Pro Cards

Pros: I have been running a Presler extreme(dual pentuimD) at 4.0ghz and 85°C for 18 months 24/7 on this mobo with flawless reliability. excellent installation. Love the eSata. The usb/jumpdrive firmware flash support works perfect. Overclocking rules!

Cons: SoundMax sucks. Terrible in-game microphone support. Took me several hours to get mic to work with vent/wow/cs:s/tf2 correctly. I have to plug in my headset mic in the rear and the headphones in the front; luckily my headset can split that far.

Other Thoughts: I use this board tot ts maximum potential and I have been very satisfied with it. Less the sound software it functions exactly the way it should and going above and beyond. The overclocking is very comprehensive. My suggestion is for ASUS to drop soundmax for another. I will buy another ASUS when Nehalem debuts an extreme edition, I just hope soundmax is better then.

Pros: Stable, easy to use in all respects. I went for the Deluxe (not the regular or the Wi-Fi AP) because I didn't want the fan - moving parts - or the wireless connection.

The HD Audio works just fine for me. I use a pair of Sennheiser HD-80 headphones; I've heard that I could get better sound if I invested in a 'real' soundcard, but these cans pick up noise from the computer when I up the volume past a point. Heck, music sounds different from app to app anyways, and HD Audio is a great upgrade past AC-97.

Cons: BIOS selected RAM timings higher than the modules I used specified; price hasn't seemed to fall since its introduction.

It did take me a while to find the right SATA port when I was installing the drive, however; there are two groups of SATA plugins and I didn't find the right port for a while (should be at the bottom right of the red group, but it's been a while since I looked)

Other Thoughts: The flimsy CPU connector had me sweating, but that's a problem of the specification and the HS/F, anyhow.

Pros: Nice Surround Sound and HD Sound On-Board.
Useful eSata Port.
6 Sata Ports inside.

STABLE

Cons: Drivers come for XP only, so if you get vista, you have to find the software manually and configure it manually as well, which isn't so stable. Can't use OC software without Windows XP.

As technology keeps evolving and needs growing bigger, I find myself in need of SLI support. Can't install two Graphics cards in PCI-E (It would be one 16x and one 4x).*

*Not really a big con as you know what you're getting; but I still would have like to have two PCI-E Slots.

Other Thoughts: Nice Stable board, haven't gotten mad at it's other than driver install on new OS.

For some reason, it clearly specify in the board manual that you can't install more than 2GB in 800mhz without it down clocking to 667. This isn't true, I have 6gb running at 800mhz without issues.