ASUS P5B Intel LGA775 Platform - Intel P965 Review

Overall Rating

Excellent choice for a budget Intel Core 2 Duo over-clocked system. ASUS Crash Free BIOS. Easy to over-clock. Price / performace ratio + ASUS reliability.

Does a great job filling its targetted niche as a high performance Core 2 Duo motherboard designed for overclocking but light on extras.

Newer siblings in the ASUS P5B family have more features such as onboard WiFi and better support for RAID.

Had to Flash the BIOS to 0806 to fully recognize the CPU - painless process that is explained in the manual.

The Intel P965 chip set is picky about RAMM, particularly stock RAM voltage (likes 1.8v). I selected the DDR2 DIMMS for this build from the ASUS approved vendor list of products

This is a great choice for the budget-minded enthusiast or even a beginner putting together his or her first computer build who wants to try some over-clocking with the Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs. I was looking to upgrade from a three year old Pentium 4 AGP system. I needed to upgrade but the timing wasn't right to spend $1200 - $1500 on a new build so I was looking for performance at bargain prices

Having used ASUS motherboards with good results for several years, I began looking at ASUS motherboards that support the Core 2 Duo processors with room to upgrade in the future. I chose the P5B over the P5B -E and P5B-deluxe because of price and because the features that came with the newer, more expensive editions are not important to me.

I've only had one mild issue in that I had to flash to a newer BIOS in order for the board to fully recognize the e4300 CPU. The system booted up fine with the original BIOS and the system functioned, but I had a warning during the boot process that indicating that the CPU was not recognized. Updating the BIOS was easy and well explained in the motherboard manual so I was past that in just a few minutes. There is some Vcore droop between the BIOS Vcore setting and the actual readings. This didn't cause me any problems.

I gradually worked my way from the stock 1.8ghz (Bus Speed 200x9) to a high of 3.3ghz (Bus Speed 367x9) at a BIOS vcore setting of 1.50 and passed a 3 hour Orthos testing. My over clock goal was 3.0ghz so after seeing what could be done considering CPU heat, I backed off on the settings to my 3.0ghz goal and passed a 10.5 hour Orthos Blend test at a Vcore setting of 1.35 and with CPU temps under full load of ~55c using TAT and 44c using Core Temp with an aftermarket heat-sink / fan.

This motherboard performed very nicely and never gave me any issues while taking my over-clock to 83% before CPU heat under a heavy load began to reach the limits of my comfort level. Now, at 3.0ghz & a 66% over-clock I am running stable and cool, and all at a budget price.