Asus P5Q Deluxe

Verdict: One of the best overclocking motherboards to date.

After the disappointment of the Asus Maximus II Formula, it would be fair to say that we didn't expect a great deal from an Asus motherboard based on the Intel P45 chipset.

However, unlike the Maximus II Formula, which appears to have been designed for magpies with a fascination for flashy gadgets, the P5Q Deluxe is much more straightforward. This isn't to say the P5Q Deluxe lacks extras - for example, the Northbridge, Southbridge and VRMs are cooled by a massive array of heatsinks and heatpipes that snake all the way across the PCB. Most of the S-ATA II and EIDE ports are mounted parallel with the PCB (making for neater cabling), while separate power and reset switches are integrated on the PCB.

What's more, even if you install two dual-slot PCI-E graphics cards, you can still use both PCI slots. The high-speed PCI-E slots are CrossFire-compatible but don't support SLI. The four DIMM sockets can support up to 16GB of DDR2.

At its default BIOS settings, the P5Q Deluxe was curiously slow in our Media Benchmarks, achieving the dubious honour of last place in the Labs test. However, in a strange turn of events, once our test CPU had been overclocked to its 3.66GHz air-cooled maximum, the P5Q Deluxe proved very fast, edging ahead of all the other mid-price LGA775 motherboards.

In addition to the well-cooled Northbridge, Southbridge and VRMs, the key to the P5Q Deluxe's success is its excellent BIOS. For example, you can precisely adjust the voltage of the CPU, RAM, Northbridge, CPU PLL, VTT and Southbridge, while EZ Flash 2 allows you to update the BIOS using a USB stick from within the BIOS, doing away with the need for a floppy drive or other bootable disk. After lowering the CPU multiplier from 8x to 6x, we successfully overclocked the FSB to 555MHz, the highest frequency we've achieved so far. A VTT of 1.9V, a CPU PLL of 2V, and 1.4V for the Northbridge and the Southbridge was required to make the P5Q Deluxe benchmark stably at this frequency.

Although the P5Q Deluxe is the first motherboard to speed past the previous overclocking champion, the P5K Premium WiFi-AP, the Biostar TPower I45 was just as overclockable and £15 cheaper. Still, paying just under £110 for a motherboard that can overclock to 555MHz is nothing to be sniffed at.