ASUS P5B Premium Vista Edition Review @ Hardwarezone
Hardwarezone reviews the ASUS P5B Premium Vista Edition motherboard which uses the Intel P965 chipset. It comes with the ASAP module which is an extra flash storage to use in many situations, including the Windows Vista ReadyBoost feature. Also delivered with the motherboard is the external ASUS ScreenDUO display that can show information like media play lists or RSS feeds. However, it is incompatible with Windows Vista SideShow at the moment. Let’s hope that ASUS can fix this issue in the near future. Hardwarezone gives a final score of 4 out of 5 along with the ‘Most Overclockable Product Award’ and writes in the conclusion:
Performance-wise, the board pumps out some decent scores, though a few benchmarks show some slightly diminished numbers compared to the P5B Deluxe. It makes up for it however, with its incredible overclockability. 515MHz FSB is the highest overclock we’ve achieved for any Intel P965 motherboard with stock cooling, matching the performance of the Commando. The only other board to have passed the 500MHz mark with an Intel Core 2 Duo in our lab is the nForce 680i SLI based Striker Extreme - all ASUS motherboards. Without doubt, the P5B Premium Vista Edition is one of the best Intel P965 boards from ASUS.
Here’s the kicker. The ASUS P5B Premium Vista Edition retails for around US$270, a pretty hefty price to pay for an Intel P965 board today. The P5B Deluxe WiFi-AP can be found for less than US$200 today and we’ve even spotted the ASUS P5N32-E SLI, an nForce 680i SLI board for US$20 less. Considering how cheap flash memory is these days - a generic 512MB USB 2.0 flash drive costs about US$10 - you are really paying for the ScreenDUO feature. We would have initially awarded the ASUS P5B Premium Vista Edition with a 4.5 Star award, but with ScreenDUO not working as intended and being rather restrictive, we deducted another 0.5 Stars.
Read the full review of the ASUS P5B Premium Vista Edition motherboard here.