ASUS P5Q PRO P45 Motherboard Review

Heat & Acoustical Testing

This section is going to be short and sweet since the P5Q PRO does not have a fan, thus has no acoustical footprint.

Now since this motherboard is a mainstream model, it unsurprisingly does not come with temperature sensors for the northbridge and southbridge. Therefore, we had to rely on our trusty digital thermometer for all temperature measurements. The FSB was set to 400Mhz, the voltages to AUTO (see above chart for exact figures), and then OCCT was run for two hours. The temperatures were recorded at twenty minute intervals throughout the two hour test.


With an aforementioned 400Mhz FSB, the northbridge cooler reached 45°C/113.0°F and the southbridge cooler measured a toasty 47°C/116.6°F. Both of these temperatures are at the upper-limit of what we would consider desirable, but they are not unsafe. Interestingly, the heatsink-cooled MOSFETs actually ran 2°C hotter (41 °C vs. 39°C ) than the 'naked' ones. We can possibly attribute this to the fact that the northbridge and MOSFET heatsinks are linked by a heat pipe, and therefore heat output from one component will affect the other.

Now because our side-mounted 120MM "case" fan was disabled during this testing, and there was no airflow to speak of, all these figures essentially represent a worst-case scenario. In a regular case with one or two 120MM fans, temperatures should improve somewhat. Having said that, we definitely recommend that you provide proper cooling to all heatsinks if you plan on doing any serious overclocking with the P5Q PRO.


Long-term Impression

Overall, the long-term impression of the ASUS P5Q PRO is quite favourable. The motherboard ran flawlessly throughout our veritable gauntlet of tests. We never experienced any stability concerns or strange BSODs…although we did cause a few with our over-ambitious overclocking attempts. We did experience an issue when the motherboard attempted to recover from an unsuccessful overclock that refused to POST, it simply sat there idling with the monitor on standy.

As a result, we had always to turn off the power supply for a split second in order to reset to the safe defaults that would allow us back into the BIOS. We are not entirely sure why C.P.R.(CPU Parameter Recall) is failing to automatically reset the BIOS once we hit the reset button, but it’s an issue that affects a few ASUS motherboards, like the Rampage Formula. This is a minor inconvenience though, and it is the only noteworthy issue that we encountered.