ASUS P5Q PRO P45 Motherboard Review

Bios Rundown

The best designed, most feature-rich motherboard can easily be rendered mediocre by a subpar BIOS. Thankfully, ASUS has outfitted the P5Q PRO with an intuitive, tweaker-friendly BIOS. Now let’s have a closer look at the P5Q PRO BIOS Version 0703, which is latest one as of July 27^th, 2008.


The welcome screen should be familiar to anyone who has used an ASUS motherboard in the last 5 years. It features the usual assortment of date/time, language selection, and hard drive configuration. This particular BIOS version (AMI v02.61) offers six language options; English, French, German, Japanese, as well as two Chinese dialects.


The Ai Tweaker section does not have any sub-menus, so everything pertaining to overclocking can be conveniently found in one area. In default mode, everything is set to AUTO and the available options appear pretty slim. However…


…once you set Ai Overclock Tuner, DRAM Timing Control, and Ai Transaction Booster to manual, the BIOS displays its full set of capabilities. The FSB and PCI-E frequency are adjustable in 1Mhz increments, up to 800Mhz and 180Mhz respectively, and you can choose from four chipset straps; 200/266/333/400. There are countless memory frequency options, depending on the chosen FSB and strap combination.

For a mainstream model, the memory tweaking options are quite impressive. In fact, the only obvious settings that are missing are the DRAM Command Rate and Refresh Period (tREF). However, these relatively minor omissions are overshadowed by the inclusion of an updated Transaction Booster option, which permits total control over the critical Common Performance Level, also known as tRD.

Voltage-wise, the P5Q PRO does not disappoint either. To demonstrate how liberal the available adjustments are, we set every option to its highest level, and as you can see, ASUS has given users an incredible amount of freedom. Should that be insufficient, the CPU and NB voltage can go even higher, to 2.10V and 2.06V respectively, once you enable the overvoltage jumpers. Furthermore, all voltages can be finely tuned in 0.02V increments, aside from the southbridge which has 0.10V intervals. In short, overclockers will only be limited by their components, cooling…and their sanity!

On a side note, except for the CPU GTL Reference, there are no itemized lists in the voltage section. Therefore, you must input the numeric voltage settings manually. It may take a little getting used to, but it is a much faster approach.


The Advanced tab is where you can enable or disable a number of CPU-specific features and functions, as well as the motherboard’s various onboard devices (audio, LAN, IDE controller, USB, etc).


The Power section is not particularly noteworthy. It contains the power management settings linked to the power-saving sleep modes, and the Hardware Monitor. The Hardware Monitor has very basic functionality, but it does report the essential temperatures and voltages, and it supports the three-setting Q-Fan Control feature.


The Boot section is perfectly standard, nothing new or unusual to report here.


The last section contains the previously mentioned ASUS EZ-Flash 2 tool, which greatly simplifies the BIOS updating process. You can also enable/disable and configure the Drive Xpert and Express Gate features from this section.

The ASUS O.C Profile feature gives users the option to save and switch between two BIOS profiles, for example an everyday profile and a benchmarking profile. Not only is this infinitely quicker than manually inserting every setting, but it might finally allow overclockers to stop making hand scribbled BIOS setting notes on random pieces of paper (don’t lie, you’ve all done it!). An interesting addition is that the O.C Profiles can be saved to a USB flash drive and shared among fellow P5Q PRO users.

Overall, this is a functional, intuitive BIOS with an abundance of options, and it is quite respectable for a motherboard in this price range.