ASUS P5B Deluxe

Performance:

For comparison we had used an Abit AW8-MAX and AW9D. The AW9D is Abit's flagship Intel motherboard that utilizes Intel's 975X Chipset, while the AW8-MAX was once Abit's best model with the i955X. Due to the lack of Core 2 Duo support on the AW8-MAX, a Pentium D dual-core processor was used for testing. When it came to benchmarking we had no problems running the FSB in excess of 250MHz. Due to the lack of CrossFire support under Linux, no MultiGPU testing was completed.

Unlike some Intel motherboards we have recently tested and are in the process of testing, the ASUS P5B Deluxe had worked fairly well with Fedora Core 6 and the Linux 2.6.18 kernel. The standard functionality of the motherboard had worked without any issues. LM_Sensors currently does not support the Winbond W83627DHG I/O controller for hardware monitoring, but a patch for this support should be available soon. Both Gigabit Ethernet interfaces were detected and working on the 2.6.18 kernel, but on shutting down there would be repeated "phy read timeout disabling/enabling" errors from the Linux sky2 driver. The integrated WiFi also requires the use of the ndiswrapper for proper usage. Overall, the ASUS P5B Deluxe motherboard as a whole should work well with any Linux distribution using a recent Linux 2.6 kernel.