Asus P5QL/EPU review

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Verdict:

With a low price, good performance and all the basic ports, the P5QL/EPU retains its position as our Best Buy Intel motherboard.

Review Date: 21 Sep 2009

Price when reviewed: £54

Buy it now for: £60
(see more store prices)

Supplier: http://www.digital-fusion.co.uk

Reviewed By: Alan Lu & Kat Orphanides

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

ExpertReviews Award

Review
Specs

Motherboards that use Intel's P43 chipset have consistently impressed us with their performance and low prices.

The P5QL/EPU is a budget model from Asus. Its LGA775 socket supports any Core 2 Duo or Quad processor, as well as the Core 2-based Pentium and Celeron ranges. It has a PCI-E x16 slot for a graphics card, which you'll need, as there's no graphics chip.

The two PCI Express x1 slots and three PCI slots are sensibly arranged, so you'll block only one of the PCI slots if you install a dual-slot graphics card. There are six SATA ports but no RAID controller. The P5QL/EPU is impressively quick, beating most of the LGA775 motherboards we've seen lately, and delivered an excellent score in our Call of Duty 4 test.

It has plenty of ports on the I/O panel. The PS/2 port means you won't have to use a USB port for your keyboard, but you'll need one for your mouse. There are six analogue mini-jack ports supporting 7.1 multichannel surround sound, plus an optical S/PDIF. Most users won't be too concerned by the omission of eSATA and FireWire.

The BIOS has lots of options for overclocking, but the small, passive heatsink on the Northbridge may be a limiting factor. The P5QL may not support dual graphics cards or RAID, but it does support a 1,600MHz FSB and 1,066MHz memory and offers excellent performance for just £54. This makes it a sound basis for an Intel-based PC with a dedicated graphics card.

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