Customer Reviews

ASUS P5P800 - mainboard - ATX - i865PE

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this motherboard for the AGP slot, LGA775 socket and its microATX design. My biggest complaint is that they didn't put a firewire connection on it! Why not? It has nearly everything else.

Here are some things I noticed:

- They placed the AGP slot too close to the next PCI slot. Once you snap in your video card into the AGP slot you will instantly notice that you will NOT beable to put a full height PCI card in the next slot (unless you want the two to touch). My video card fan hits the next card in that PCI slot, thus shorting out the board. A short PCI modem card or PCI fan with a plastic housing would work.

- Works well with the new INTEL Pentium D930 dual core CPU and Kingston KVR400AK2/1GR memory (even though the memory is NOT on their compatability list. It would be nice if they put the memory compatibility list on the web site along with the description of the motherboard but they don't.

- I/O shield is a bit thin, so if you like to man-handle things you will probably bend it (like I did.) Not too thin, just noticable.

- Packaging is minimal with only a corrugated cardboard wrapper and anit-static bag. Moves around a bit during shipping.

- PCB is thick and a respectable weight.

- Case fan connection (3 and 4 pin) is on the other side of the CPU fan. You have to drag the wire across the CPU fan to plug it in! I twisted mine around the CPU fan wire to keep it out of the way, but surely they could have put it on the opposite side where nearly ALL case fans install.

- Plenty of mounting holes/stand-offs.

- 4 and 6-channel audio configurations will cause you to lose your microphone input (pink) and line-in input (blue). Both of these get used for the three outputs of your 6-channel audio. You should have a separate input for both of these on your case to plug into the board internally. If you don't you might want to consider getting a sound card OR a multi input device.

- Some have said the BIOS is "minimal" or "sparse". I found it to be just fine, with the usual settings and configuration options. The instructions are a bit on the you-should-know-this side, but I just searched the internet for topics I didn't know and usually found the answer on the first page of results.

- My case fan has now kicked into high and stays there 24/7. I think this board with its new Intel Pentium D930 is running a bit warmer than my previous setup. If you have a cool case with at least two fans you should have no problem. Don't get my wrong, it is in no way running hot, but is warm wnough for the fan to stay on high.

- If you plan on running 4 sticks of 1GB memory you may need to run Win XP Pro 64-bit OS in order for the system to detect all 4 gigs since Win XP 32-bit does not support Physical Address Extension (PAE).

- Dual-channel configurations require identical DDR DIMMM pairs for each channel and same CAS latency - basically a matched set.

- It also comes with a little metal Powered By ASUS sticker for your case or whatever.

All in all, I HIGHLY recommend this board for those of you that want to keep your AGP video card. Otherwise get the new PCIE versions for your LGA775 socket CPU.

a relatively good product. altought the ethernet port failed after about 6 months. the board is still functional otherwise.

I've always been an avid supporter of Asus up until this board. Although I mostly agree with the review above, I had been having multiple problems with my system that, until yesterday, I did not even realize had anything to do with this board.

The short, as-non-tech-as-I-can-make-it problem with my board is that something is causing the northbridge to overheat. I don't just mean slightly either; from startup its running at over 120 degrees Celsius! As a comparison, with the way my system is ventilated my other components run between 38-50 degrees Celsius. Before I caught what the problem was this issue was causing my system to completely shut off without warning and not come back on.

My board has less than 40 hours usage on it, and now I have to pay to ship it to Asus and pay again to have a replacement sent back to me. Between this issue and the fact that none of my "regular" vendors even carry this model anymore, I'd recommend that anyone considering purchasing this board to look elsewhere and save themselves the aggravation.

The only reason I gave this 2 stars instead of 1 is that at least it wasn't DOA :(