Intel tags its P965 Express chipset as a mainstream product, yet the P5B Deluxe Wifi-AP Edition is anything but. The first hint that we're well beyond mainstream territory is the board's $200 price tag, which is $80 higher than some P965 boards. The second hint is the fact that Asus makes a vanilla P5B that sells for around $150 without all the Deluxe Wifi-AP luxuries.

Building a high-end board based on a mainstream chipset isn't necessarily a bad idea. After all, the P965 is much fresher than Intel's high-end 975X chipset; the 975X's ICH7R south bridge alone is close to 16 months old. Most of the mobo makers we talked to at Computex seemed much more interested in producing enthusiast boards based on the P965, as well.

Considering its wealth of onboard peripherals, the P5B's layout is actually pretty good. Both power connectors are located along the edges of the board where they won't create cable clutter that can interfere with airflow. However, putting the auxiliary 12V connector along the top edge of the board could create problems for upside-down cases like Antec's P180, which positions the power supply below the motherboard. Users may need an extension cable to snake 12V power all the way to the top of the board.

The P5B's CPU socket is flanked by tallish passive north bridge and VRM coolers, but there's still plenty of room for larger aftermarket heatsinks. There's also loads of clearance between the socket and DIMM slots, something we don't see often on Athlon 64 motherboards.

Asus makes much of the fact that the P5B Deluxe uses a true eight-phase power design, and you can see most of it from this angle. The board has eight discrete power outputs to the CPU, and Asus claims that allows it to deliver more stable power to the processor.

Moving down the board, we run into the P5B's low-profile south bridge cooler, which provides plenty of clearance for longer graphics cards. Longer cards do come a little too close to the DIMM slot retention tabs for our liking, though. Swapping DIMMs without removing cards from the top PCI Express x16 slot is possible, but it's not easy if you have stubby fingers.

Fortunately it is easy to get at all six of the board's ICH8R-powered Serial ATA ports. They're all neatly clustered at the bottom of the board where not even longer double-wide graphics cards interfere.

The same can't be said for the internal SATA port connected to the P5B's auxiliary JMicron storage controller, though. That port is buried just above the top PCI Express X16 slot in one of the worst positions we've seen on a motherboard. At least with six south bridge-powered SATA ports, you shouldn't need to resort to the JMicron controller for much more than its ATA port.

Unfortunately, the controller's ATA port isn't without its own issues. We couldn't get a five-year-old version of Norton Ghost to run from optical drives connected to the controller. A more recent version of Ghost 2005 worked without putting up a fuss, though.

Storage controller nitpicking aside, Asus has been fairly modest with the P5B's expansion slot layout. The board sports two physical PCI Express x16 slots for those who want to run dual graphics cards, but there's no provision for CrossFire or SLI GPU teaming. The second x16 slot can be configured with either two or four lanes of bandwidth courtesy of the board's ICH8R south bridge. Users also get a single x1 slot and three standard PCI slots, which should be enough for most folks. Since there's no need to run a pair of double-wide graphics cards on a board that doesn't support CrossFire or SLI, you only have to worry about losing one PCI slot to a double-wide card.

Despite being based on very different chipsets, the port clusters for all three Asus boards are remarkably similar. Parallel ports are snubbed on the P5B in favor of external Serial ATA and coaxial and TOS-Link digital S/PDIF outputs, and that's just fine with us. We wouldn't mind a couple of extra USB ports in the mix, though. The P5B can feed up to eight USB ports, but four are only available via onboard headers.

As its Wifi-AP Edition moniker suggests, the P5B is also fitted with an integrated wireless networking controller. The Wi-Fi component is actually a part of the motherboard, so it won't eat up one of your expansion slots. Asus includes the necessary software to configure the Wi-Fi card as an access point to share your Internet connection with wireless devices, too.