Asus has always been one of the few brands to hit the shelves early with motherboards based on the latest chipsets. Using Intel's new P45 chipset, the P50 Pro is Asus' latest offering in the mainstream segment. The motherboard not only packs a host of innovative features, but also seems quite promising on the performance front. Let's find out what makes this board special and how well it performed in our tests.

FEATURES: The P50 Pro offers tons of features while being highly reliable and environmentally friendly as well. As a feature of the chipset, the board supports up to 16 GB of DDR2 memory and CrossFire multi-GPU setup in dual-8x mode. The ICH10R southbridge offers 12 USB ports and 6 SATA ports that are grouped neatly at the lower right corner. Two additional SATA ports supporting RAID 0 and 1 are provided by the Silicon Image 5723 controller. Asus has provided a utility called Drive Xpert which has a user-friendly interface for configuring RAID with these additional SATA ports.



The P50 Pro sports all-solid capacitors for better durability, and an 8-phase power design for better power efficiency and stability. Further value addition comes with the inclusion of Asus' 'Express Gate' and '6 Engine' utilities. While the former gives you access to the Internet, Skype, music player and picture viewer within a few seconds of powering on the PC, the latter intelligently detects and moderates the power consumption of the various subsystems. In order to use Express Gate you need an external USB hard drive. We discovered this after numerous unsuccessful attempts to load it from a USB flash drive.

PERFORMANCE: Loaded with high-end components, the P50 Pro breezed through our performance tests without any hitches. In our overclocking test we 'managed to push the FSB speed to a maximum of 2040 MHz (510 x 4). So you should be
able to achieve good overclocking results with CPUs which have fixed multipliers, provided you have good DDR2 RAM. VERDICT: The Asus P50 Pro deserves serious consideration if you're looking for a good CrossFire motherboard, since this is what the P45 chipset does much better than its predecessor, the older P35.
FOR: Neat layout, good software bundle, great performance.

AGAINST: None.