i just put together the pq5 board with a 9450, 4 gb of g.skill ram, tagan 800 watt ps, 6 sata hard drives, 1 dvd burner, 3 tv tuner cards and sound card. observations so far:
-easy build..booted right away with no issue. came with 0506 bios, upgraded to the supposed much better 0703 bios right away.
-did not rebuild my prior os drive from my p35 chipset based abit board. no issues.
-there has been a comment about the atheros network chip not being very fast. i question this. i've run speedtests with no speed issues and from a feel standpoint, everything opens very fast.
-easy to use the eazybackup (raid 1) utility. it is misleading though.the manual info refers to only material on the drive you're going to backup to being lost..but in the utility screen, if gives you the impression it will erase both your source and target drives. not true..just set it up this morning and it didn't touch the source drive.
-have no overclocked yet. i love that the default voltage to start with my quad is showing up at 1.15 volts, but there is vdroop as the setting is 1.2 volts. not a huge amount, don't know if i have the line load funtion in the bios engaged that is supposed to correct vdroop. i only built the system up a few days ago so have not overclocked yet. this is my htpc system so i had tv recording priorities to get going cpu temp at that voltage is 36 to 37C.
the layout of the board for the most part is excellent. i am torn on the atx socket placement though. it's great in that it isn't on the bottom edge of the board so doesn't get hidden under the drive cage in my silverstone htpc case. the downside of it's placement up between the graphic card and cpu is it's a thick bundle of cables in the middle of my board and i can't stuff them away the way i'd like to. it seems to have made a cramped case, that much more cramped now.
would like to get the northbridge temp. anyone know a utility that will show it? that was the nice thing about the abit versus asus pc probe which unfortunately doesn't give a lot of info (unless i'm not manipulating it properly)