*sigh* its taken a bit but I can finally report of the P5B deluxe...if you are on the fence, avoid this board.
In the last 10 years I have only had 1 other motherboard that has given me this much trouble and that was because it died and took random components with it.
I bought the board and some memory that another person on recommended and said ran with the board. It hated it ( PQI pc 5400 DDR2 667).
I did however manage to get some OCZ Platinum PC DDR 800 PC 6400 ram to run with it. BTW that ram was *supposed* to go on the gaming machine I mentioned before.
I did like the fact that I could do a bios update with a thumb drive before installing an OS, unfortunately the latest BIOS vers 806 didn't really help.
If there is a problem with a component, the board will not make a sound it just won't post. You troubleshoot it by removing components one by one and if it makes any noise then the problem was the last component you removed.
When it wasn't making any sounds I was blaming everything from the CPU to the case.
I'm used to the MB telling me wtf is going on, so this was quite frustrating.
Then there was bios problems, everytime I made a change in BIOs a reset wouldn't do it. I had to power down fully before it would reboot.
Then I made the mistake of using the Asus disk and installing the Intel ICH USB update that was included on the disk, which promptly disabled every USB port (don't install pls, it works just fine without). I stupidly thought it actually was an update to impove the USB 2.0 performance..it wasn't.
BTW one of the things slowing down the POST is the IDE. I'm at work at the moment so I can't see the screen, but there is an option in there to switch the IDE from RAID, to IDE to ACHI (sp?). If you can disable it, if you can't, it just going to post slow since it displays that stupid thing for a good 3-5 seconds and I can't find an option to turn the stupid wait screen off.
I don't think its the Q-Fan since I didn't bother with that until I had the system fully up and stable. Though I've noticed that this board really doesn't manipulate the fan speed very well as some fans it will run 100% and others it will run at min, even just after startup when temps are cool.
I put a Vanessa -L on the CPU and its running the fan at 100% even though CPU temps are in the upper 30's celcius.
However once I got the system up and stable, it was rock solid, laughing at Prime 95 and 3d Mark 6 (ran Primte 95 18 hours and 5 minutes before I finally stopped it). I had no trouble installing any software and it got win xp on fairly fast (little more than an hour start to stop, including drive format)
Even though it works fine on anything I throw at it now, my biggest fear is I'll get it to my friend and thier family will plug something in and it will die.
The P5B pretty much destroyed my enthusiam for this dual build as I stare at the P5W DH Deluxe with trepidation. Even though I hear good things about it...well, that's for next weekend. I'm going to spend the rest of the week trying to stress test this first machine to make absoutley sure it doesn't drop as soon as I hand it off, because its a 1.5 hour one way trip to fix something.
If yer in the market for a new board consider the new Nvidia chipset for the gaming machine. This merger between AMD/ATI has knocked both companies for a loop and it may be a while before they catch up.