For once Asus hasn't picked a model code for this motherboard by grabbing a handful of letters from the Scrabble bag, but has instead has plumped for the name 'Commando'. Confrontational or what!

This LGA775 design uses the Intel P965 chipset instead of the new P35 so you're limited to the current crop of Core 2 processors with 1,066MHz FSB and won't be able to upgrade to the 1,333MHz models that Intel is about to launch.

The other limitation of the P965 is that it only supplies 20 lanes of PCI Express, so the main graphics slot gets a full 16 lanes without any problem but should you plug in a pair of ATi graphics card in CrossFire, the second graphics slot only gets four lanes of PCI-E. The P965 doesn't support two Nvidia cards in SLI although we firmly expect to see this feature added to the new X38 chipset.

With two graphics cards you've accounted for all 20 lanes of PCI-E so Asus hasn't bothered with any of the tiny PCI-E x1 slots that litter so many motherboards, but which have no obvious purpose.

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Right, that's the bad news out of the way and from here on in it's all good stuff. The layout of the board is amazingly tidy. The power connectors are located at the edge of the board, just where you'd hope to find them, the IDE connector and six SATA ports are laid down to make connection easier and the headers are neatly arranged at the foot of the board.

There's one Firewire header and a bracket with a single port in case the single Firewire port on the I/O panel isn't enough, and you get two USB ports on a second bracket to add to the four native ports. That leaves two USB headers which you can connect to any USB ports that are mounted on your case.

Next to the headers are three illuminated micro buttons for Power, Reset and Clear CMOS and you get the usual Asus pack of Q-Connectors to help you connect the Commando to your front panel connections and ports.

The I/O panel is a strange affair as it carries the Firewire and four USB ports that we mentioned plus two PS/2 ports, dual Gigabit LAN and optical and coaxial digital audio outputs, however there's not a sign of a mini jack as the six connectors are carried on an audio riser card along with the ADI 1988D audio chip.

This leaves room on the I/O panel for an LCD POST display in the space where you'd normally find a Parallel port. Once Windows is running the display acts as a digital clock, but quite why you'd want this on the back of your PC is something of a mystery.

Asus has employed a cooling system that uses heatpipes to link passive coolers on the Southbridge and Northbridge of the chipset to a cooler on the power regulation hardware while still leaving plenty of space around the CPU socket. It also supplies an optional fan that clips onto the power regulator cooler behind the I/O panel in case your CPU cooler and case fans aren't moving enough air around.

During our testing this P965 motherboard was happy to run 1,066MHz DDR2 memory, even though it is only supposed to support 800MHz RAM, and the speed matched the early P35 models that we've seen to date.

The Asus Commando is one of the finest P965 motherboards we have ever seen. Although you can run dual ATi graphics cards in Crossfire we suggest that you ignore that aspect and plug in a single powerful card, as the Asus delivers performance in spades and has a list of features as long as your arm.