ASUS P5K-E WiFi-AP Motherboard

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Motherboards | Power Supplies | Memory | Systems | Video Cards

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Max Slowik
Beth
AMD
Feb. 19, 2008

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Introduction

You wouldn't know by looking, but Intel's a little new at the chipset business. It's not that they haven't been doing it for decades, but just that they've never made a business out of it. Until recently. Intel's 975X did well; i965 blew doors off hinges. And, though it's a little long in the technospheric tooth, i965's footprint is almost too big to fill. Without presuming that its successor, P35, is shiny and better, I've tested what looks like a crowd-pleaser: Asus' P5K-E WiFi-AP. For less than $150, it's priced right where everyone can reach it, and comes with the right amount of flash to nab attention from the rest.

Layout

You'd think that, with all the room available in the ATX standard, all layouts would be as nice as what this board's got. Without going into too much detail, it's pretty near perfect. The spacing and location of all pieces is ideal. The only drawback is that the SATA connectors stick straight out of the board, where a GPU could potentially cover them. There's just enough space to smash a GTX down over them, but it's not pretty.

The best bit is the arrangement of the expansion slots. Instead of starting with a PCI-Express x16 slot there are two x1 slots, then the x16. Between it and the next x16 (x4 electric) are two PCI slots, and at the bottom is a final PCI slot. This strikes me as ideal for all the after-market GPU heatsinks that take up a lot of space on either side of the video card. This positioning will eliminate any cramping of the Northbridge cooling, and yet leave probably one or two free spots for other cards.

At the center of the motherboard rests the Northbridge heatsink, which connects via heatpipe to the MOSFETs' heatsink for the CPU's 8-phase power. Although it looks expensive and copper, it's actually aluminum with a copper patina, just like the Southbridge heatsink. As long as it stays cool, though, it's not super-important.

Bundle

As this isn't a Deluxe edition, the bundle stops short of overwhelming. I think the package is about right, without inducing that niggling suspicion that you've paid for more than you'll ever need. It's got your pair of SATA cables, a 4-pin Molex-to-SATA power adapter, an IDE and a floppy cable, and the antenna for the wireless NIC. It also has three of the little quick connectors, one for the front panel header, and one each for USB and IEEE 1394 headers.

The driver CD "InstAll"-ed everything, even the wireless applet, without hassle or crapware, even if it took slightly longer than I'd have liked (which made me a little nervous). There's also a "Superb Software Library" CD included, though the most interesting application was the free InterVideo DVD codec. Other useful software includes the Asus Update utility, for backing up and flashing the BIOS within Windows, and the slightly-underpowered AI Suite, used for overclocking within Windows.

There are two manuals as well, one for the motherboard and the other for the WiFi-AP module.

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Page 1: Introduction, Layout, and Bundle
Page 2: Test Setup and General Benchmarks
Page 3: Graphics Benchmarks & Bios and Overclocking
Page 4: Conclusion

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1 User Comment

1 - Posted by benny on June 13, 2008 - 10:42 am

You made the comment that the P5B-VM and P5K-E boards were running almost the same benchmarks. Take a look at your CPU and RAM. The CPU max fsb is 1066, and the RAM is ddr2 800. That is the max for the P5B. Of course it will run the same on the P5K, it is limited by the CPU and RAM speeds. Why not try an E8400 (fsb 1333) and DDR2 1066 on the P5K and re-run those benchmarks?

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