Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP Motherboard Review

[One4yu2c]

Today HardwareLogic looks at the Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP motherboard. Based around Intel's P35 chipset and sporting support for the Core 2 architecture, we're walking into this review with high hopes. After all, Intel chipsets have a reputation for stability, and their Core 2 processors are proving to be very OC friendly. Couple these traits with Asus' market mentality, and it would appear to be the perfect marriage. But will this union ultimately receive our blessing, or should we be looking to annul?
Frank Stroupe

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[Yellowhello]

Awesome review Frank! You hit some pretty high FSB speeds on this board... but it looks to be a tad pricey.

[gvblake22]

All the Asus boards with the "Deluxe" moniker tend to be priced in the $200+ range. Kindof ridiculous personally, but I guess if you really want WiFi and all that extra stuff then it's worth it. Personally, I wish Asus had a little more available in the middle ground. their budget boards always have a lot of features axed and often have poor layouts but the high-end boards are almost TOO feature rich and cost too much. That's where Gigabyte has managed to take over, their parts have a reasonable amount of features at (usually) reasonable prices.

Great review though Frank, thanks!

[Quakindude]

With boards like this coming out, I may need to re-evaluate my stance on Asus. Don't get me wrong, they've usually had excellent products in the past, but their customer service has sucked ass in my experiences with them.

You should know what this link is for....DIGG IT BABY!

[Capper]

I'll be the first to say ASUS support has been awful......but I also need to point out their incredible growth over the last couple of years, and that its hard to keep up supporting so much stuff.....I'm not making excuses, but I do see that they are at least making an effort....bring on more staff, dedicating people to specific areas of expertise, and hiring on people to man their forums..... all positive signs.

As a side note, Sean will be posting a review of the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe in the coming weeks, and I'll say I was so impressed with the looks and bundle that I bought one for myself, and its far and away the best setup I've ever seen.

[Athildja-x64]

Originally Posted by gvblake22

All the Asus boards with the "Deluxe" moniker tend to be priced in the $200+ range. Kindof ridiculous personally, but I guess if you really want WiFi and all that extra stuff then it's worth it. Personally, I wish Asus had a little more available in the middle ground. their budget boards always have a lot of features axed and often have poor layouts but the high-end boards are almost TOO feature rich and cost too much. That's where Gigabyte has managed to take over, their parts have a reasonable amount of features at (usually) reasonable prices.

Great review though Frank, thanks!

The problem with Gigabyte is that their layouts are awfull.
I have the P35-DS4 and I have to remove the video card to swap RAM.
also the SATA ports are partially covered by any card longer than an X1950XTX.
It has a ton of features and seems to be a good performer but I wish that layout were better.

[Capper]

I'ved never had the issues with the Gigabyte boards, except for the most annoying...their CMOS battery and jumper placement is terrible.

[garetjax]

Very good review, Frank. Was a bit suprised at the lack of a bundle for a motherboard that is obviously aimed for high level enthusiasts (if price is any indication). I think this motherboard would be more compelling if Asus had included a bit more accessories with their bundle. Items such as rounded IDE/FDD cables and few more molex to SATA cables would have been nice, as well as a small chipset fan, reminiscent of EVGA's 680i motherboard bundle.

[fstroupe]

Thanks guys. The time put into this review kind of freaked me out. I probably had 40 hours just overclocking and benchmarking. LOL...I told Capper when I got the software for WorldBench 6 that I'd have the review done in a short time later. He said "you will spend most of the day tomorrow benchmarking." I assumed that he figured I was waiting on that software to start my benchmarking, though it was all done besides that one. No, he meant that it would take all day to run WorldBench 6. Actually, my last run was set up to run when I went to bed the next night. LOL

Actually, at first, I was kind of ok with the bundle...I never use them anyway....I think only DFI includes rounded ide and floppy cables, etc, and I usually use the same SATA cables, etc.

Until I realized that there was no external COM1 port. Yeah, no one ever uses them anymore, and I didn't....until early this year I reviewed a PC Cassette deck, and it uses the serial port to interface the deck and the software. I use it for some simple recording I do at church, I record it on a regular cassette deck,then make it digital to edit it. I looked a little, and found out not only do they make a PCI bracket to connect to the port on the mobo, they included it with other bundles. I was pretty pissed then. Hell, newegg doesn't carry them. I use a receiver that has a cassette deck as a PC amp to power my JBL monitors, so I'm not totally screwed, but the play quality of the PC deck is much much better for digital conversion.

Actually, I was kind of disappointed in the FSB speed I got, one of the sites linked got 555mHz. I was held back by my memory. I'm trying to get some of the ReaperX thru another site. It has been a long time since I got any high end review items from him. LOL I should get some really respectable numbers with that stuff.

It is a nice mobo though. I really didn't go into this review with high expectations from an Asus board, especially for overclocking. The location of the CMOS jumper is totally irrelevant. The BIOS is totally jumperfree. It is so cool. Also, you can set up four preset bios settings....I didn't, but it would have come in pretty handy for benchmarking. Don't have to write your settings down if you need to come back to the same overclock for some reason.

With the right processor and RAM, this may be the best LGA775 overclocker on the market.

I don't think that there would be an issue even with an 8800 and the SATA ports, they are pretty well placed.

I kind of expect that we won't see many more new Asus mobos under $200. Though if you think about it, within a year or two we won't see that many new mobos under that, cause everyone will soon expect high end heatpipe cooling, etc.

[Loosecannon]

I agree the P5k Deluxe is a great board but in my opinion if your going to consider spending $200 + on this board i would go for the P5K Premium

It's even more stable that the deluxe while overclocking,but not worth jumping from a Deluxe to a Premium if you already own one,that would be for the real die hard overclockers

I think the IDE connector placement really sucks and in some full tower rigs will require a longer than supplied IDE cable to reach top mounted devices
Theres a voltage dampener option which when enabled it gave me no voltage drop at all under load, this in itself is quite impressive and testament to the quality of the boards components. A serious issue when using a 8800GTX was the fact that some of the SATA connectors were covered by the end of the card, SATA connectors 1, 3 became completely unusable while 2, 3 were very close to the cooler of the card and this could be a major issue with some raid configurations or if you had more than four Internal SATA Drives.

I agree that they could of packaged some more software/games for the price for sure