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ASUS P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP Edition

As usual ASUS is one of the first companies to release a motherboard based on a new chipset. We take a look at one of the first boards to use the new P35 chipset, the P5K Deluxe WiFi/AP Edition, and put it through its paces.

Introduction

ASUS has been one of the worlds premiere motherboard manufacturers for a number of years. ASUS has been synonymous with quality, innovation and stability. It’s no wonder their boards have been at the heart of enthusiast’s computers for a number of years. Additionally ASUS is also known as a manufacturer of OEM motherboards, video cards, and personal electronics. Today we are looking at the P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP. The P5K Deluxe is based on the new Intel P35 chipset. The P35 chipset has been introduced as the replacement for the still relatively new P965 Express chipset. The chipset features official 1333MHz bus support as well as support for upcoming 45nm CPUs such as those based on the Penryn Core. This chipset is really an evolutionary product rather than a revolutionary one.

The ASUS P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP supports the latest Intel® Core™2 Extreme Quad-Core / Core™2 Duo / Intel® Pentium® Extreme and Intel® Pentium® D processors. Following industry trends the P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP requires only a few components to create a fully functional machine. The required components are: Socket LGA775 CPU, DDR 2 memory, power supply, drives and a video card. ASUS integrated the following components into the P5K’s design: 1 ATA-133 port, 1 floppy port, 12 USB ports, (6 on the backplane and three headers supporting two ports each), 6 SATA 3G ports, 2 eSATA ports, 2 IEEE1394 ports (1 on the backplane and 1 header supporting 1 port), 2 GigE Ethernet ports, 6 mini-headphone jacks and oddly it supports a single PS2 keyboard port, but no mouse port. Instead you’ll find two USB ports located where the PS2 keyboard port would be, while the mouse port has been raised to where the mouse port “should be.”

Main Specifications Overview:

Detailed Specifications Overview:

Packaging

The packaging is ASUS standard. The board is traditionally packed at the bottom of the box with the accessories laid out on top of it. The board is adequately protected during shipment and that’s what really counts. The board comes with the basic amount of accessories. Cables, manual, WiFi user’s guide, driver CD, WiFi antenna, and I/O shield.

Board Layout

The board has a good layout. There are no glaring flaws here. There is one potential issue which I’ll cover later, but really ASUS did a superb job overall with the design of the P5K Deluxe. Power connectors are located in ideal locations for most situations; the floppy port is in the best place possible in my opinion. The IDE slot isn’t the best placed, but that’s relatively minor. At this point if you are building new you should have 100% SATA drives at this point. Even optical drives have had sufficient market penetration at this point to make justification for an IDE model difficult.

The CPU area of the P5K Deluxe is mostly clear. I do have a concern that there are some heat sink designs that might run into the MOSFET coolers. This isn’t a definite and there are certainly options if that situation were to arise. One thing I did notice while I was examining the board is that while the heat pipes make good contact all around, the stand alone heat sink on the boards right most side only makes contact with about 75% of the components it is supposed to be cooling. I can see right underneath the heat sink. While that can’t be good in my opinion, it didn’t seem to affect my testing at all. I felt it was worth mentioning from a quality standpoint.

The board has 4 240-pin DDR 2 DIMM slots and they are located in the usual place which is directly in front of the CPU socket area. As usual ASUS did a good job here and placed the DIMM slots so that memory could be installed with large video cards installed. For awhile I was using an EVGA 8800GTS Superclocked 320MB card in the primary PEG slot without difficulty. I swapped memory modules in and out and had no difficulty doing so.

The north bridge is located just to the left of the CPU socket. It is cooled by the standard ASUS heat pipe cooler. The unit appears to be of high quality and worked fairly well during testing. It never became too hot to touch during stock or overclocked operations. The cooling system is also small enough to not interfere with the installation of anything. I’m starting to see more and more boards with ridiculous north bridge cooling that is starting to get in the way and become inconvenient. Fortunately this is not the case here.

The south bridge is located directly in front of the primary PCIe x16 slot. It is also cooled with the ASUS heat pipe cooling solution and is connected to the rest of the cooling system via that heat pipe. Directly in front of the south bridge are the SATA ports. With an 8800GTX installed, getting to some of those ports could be a challenge, but the use of cable management and possibly right angled cables could help to alleviate this problem.

The P5K Deluxe has 2 x PCI-E x16 (blue @ x16 mode, black @ x4 or x1 mode) supports CrossFire Technology, 2 x PCIe x1 and 3 x PCI slots. The slots are laid out in a logical and very functional fashion. ASUS has also added a feature called Ai slot detection. This feature allows you to simply plug power into the system and onboard LEDs will give you an indication letting you know if your hardware is installed correctly and making a good connection. This is a nice feature, and while it won’t make or break a recommendation, it is attention to detail like this that separate ASUS from other companies.

The ASUS P5K Deluxe has the following ports on the backplane: 1 PS/2 keyboard port, 2 RJ-45 ports, 6 USB ports, 1 IEEE1394 port, 2 eSATA ports, six mini-headphone jacks, one SPDIF port, one optical port, and finally one WiFi antenna port. Notice I only listed one PS/2 keyboard port and none for the mouse. That’s because the P5K doesn’t support PS/2 mice at all. This really isn’t a big deal because most of us haven’t used PS/2 mice in quite some time. In contrast there are plenty of people who swear by their PS/2 keyboards and some of those individuals haven’t had the best luck adapting them to work with USB ports.