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As mentioned before, there are a number of Intel P35 motherboards that offer support for DDR3 memory, and while we have a few of these boards on hand, such as the ASUS P5K3 Deluxe/Premium and the Gigabyte P35T-DQ6, we are deliberately excluding them from the comparison. At the moment just 2GBs of DDR3 memory will set you back around $400 which is quite ridiculous, making it pointless (for the time being) to buy a DDR3-capable motherboard given the price premium. That leaves us with the nine motherboards we are testing today that support DDR2 memory exclusively.

For this P35 round-up we have tried to include a high-end version and a budget version motherboard from each manufacturer. The boards will be put through the usual batch of tests, while we will also compare their overclocking abilities side by side. Before jumping into the benchmarks we will briefly list the features and go over the layout and design of each motherboard.


Initially we had planned to include a few MSI motherboards that were going to be supplied by the manufacturer itself. Unfortunately once we explained our plan for a comparison against competing boards, they got cold feet and pulled out. Not sure exactly what we should make of this, so make of it what you will. Because the news came somewhat last minute we did not have time to purchase these motherboards without delaying the article further, we apologize for the omission.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

ASUS P5K-E – Design

ASUS has made good use of the room available on the I/O panel filling every last gap with some kind of connector. While overall the board design of the P5K-E is very good, we found the same (small) design flaw that was found with Deluxe version. The P5K-E uses vertically mounted SATA ports rather than those on a 90-degree angle.

While we were able to use all six ports when running two GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards in SLI mode it was a bit of a tight fit. For those that want to access the single IDE port its position is not ideal either as it is located horizontally in the bottom right hand corner of the board. The first of the key connections such as the 24-pin and 8-pin power connectors are very well placed and easy to access. The DIMM slots are just clear of the PCI Express x16 port making it possible to install/remove memory with a large graphics card installed.

The expansion slots are well laid out with two PCIe x1 ports at the top followed by a PCIe x16 port which is then separated of the next PCIe x16 port by two PCI ports. At the bottom of the board there is a third PCI port. Below this at the very bottom of the board we have a front audio header, a single serial port header, a Firewire port header and two USB 2.0 headers for four more USB ports. The clear CMOS jumper is easy to find as it is placed next to the battery.

The P5K-E is well equipped cooling-wise, though there are a few alterations here when compared to the more expensive Deluxe version. The north and southbridge chips are not connected via heatpipes. In fact this version uses just a single heatpipe connecting the northbridge heatsink to the heatsink over the power phase chips. Only half of the sixteen MOSFET chips are cooled on this motherboard and while this does sound kind of pointless there is a reason for this.

ASUS is not really concerned with cooling the MOSFET chips on this motherboard as they shouldn’t get very hot. Rather they have designed a more efficient way of extracting heat from the northbridge chip which does get quite hot under normal operating conditions. Therefore the heat is transferred away from the Intel P35 chip towards the top of the board where the case fans can help disperse the heat.

Moving around to the I/O panel we have a huge range of connectors starting with just one PS/2 keyboard port and two USB 2.0 ports from the left. Then there are two audio related ports which include coaxial and S/PDIF connections. Next we have a LAN port with two more USB 2.0 ports, then a Firewire port with two eSATA ports and next to that another LAN port with two more USB 2.0 ports making for a total of six USB 2.0 ports on the I/O panel. There is still more with another six audio jacks and then finally a wireless antenna port.

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9-way Intel P35 motherboard round-up

Anyone looking at building a new desktop system should not look any further than Intel Core 2 processors, and when time comes to pick a platform you should have Intel's own P35 chipset in mind as it officially offers 1333MHz FSB support and will be compatible with upcoming 45nm processors. This translates in a fairly 'future-proof' platform, with some models currently available supporting DDR3 memory already.

But as new as this chipset is, deciding that you want a P35-based motherboard is not enough. Most major manufacturers have already launched several different models powered by the chipset, to give an example, ASUS currently offers a dozen motherboards models all based on the Intel P35.

We have rounded up some of the better examples available for one big article where we shall compare them side by side. Although we have nine motherboards to compare, they come from just four different manufacturers: Abit, ASUS, ECS and Gigabyte. These boards range from $90, all the way up to $230.