- Very Strong Performance
- Good Overclocking Ability
- Q-Connectors For Easy Motherboard Header Installation
- BIOS Somewhat Difficult to Use
- SATA Ports Can Conflict with Long Video Cards
- Limtited CrossFire Support
- Intel LGA775 Socket
- Intel P35 Chipset with ICH9R
- 1333 / 1066 / 800 MHz Frontside Bus
- Four 240-pin DDR2 Memory Slots
- Two PCI-Express x16 (One x16, One x4 or x1) with ATI CrossFire Support
- Two PCI-Express x1, Three PCI Expansion Slots
- Six SATA 2.0 Ports via ICH9R with RAID 0/1/5/10 Support, JMicron Controller for PATA and Two External SATA
- Ten USB 2.0 (Six Rear, Four Interntal), Two FireWire 400 (One Rear, One Internal), Gigabit Ethernet
- ADI AD1988B 8-Channel HDA Codec with Coax and Optical S/PIDF
- SATA Cables, ATA Cables, Molex-to-SATA Power Adapter, Floppy Cable, I/O Shield, Q-Connector Adapters
5/17/08 - The ASUS P5K-E is a mid-level board using the popular Intel P35 chipset. The LGA775 socket allows it to use almost every version of the Core 2 processor available on the market save for the 1600MHz bus Core 2 Extreme. It can properly handle the new 1333MHz 45nm dual and quad core models.
The number and variety of connectors on the board allows for it to use just about all of the latest technologies. It does use the DDR2 memory standard over DDR3, but this doesn't affect overall performance much and helps keep system costs down dramatically. One really nice feature of the P5K-E is the inclusion of the Q-Connectors that makes connecting case headers to the motherboard headers extremely easy.
Some users might have an issue with the location of the SATA ports. If you happen to have a very long graphics card in the primary PCI-E slot, it will interfere with several of the SATA ports. Since there are six, it is possible to avoid using two of them but it is still an annoyance. Also, the second PCI-Express graphics slot can run at most at x4 transfer rates. This limits the overall performance of an ATI CrossFire setup.
Overclocking the ASUS P5K-E motherboard worked very well. The heatsinks on the various critical components helps keep the motherboard temperatures down. Even though the board only officially supports the 1333MHz bus, the board has no problem reaching 1600MHz speeds without any chipset voltage increases. The only real problem is that the BIOS menus are fairly difficult to navigate and adjust to truly push the board as far as it can go. Of course, the cost of the board is much less expensive then the enthusiast class boards.
