Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi Review

Author: William Henning
Editor: Howard Ha
Publish Date: Wednesday, June 13th, 2007
Originally Published on Neoseeker (http://www.neoseeker.com)
Article Link: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/p5k_deluxe/
Copyright Neo Era Media, Inc. - please do not redistribute or use for commercial purposes.

Today we take a look at the Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi, this is Asus' new P35 based version of the venerable P5B series of motherboards.

I always look forward to benchmarking Asus boards as their higher end boards are known to be good overclockers - and they seem to get even better each and every year.  Given that the P965 based P5B family of boards from Asus is one of the best boards for enthusiasts, this new P5K is a very exciting product indeed.  Just looking at the packaging of the board it is easy to see that pretty much every useful feature is provided - up to and including integrated WiFi networking, a nice feature that will be appreciated by those who need it.

The first P35 based board we recently reviewed, the Gigabyte P35-DS3R was an excellent performer and a great overclocker. It will be interesting to see how the P5K Deluxe WiFi compares.

The P5K Deluxe WiFi AP Edition is certainly not short of features:

• 800/1066/1333MHz FSB
• 4 DDR2 dimm sockets - official support for 667MHz and 800MHz, 1066MHz and higher may be possible
  
• Improved Stack Cool 2 heat pipe design - up to 20'C cooler, pure copper
• One PCIe 16x slot for a GPU
• One PCIe 16x form factor, PCIe 4x or 1x signaling slot for peripheral or second GPU
• Two PCIe 1x slots
• Two PCI slots
• Six SATA2 connectors with RAID support
• Two "SATA on the Go" connectors from JMicron PATA/SATA2 controller
  
• Dual Gigabit Ethernet controllers
• Asus WiFi-AP Solor IEEE 802.11b/g controller and external antenna
• Eight channel AD1988B High Definition audio controller
  
• Coax and optical S/PDIF outputs
• Next generation eight phase power design
• Six USB 2.0 jacks on the back
• Two external SATA2 connectors
• PS/2 keyboard jack
• Firewire connector on the back
  
• Six audio connectors
• Six additional USB 2.0 headers
• Additional FireWire header

The Board

The Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi AP Edition comes in a nice black box with a "flap" on top. Simply there so that the marketing department at Asus has surface area available to display the various board features.

As you saw on the previous page, Asus has something to gloat about, as this board does have plenty of features for us to play with.

Asus is obviously proud of its memory overclocking capabilities, as it shows a large bar chart about that benefit right on the front cover of the box.





The bundle is complete and decent, but other than the included WiFi it has no frills to add to the cost of the package.  You get an ATA cable, four SATA cables, two dual SATA power cables, an I/O shield, user manuals for the motherboard and the WiFi-AP Solo, back panel dual USB and FireWire connector as well as an omni-directional antenna.

The CD has drivers, Asus utilities such as PC Probe II, Asus Update and AI-Suite, WiFi-AP Solo Wizard, OEM AV software, and some image editing software. Better than some vendors bundles, but no free games and/or large software bundle to be had here.



The board has a nice clean layout, and is definitely dominated by the heat pipes and heat sinks. Note the two PCIe 16x form factor slots, however the black one is only 4x or 1x electrically.



The floppy connector and ATX power connector are right below the DDR2 dimm sockets.



Check out the six SATA2 ports - I like it that they are not those annoying 90 degree ones that are a pain to plug cables into once the motherboard is mounted inside a case. You can also see the ATA connector, and two of the additional USB connectors here.



Three PCI 32 bit slots, two PCIe 1x slots, and two GPU slots (PCIe 16x and PCIe 4x) along with the WiFi card give you plenty of room for expansion down the road.



Check out the pipes on this baby...



The back I/O panel presents us with six USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 keyboard port (Where's our PS2 mouse port?), optical and SP/DIFF outputs, dual gigabit and dual eSATA connectors, FireWire and six audio jacks - as well as a jack for the WiFI antenna.

While integrated WiFi is an excellent feature for those who need it, personally I am not a big fan of WiFi. Nevertheless, WiFi enabled homes and offices are very common nowadays, and it certainly is handy that you won't have to use an add-in WiFi card from a third party vendor.  If you do NOT need the WiFi capabilities a non-WiFi bundle is available.



You can also see eight voltage regulators on the back of the board (the small black squares on the left side and top left of the board rear).

The BIOS

Asus went with an AMI BIOS - and there are plenty of things that can be tweaked; however most of the interesting settings are under the Advanced -> JumperFree menu.

The main menu and SATA/IDE pages are pretty standard.




Under the Advanced menu, we can get to the interesting stuff - while most of the goodies are under "JumperFree Configuration", there are some useful tweaks to be had under "CPU Configuration" and "Chipset" as well.



It takes two screen captures to show you all of the features available under the JumperFree Configuration - it has it all; memory speed and timings, processor multiplier and FSB frequency, voltage tweaks et al.




The Advanced CPU settings also let you change the multiplier, and allow you to enable/disable virtualization, SpeedStep etc.



The Chipset menu gives you some control over the graphics slots.

There's more on the next page.

BIOS (Continued)

The Onboard Device Configuration lets you enable/disable various on-board peripherals, hence the title.



Its a bit of a waste to have a whole menu screen dedicated to just saying Yes/No to PnP OS



And we have a USB Configuration screen:



The Boot menu sets boot options and priorities:



The Power Menu controls APM settings, and gives us access to the hardware monitor





I really like OC Profiles on the EZ Flash 2 screen; I just wish it was possible to save more than two profiles. Having the option to name said profiles would be even better.



And of course we can save or discard changes, and load defaults from the Exit menu.

Test Setup 

Business Winstone

The Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi turns in a fairly average Winstone performance at stock and at overclocked speeds.



Content Creation

The P5K Deluxe did very well for content creation, taking first place at both stock and overclocked speeds.

WinRAR

The Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi did poorly at stock and only turned in average results when overclocked for WinRAR.



HDTach

We have noticed an unfortunate pattern lately with motherboards arriving at our labs - the burst rates seem to be capped at SATA 1 speeds. Most likely that a poorly written BIOS is to blame.



ATA speeds were mediocre at stock, and nothing to write home about when overclocked.



For USB speeds, the CPU utilization was very good, however the transfer rates were slightly lower than average.

RightMark Read

The Read speeds for the P5K Deluxe WiFi were poor at stock speeds with a 1066FSB, however they significantly improved - as we would expect - with a 1333MHz FSB. The overclocked results were not great.



RightMark Write

At the 1066FSB stock speed, the write speeds were poor, however as above, the results with a 1333MHz FSB were much improved. Unlike with reads, the overclocked write speeds came in third overall, and were quite decent.

RightMark Latency

The P5K Deluxe WiFi fared poorly at the latency tests.



RightMark Bandwidth

Unlike the latency tests, the P5K Deluxe WiFi did very well at the RightMark overall bandwidth tests, taking second place with a 1066FSB, also doing VERY well with a 1333MHz FSB. And most impressive, taking second place when overclocked.

Sandra

The Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi performed as we would expect based strictly on the processor speeds it was run at for the Sandra CPU tests.



The P5K Deluxe did poorly for Sandra Memory bandwidth with a 1066FSB, quite well with a 1333MHz FSB, but did not have what it takes to beat the other overclocked motherboards when it was overclocked.



The Sandra latencies were average at stock, and poor when overclocked.

Lame MP3

In case you are wondering - the results that are at 358 seconds or above were obtained before we switched to using the multi-threaded LAME results, so there is little basis for comparison here, only two other boards have multi-threaded results... and the P5K WiFi falls behind them.



TMPGEnc

While the stock 1066FSB results are not great for the P5K Deluxe WiFi, they are within one percent of first place - so they are not bad; and when overclocked, the results are quite respectable; impressive when you consider how close they are to boards that managed to clock the processors higher.



Xvid

Xvid really likes the Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi, and in this benchmark the results are excellent at stock, and equally impressive when overclocked.

Call of Duty

The P5K Deluxe WiFi does OK for Call of Duty.



Comanche 4

The Comanche 4 results are better than the COD results for the P5K Deluxe WiFi.

Doom 3

Doom 3 likes the Asus P5K DeluxeWiFi - the stock results were extremely close; the results with 1333FSB were quite good, and the overclocked result was less than 0.5% out of first place - Asus did well here.



Quake 4

The Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi did even better for Quake 4 than it did for Doom 3 - good stock results, and quite good overclocked results.

Halo

I am beginning to see a pattern here... as with Doom 3, and Quake 4, the Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi does quite well for Halo.



Jedi Knight

Except at stock, where it tanks, the P5K Deluxe WiFi performs only decently at Jedi Knight.



Unreal Tournament 2004

Similar to what we saw for Doom 3 et al, the P5K Deluxe also does well for Unreal Tournament.

Overclocking

As history shows, Asus enthusiast motherboards generally overclock pretty well, and the P5K Deluxe WiFi is no exception.

I was able to reach a stable 485x7 - namely a 1940MHz FSB (not too shabby at all!) which is an excellent result. Reportedly and supposedly, other people have reached 530MHz, and even higher. However, keeping in mind that I only count stable results; I was able to post and even get to the Windows desktop at over 500MHz, but without real stability. Perhaps some better cooling or subsequent BIOS revisions would allow for stable performance at that staggering 500MHz plus FSB speed, however given that we tried two boards, with multiple BIOS revisions, it would be fair to say that everyone cannot expect to reach 500+ MHz with good stability. Please let us know in our forums how high you were able to go - but also remember that we are only interested in stable results, so it has to survive many hours of stress tests to qualify as stable.

But the one major shortcoming of the P5K Deluxe is that it appears to deliver a higher Vcore than is selected in the "Jumper Free" menu - or CPUZ is not reading the Vcore correctly. The heatpipe based heat sinks work well, however when highly overclocked, they get too hot to keep fingers on for any period of time!  This trend towards overheated motherboards for me is disturbing, since we saw the same problem overclocking NVIDIA 680i based boards, which are even hotter than the P5K by quite a margin!

While the results at 485x7 were very good, I wanted to see if I could do better; and I was able to get the system almost 100% stable at 450x8 1080-4-4-4-12. But alas I had a crash in the Business Winstone Content Creation benchmark during one of the runs, so I cannot in good conscience call it 100% stable.

How did I get the Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi stable at 485x7?

• High quality power supply
• Very high quality memory
• Noctua NH-U 12 CPU cooler with dual 12cm fans
• Vcore at 1.375V (actually seemed to supply 1.425V to cpu)
• Memory timing of 970-4-4-4-12 with Vram at 2.3V
• P35 Northbridge running at 1.55V
• Southbridge running at 1.2V
• Spread Spectrum disabled

Your mileage may of course vary, however I can't complain about a 3.395Mhz Core 2 Duo overclock running with a 1940MHz FSB!

It would not surprise me at all if a bit more cooling was able to get 3.6GHz stable.

Conclusion

The P5K Deluxe WiFi follows in the tradition of Asus enthusiast level motherboards by providing a full complement of features along with very good performance overall, the end result being excellent performance for more modern games and multimedia.  You basically cannot go wrong by selecting this board - however in all fairness, I need only to point out that the Gigabyte P35-DS3R I recently tested ended up with a higher stable maximum FSB, and while it is not quite as feature full as the Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi, it also sports a lower price tag to go with its slightly better performance.

You should also carefully consider the slightly older, but still excellent Asus P5B Deluxe which is available for a lower price  - as you could see in the benchmark results, it usually outperformed the newer P5K Deluxe - and the only significant difference between the P35 and P965 chipsets is DDR3 support - which is not likely to matter before DDR3-1600 - and PCIE 2.0 - which again does not make a lot of difference at this time.

Early in the testing I had some memory performance issues due to the old BIOS shipped with the board, and Asus was quite responsive with sending me not only a new BIOS (twice; 304 and 311), but also a new board - just in case - so that I could complete the testing.

And of quite recently, we have *finally* received some DDR3 memory, so I can now get on with testing the P5K3 Deluxe WiFi - the sibling of the P5K Deluxe that uses DDR 3 memory. It will be interesting to see for myself how DDR2 and DDR3 compare at this early stage in DDR3's development and availability. I look forward to that prospect of competition among the various memory module manufacturers, and perhaps the eventuality that will lead us to 2000MHz+ DDR3 modules. When Nehalem comes out with its integrated memory controllers, DDR3 will hopefully be available at very high speeds with lower latencies than the currently prevalent CAS7 and CAS9 - because that monster of a chip should finally be able to make use of the full potential bandwidth of DDR3 with an on-die memory controller.

The future does indeed look bright.  For now, the P5K Deluxe is an excellent choice for anyone looking for a feature rich enthusiasts' board.

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