ASUS P5K series motherboards
Externally, both the motherboards differ in only the cooling
system.
Note that cooling of the chipset on the Premium board is the
same as it is on the Deluxe version. Since the three boards are based
on the same PCB design, their assembly traits are the same. In
particular, there is the only issue with blocking the DIMM slot latches
by a PCI Express video card.
No other problems will come up for the assembly operator. The
power connectors are installed over the edges of the board: 24-pin - on
the bottom edge, with a 8-pin on the right-hand edge. We note that the
boards have retained a backward compatibility to the "old" PSUs, e.g.
with 20+4 cables. At the same time, the unused pins of the additional
connector are closed with a plastic lid:
Near the CPU socket, there is a 4-pin CPU_FAN connector for a
respective cooler.
Besides it, there are four more 3-pin connectors: CHA_FAN1 -
near the rear panel, with CHA_FAN2 to CHA_FAN4 on the bottom edge of
the board.
On the north bridge of the Premium model, there is a passive
radiator connected to the radiator on power supply module with two heat
pipes. Also, using the heat pipe the heat from the south bridge is
transferred to the north bridge. Note that on both radiators on the
power supply module you can install turbine fans which come as bundled
items.
Cooling of the chipset on P5K-E is much simpler: on the north
bridge, there is a radiator linked to the radiator on the power supply
module with a single heat pipe. But there is no passive cooling for the
second half of components of the power supply module. Also on the south
bridge there is a small radiator, without a heat pipe.
Under the north bridge of both the motherboards, there are
four 240-pin DIMM slots for DDR2 memory modules. They are partitioned
into two groups with two slots in each. The first two slots refer to
the first controller channel, with the other two to the second
controller.
Note that the board offers support for
DDR2-533/667/800/889/1066 memory, with the maximum memory capacity
being 8GB. Once voltage is applied to the board, a large green LED in
the bottom-left corner of the board lights up.
On each of the boards, there are two PCI Express x16 slots
(both with latches) which are meant for video cards.
Because of the inner limitations of P35 chipset, merely 2 or 4
PCI Express bus lanes are allocated to the second PCI Express x16 slot.
Apart from the listed slots, the boards use three "regular" PCI slots
as well as two PCI Express x1 slots on each.
Both the motherboards use the ICH9R south bridge with a
radiator. Therefore, the boards support 6 SerialATA II ports, which
allows merging disks into RAID arrays of levels 0,1,5, and 10.
Besides, two extra SerialATA II devices can be plugged in to
the JMB363 controller by JMicron (the chipset is in the upper left
corner of the board).
Both the ports are brought to the rear panel of the board. The
same controller provides support for one ParallelATA channel.
Therefore, as many as 10 hard disks (8 SATA + 2 PATA) altogether can be
plugged in to the motherboards.
Then, the boards use only 10 USB 2.0 ports (of 12 supported by
ICH9R). Six ports of them are on the rear panel, with 4 more plugged in
with a plate (the Premium and Deluxe boards come bundled with 1 plate
for 2 ports). The reduction in the number of USB ports is related to
the installation of a Wi-Fi module.
Besides, the motherboards support the IEEE1394 ("Firewire").
For that, there is an additional FX3227-100 controller made by Agere.
Therefore, the boards offer support for 2 Firewire ports each:
one mounted on the rear panel, with the other one connected with a
plate (available only in the package bundles of the Deluxe and Premium
models).
Then, both the motherboards offer 8-channel integrated Intel
High Definition Audio, with AD1988B chip used as the codec.
A few words on the network support: P5K Premium uses two
high-speed LAN controllers: RTL8110SC (Gigabit Ethernet) connected to
the PCI bus,
and Marvell 88E8056 (Gigabit Ethernet) connected to the PCI
Express (x1) bus.
P5K-E uses the same controller, and it is the only one: the
RTL8110SC chip is not unsoldered. In the end, there is only one
connector RJ-45 on the rear panel of P5K-E.
The rear panel of the motherboards is of quite nonstandard
configuration, albeit familiar through the review of P5K Deluxe:
As we can see, engineers at ASUS have completely given up
support for the LPT port and COM ports (one COM port is implemented
with a plate but it is missing in the bundle). Missing is also a PS/2
connector to plug in a mouse. On the other hand, USB 2.0 ports are in
abundance; there are two SerialATA II and one Firewire, as well as an
optical and coaxial SP-DIF output.
The boards have the only CLRTC jumper - to clear the CMOS
settings (near the battery).
Now on to the BIOS settings.
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