Functionality

Judging from our experience with the mainboards that arrive in our lab we start noticing more and more often that most of the features these new solutions have to offer are implemented by the chipsets they are based on. This is actually not surprising at all, since contemporary chipsets features extremely rich characteristics thus saving the developers time and trouble looking for additional onboard controller-chips. Most contemporary mainboards usually take only an additional IEEE1394 controller and a sound codec and sometimes also an ATA RAID controller. However, there are some exceptions to this rule. For example, the Asus P5K Deluxe / WiFi mainboard we are talking about today differs significantly from other Intel P35 based mainboards in terms of available features.

First of all, I would like to say that this mainboard boasts extremely rich networking capabilities: besides all the usual stuff it also features two Gigabit network ports and a wireless network controller supporting 802.11b/g protocols. It is remarkable that Asus engineers decided to implement two Gigabit network ports without involving the network functions of the Intel P35 chipset and without installing an additional dual-port controller. Instead, they equipped Asus P5K Deluxe with two independent chips: Marvell 88E8056 with PCI Express x1 interface and Realtek RTL8110SC with PCI interface.

As for the WiFi controller based on Realtek RTL8187L chip, it communicates with the chipset via the USB 2.0 bus.

However, it doesn’t affect its features and the wireless network card works just fine as a station and as an access point.

Three networking interfaces is not the only peculiarity of Asus P5K Deluxe mainboard. Another remarkable thing is the availability of two PCI Express x16 graphics card slots, although the Intel P35 chipset doesn’t officially support this feature. Nevertheless, Asus engineers solved this problem by connecting the physical PCI Express x16 slot to PCI Express x1 or x4 bus. The operational mode for this bus is set in the BIOS Setup, and if the faster 4x mode is enabled, then one of the PCI Express x1 slots will be disconnected.

Thanks to the two graphics card slots, Asus P5K Deluxe mainboard supports multi-GPU configurations. Namely, ATI Crossfire technology that can work as PCI Express x16 + PCI Express x4 in this case. As for Nvidia SLI, it doesn’t work (yet?) on Asus P5K Deluxe because of the limitations set in Nvidia’s drivers.

Speaking of the advantages of the new Asus P5K Deluxe we would like to stress the fact that being based on Intel P35 chipset, the board is compatible not only with all existing processors on Core micro-architecture, but also with the upcoming CPUs from the same family. Namely, it will support processors using 1333MHz bus as well as the new Penryn models. Note that at the same time the board has limited compatibility with some older processor models. It doesn’t work with processors supporting 533MHz bus, such as Celeron CPUs on NetBurst micro-architecture, for instance.

Asus P5K Deluxe mainboard is designed to work with DDR2 SDRAM. The support for new DDR3 SDRAM is implemented in another Asus product called P5K3 Deluxe. DDR2 modules can be installed into four corresponding DIMM slots. The modules should be installed in pairs in the corresponding color-coded slots to ensure that the memory will run in dual-channel mode. Note that Asus P5K Deluxe can take maximum 8GB of memory, however, the board doesn’t support memory modules with over 2GB capacity. You can only have over 4GB of RAM available in 64-bit operating systems.

There are six SATA ports on the board for hard disk drives. These ports are implemented via the ICH9R South Bridge. The integrated Serial ATA controller of this South Bridge supports NCQ, 3Gbit/s data transfer rate, RAID arrays of types 0, 1, 0+1 and 5, and Matrix Storage Technology. As for the Parallel ATA interface, Intel P35 doesn’t offer it at all, that is why Asus P5K Deluxe uses an additional JMicron LMB363 controller for that. Besides one Parallel ATA-133 channel, this chip also provides two eSATA ports (SATA on-the-Go, according to Asus) that have been laid out to the rear panel. These external ports also support NCQ, higher interface speed, RAID0 and RAID1.

The mainboard features 10 USB 2.0 ports implemented via the chipset South Bridge. As for the two IEEE1394 ports, they are connected to the external Agere FW322 PCI controller.

The sound tract on Asus P5K Deluxe uses high-definition eight-channel ADI AD1988B codec. It is one of the best codecs available today that provides excellent sound quality and come with quality drivers. Besides, it can also send different audio streams to different playback channels at the same time and offers special technologies for efficient noise reduction when working with voice applications.