This article had many great aspects to it. Great information, thorough testing, useful strap change info, good OCing info.

The one complaint I have is with the conclusions of the overclockiing performance test against the GA-P35-D3R. You wrote:

"The newcomer, our today’s hero – Asus P5K Deluxe – is close behind the leader. However, Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R on the same Intel P35 chipset cannot boast the same great performance. It yields to Asus mainboards on Intel chipsets in all tests."

That's really a ridiculous exaggeration. In all real-world performance tests, the DS3R was within 1% of the P5K, except for the Excel where it was 3%. This difference represents a completely negligible performance difference, which is unnoticeable in the real world!

You should test the power consumption of the Asus P35 series. Several pages like hardware.info, techreport.com and computerbase.de reported higher consumption than the competition.

Nice review. It was interesting to see the benchmark comparison at 3.2 GHz using various FSB values. I would have liked to have seen more applications tested as part of that. It would have been good to see the same comparison with a quad core also, as that may benefit even more from the bandwidth. Maybe next time.

The new Asus P5K overclocks like a mother just like the good old P5B Deluxe. The only question is have they fixed the on board sound problems?

The Analog Devices AD1988B sound chip is unusable on the P5B Deluxe and is the only negative on a great board. Looks like the P5K is using the same AD1988 chip so be prepared to buy a sound card which will use up one of the few available expansion slots.

This is one of the best mobo reviews I've ever seen. Too many reviewers devote too much review space to unpacking the box and ticking through stock features. This kind of testing of strap and bios options, as well as the performance comparison using overclocked systems, is all too rare. Thumbs up!

Nice review, but as "Cuervo" mentioned, then it would have been really nice the test with a Q6600. Maybe another article can include a Q6600 and hopfully a few other boards from the P5K-series (here I'm hoping for a comparison of the P5K Deluxe and P5K WS - Does the other family-members overclock as well as Deluxe?)

Excellent artcile! You have demonstrated a thorough command of the latest understanding of the P35 chipset. Beyond performance however, are the issues of compatibility and stability of the entire system. A number of people are reporting issues with SATA port compatibility with their hardware in either the IDE, AHCI, or RAID configuration. Other people are struggling with the WiFi. A follow-up article discussing these issues would be very helpful.

We need a review that centers on using 4 x 1 Gb sticks + overclocking...aall these new mobo's claim 4 to 8Gb support,and great overclocking abilites...well ?

It's Just Propaganda , i did that myself and i had shit load of problems , i am an expert Overckloker .. so if you wanna buy Mobo. just go to the old Asus ( 680i) Chipset ..

Outstanding Review and all the information I needed to get my X6800 running strong on the PK5 Deluxe.

Thank you!

Say, Printer friendly pages would be real cool as I most often read your reviews offline.

I'm in the market for an mATX mb and someone recommended the ASUS P5K-VM. I'm not looking to overclock it. I mainly do a lot of DVD backups, etc., along with general Internet and other non-demanding tasks.

this was a good driver

this was a good product

nice product

I agree with Mike in the first post, but I won't complain. After everybody chases the Asus I will end up with a better price on the solid Gigabtye board.