Conclusion

It is pretty hard to put together our final verdict about Asus P5K mainboard. It actually has only one serious drawback: inconvenient location of the PATA connector. All other remarks we made throughout this review are not so simple. We have already mentioned the three-phase CPU voltage regulator circuitry – not quite a drawback, but also not an advantage. Or the absence of the COM-port on the rear panel – it is not really a disadvantage these days, but also hardly a plus. However, the COM port is laid out on the PCB, next to the power supply and FDD connectors, so it is an advantage, isn’t it? But the board comes with no rear panel bracket carrying a COM port, so it is a drawback in the end. And what if you don’t really need this port, then you wouldn’t want to pay for additional components in the bundle that you will never use – so it is still a plus. Or a minus?

I hope you understand me here. I can’t say that Asus P5K is a bad board, but at the same time I cannot claim that it is an excellent one. It is a good normal board. And I would definitely recommend it as a good option. But not now.

The first mainboards to start selling cost about $190. Now the prices have dropped down a little bit, but not too much. The new mainboards cannot boast any significant advantages over the Intel P965 Express based solutions. It is still too early to think about CPUs with 333MHz bus support as Core 2 Duo E6x50 processors will be announced only in mid summer. It makes even less sense to buy new boards for the sake of 45nm processors support. These CPUs will only come out in early 2008 and it will definitely take a while before they get widely spread and become affordable. Mainboards on Intel P35 Express core logic, and of course, Asus P5K, can replace their predecessors, but I would recommend to wait a little bit for the prices to go down. If you are not going to upgrade to new CPUs with 333MHz bus, then you may be quite happy with an Intel P965 Express based board, as they should become even better value now that the new mainboards are becoming more and more widely spread. So, looks like the summer is going to be not only hot, but also pretty exciting.