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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).