Introduction

Though we now have Intel's top-end X38 chipset making its presence felt in the market with companies dishing up fancy new motherboards based on it, the mainstream P35 chipset, while lacking a couple of major features which X38 offers it is built on a solid platform, costs less and performs at an incredible speed when put to the test by the right companies.

ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI and Universal abit to name a few have managed to get some extreme power out of their P35 boards both based on DDR2 and DDR3; that's what makes P35 so good, the best of both worlds. If you still have DDR2 and want to upgrade to P35 there are boards out there for you, and if you're just setting up a new system DDR3 versions are out there and making big waves allowing for a smother upgrade to X38 in the future.

So far we have looked at a few P35 boards both based on DDR2 and DDR3 memory technologies from the major players like GIGABYTE, ASUS, MSI, Universal abit and even from the more unfamiliar companies like Foxconn and ECS. All of these offer a pretty good design and feature set depending on what your intent is.

Today we are looking at another ASUS P35 board for the more mainstream/budget sector. We looked at the P5K-E Deluxe board which had everything you're going to want built onto the board including Wireless USB Ethernet. Today we take a look at the ASUS P5K, the mainstream version with a few missing features. How does it stack up? Let's have a look.