Intel P35

The Intel P35 chipset may be an evolution but there's very little going for it if this first look at the basic performance Asus's P5K Deluxe is anything to go by. A P35 board will provide more chipset straps for overclocking as well as support for future processors and a couple of extra goodies, but investing in a P965 should give you very similar performance and certainly won't short change you.

There are dozens of very good P965 boards out on the market from exceptionally cheap to "enthusiast" expensive, and in time it will be interesting to see what else manufacturers will do to tempt us to their P35 offerings. So far, we've had three Bearlake boards in house with dual PCI Express x16 slots, but none of them have allowed us to enable ATI CrossFire yet, despite Intel confirming the chipset does support it.

We've heard the very recent 0304 BIOS from Asus does support it, but instead of limiting yourself to x16 and x4, you're still better off investing in a dual x8 lane 975X, RD600 or waiting until September for a dual x16 X38 board.

We'll look at overclocking, DDR3 support and power consumption of retail P35 boards later in the week, but at the moment there's really very little the P35 has to offer over P965.

Asus P5K Deluxe

The P5K Deluxe is another well laid out Asus board, with a ton of functionality and features, no immediate compatibility problems and it looks good to boot. The may be a "problem" with performance, in that it's not providing the additional increment we expected from the P35, but that could change a bit with future revisions.

The rear I/O is inventive an continues to be forward looking without alienating those who use a PS2 keyboard, and the heatpipe/heatsink cooling solution means that all the chipset and power regulation components are cooled silently.

Even using this early BIOS we've had superb stability once we found slightly loose memory timings that worked. The software included on the Asus CD works perfectly with our Windows XP SP2 installation and Asus even includes an utility that automatically installs all the mainboard drivers with just a single "OK".

Released today at around £170/$240, this is undoubtedly an expensive motherboard, but hopefully as more resellers take up stock of the board and more competition hits the market, prices will drop. As it stands, the board is just too expensive and offers too little over the Commando and P5B Deluxe WiFi AP, despite its numerous positive points.

Power Consumption

For our power consumption measurements, our system was configured as follows:

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, 2GB OCZ FlexXLC PC9200, Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX, Tagan 700W Easycon XL PSU, DVD Drive, Seagate 7200.9 200GB Hard Drive, USB mouse, PS2 keyboard, Ethernet connected, One CPU fan connected and all on-board hardware enabled.


Power consumption is 18 percent higher at idle but only 5 percent higher under load. Any chipset saving on the P5K Deluxe is masked by the fact the board has an extra Ethernet controller, more USB ports, Wireless LAN and eSATA on top of the Commando. The Commando does have the rear I/O LCD and audio daughterboard, but it's still far less to maintain at idle. 975X is higher still, at around 156W idle and 210W load with a 7900 GTX, but that chipset is now nearly two years old now.

Final Thoughts

Intel has brought out another solid chipset that works well but it isn't spectacular. That's mainly because the P965 chipset was such a great step forwards for the chip giant. Based on our initial look at the Asus P5K Deluxe board, it doesn't warrant the extra cost over the P5B Deluxe WiFi AP or any other feature equivalent P965 motherboard that will very likely be cheaper.

Look out for full reviews of some more Bearlake boards later this week, and we'll be revisiting the P5K Deluxe when we've got final hardware in house.