Gaming Performance:

The Abit board benefits ever so slightly from PCI-Express 2.0 when coupled with the GeForce 8800 GT in Quake Wars: Enemy Territory and Crysis, however between the boards there's very little in it - a frame or two at most. The Asus P5K Pro doesn't make use of the extra performance we saw in 2D here, with the titles remaining graphics focused at a medium-high resolution.

Power Consumption

While we issue a swift reminder than all the boards have different components, therefore a different power use, it's also interesting to see the P5K Pro tipping the scales and using a few watts more than its competition under load. In addition to switching power phase use between four phase and eight phase depending on CPU load, the slightly higher wattage when its EPU is enabled is attributed to the fact it's also overclocked the processor from a 333MHz front side bus to 350MHz, increasing the CPU speed from 2.66GHz to 2.80GHz for just 3W more. In much the same way, leaving it idle underclocks it and it says 4W at the wall by clocking the 333MHz down to 300MHz, making a 2.40GHz CPU (more than enough to do idle/background tasks).

The Asus board seems to work natively more efficiently than the Gigabyte EP35-DS4, which has a 13W difference and doesn't even overclock/underclock the CPU the same way; it merely adjusts the phase use with more finesse between two-four-six-eight (etc). However the Gigabyte does come out trumps by loading to 7W less than the Asus.

We found that the AI Suite software included on the CD didn't actually work - we had to download the latest version from Asus' website before the EPU worked as intended. Since it needs to be calibrated before it can be ran, we found that trying to calibrate it with the older software caused all sorts of problems and adversely affected the system by increasing its power use quite considerably. We discussed it with Asus and found the issue had already been raised with HQ, but we'd still recommend downloading the latest version from the website, just in case you get a board from an early batch where the DVD has not been updated.

Unfortunately the entire AI Suite software (regardless of version) is still about as intuitive as brain surgery: it encourages the user to user to "change gear" into different modes and click the "futuristic" but bloatware looking buttons. What happen to a simple drop down box and "apply"?

Compared to other boards - the MSI P35 Platinum that doesn't include any specific power saving of its own performs remarkably well. Even though its idle wattage is a few watts more, its load power use is the lowest across the board. Even the Abit with its "hot" X38 chipset competes respectively in the power stakes too.