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ASUS P5K3 Premium/WiFi AP |
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Written by Dusan Srbljak
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Wednesday, 29 August 2007 |
ASUS is a company that simply constantly produces competitive and high-quality motherboards. As soon as Intel introduced the Core-based CPUs, ASUS' engineers gathered around the design table. Time has passed, and ASUS promoted itself to the position of IT market leader. Top-quality motherboards were leaving ASUS factories unconceivably quickly, while the company itself tried hard to present innovative products. However, they managed to outdo themselves - the motherboard we are presenting this time around is different from everything previously seen.
Intel's newest P35 Express chipset brought along support for both DDR2 and DDR3 memory modules. As DDR3 modules are still not widely interesting because of their high price, ASUS decided to celebrate its 18th birthday in a specific manner. We have in front of us an ASUS P5K3 Premium/WiFi AP motherboard which has 2 GB of DDR3 memory - integrated!!!
| | ASUS P5K3 Premium Black Pearl Edition | | Memory | 2 x DDR3 (Max 2 GB) | | Chipset | Intel P35 Express + ICH9R | | Audio | ADI AD1988B 7.1 Audio Codec | | SATA | 6x SATA2 + 2xeSATA + 1PATA | | LAN | Marvell88E8056 Gigabit + RealtekRTL8110SC LAN 10/100/1000 Mb/s | | RAID | Serial ATA RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5 | | Connectors | 2 PCI Express x16, 2 PCI Express x1, 3 PCI, 10 USB 2.0, 2xIEEE1394, WiFi |
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The Black Pearl, as this motherboard model is suffixed, is supposed to be associated with the limited number of produced models. The bundle is very rich, so, alongside necessary cables, one can also find a WiFi antenna in the package as well. Still, let's start with the board layout. What comes to attention first is the heatpipe system. The quality of this kind of cooling is unquestionable.
When the components on the motherboard are not overclocked, the system is more than efficient. But in case that you've decided to seriously get into overclocking (which is about the only sane thing to do with a motherboard like this), ASUS provided two "turbine" type fans. The quantity of copper taken into consideration, the layout is great. Every CPU cooler can be mounted with no trouble at all. The only remark goes to the position of PCI-E 16x slots.
In case of mounting two dual-slot graphics cards, only one barely usable PCI slot remains available. On the other hand, the end-user that this motherboard is targeting may decide to use water blocks for cooling, so this minus is an optional one. The WiFi card uses a USB port to communicate with the motherboard, which leaves you 10 USB ports at disposal.
What is also interesting is that this is the first motherboard with no PS2 mouse connector whatsoever. All gamers who certainly have a good gaming mouse will salute ASUS getting rid of this ancient heritage. We also fancied the fact that there are LEDs next to each PCI(-E) slot which signalise whether the card was installed properly onto the board or not. We are already well-familiar with ASUS' voltage units, and this model in particular has an 8-phase voltage filtering unit, which, paired with SolidState condensators, works perfectly, ensuring that there are absolutely no voltage dropouts.
This is the first time that we meet an integrated memory solution on a motherboard. Although it seems that the memory was placed in a 90 degree angle on the board, this is not the case. The memory chips were placed directly onto the 10-layer PCB. ASUS claims that this solution increases the overall memory usage up to 50%. As we previously mentioned, the memory chips are kept cool by a copper heatpipe-based cooling body, and there is another cooling body placed on the opposite side of the board, which is a very good idea, as the lack of this one would impact memory overclocking possibilities negatively.
The memory chips themselves were manufactured by Qimonda. They have PC3-10700 specs, which means 666 MHz (1333 MHz effectively) with 8-8-8-24 latencies. What's certainly nice to hear is that ASUS guarantees these chips to be able to work at 750 MHz. We even went a step further and overclocked the chips to a value of 800 MHz (1600 MHz effectively) with 9-7-7-20 latencies. With these settings, we were able to make our Quad-Core CPU work at 3.6 GHz while being synchronised with the DDR3 memory.
Memory voltage can be set at 1.5-2.25 V (in 0.05 V steps), which is really a lot, since DDR3 chips are designed to work at a significantly lesser voltage compared to DDR2 (1.5 V by the book). The voltage required to reach the fantastic and so far unthinkable 1600 MHz was 1.9 V. When we went asynchronous, we managed to reach 820 MHz at 1.95 V, and every MHz over that value resulted in rebooting. Even at this extreme value, the memory was as stable as a rock. Further voltage and latency/sublatency increase provided no benefit, but we are sure that the following versions of the BIOS will increase the overall overclocking potential even more.
The BIOS was expectedly manufactured by AMI. As expected, overclocking options are aplenty. All advanced options are located in the "Jumper Free Configuration" section. CPU voltage can be set at up to 1.7 V in 0.025 steps, and our sample Q6600 processor worked at its peak clock of 3.6 GHz perfectly stably at only 1.4 V. The Northbridge can also be set to work at up ot 1.7 V. Voltage readings are very precise for all components, but we have a remark here as well. This is an old ASUS motherboard problem - it takes up to 10 seconds (!) to enter the "Hardware Monitoring" section of the BIOS. ASUS engineers could finally deal with this problem once and for all.
| 1280x1024 | | | Sandra 2007 | | | Processor | 66.400 / 44.699 | | Multimedia | 395.578 / 214.746 | | Memory | 8.434 / 8.438 | | Latency | 64 ns | | 3DMark06 SM2 / SM3 / CPU | 2624 / 2240 / 5659 | | Quake4 (MediumQ) | 112,8 fps | | FarCry (MediumQ) | 176,5 fps | | Cinebench 9.5 | 1846 | | WinRAR 3.60 | 2.520 KB/s | | Nuclearus 1.0 | 17.948 | | DivX 6.2.5 | 162,1 fps |
Testbed: Intel Quad Q6600 @ 3.6 GHz, 2x1GB Qimonda
DDR3-10700 (2T 9-7-7-20), Nvidia 8600GTS, Win XP SP2 |
ASUS P5K3 Premium/WiFi AP is undoubtedly one of the best motherboards we have ever tested. Bluntly put, it will satisfy all of your needs. Combined with the innovations it presents, there is little left except award it with our most prestigious award. |
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