P5K Deluxe Wifi AP Thread.

[Clunk]

Hopefully, this will be a worthy successor to the P5B Deluxe Wifi AP.

Some pics first.

Suspicious - No footprint.


Box.


Board fully clothed.

Note how close the southbridge is to the main PCI-E slot. This makes it almost impossible to use the larger heatpipe coolers such as the HR-05 or Noctua if you are using an air cooled card. The good news is that if you are using a waterblock, a HR-05 just fits with a few MM to spare. The SLI version of the HR-05 should fit better.


Arty farty shot.


CPU area before interference. Plenty of room, and the mosfets arent partially hidden like on some of the 965 boards.


Stupid Fecking Eejit sockets. For me, this is a silly design error. If you are running a large graphics card like an 8800GTX, 2 of the 6 SATA ports are obscured, and the location of the SATA ports makes it really fiddly for plugging cables in. As much as I hated them, the angled connectors from the Commando/Striker would have been better here.


Arty farty shot 2.


Back of the board.


Back of the mosfets.


Heatpipe sits flat for a change. Unlike almost every Asus board Ive used recently, the heatpipes sit nice and flush and might actually work. I wont be trying them though.


And so does this one.


And this one.


This one was only making proper contact at either end


Southbridge


Bearlakeyness.


Board Nekkid.


Thermal tape for HR-09 mod.

[Clunk]

Sticky. The HR-09 heatsinks wouldnt fit on the P5K, one side was too long, one side was too short, so I fitted the clip to one end of the HR-09 and tried to use double sided Sekisui thermal tape, but unfortunately it wasnt sticky enough and one end kept lifting up.


More Tape.


HR-09 in place (not for long!).


Both in place.


Tother one.


Backplate held on.


Backplate. This thing reduced my temps by around 18-20c on the P5B, and its less than a fiver, so worth doing.


HR-09 Mod - screwed into motherboard standoff hole. As mentioned above, the clips wouldnt fit in the holes, so I used a clip at one end and then removed the pushpin at the other and used a 8mm M3 screw and screwed it directly into one of the motherboard standoffs


HR-09 mod - Unfortunately there were no spare holes to bolt this one down, so I made a little bracket and bolted it to the bottom left CPU bolt. Works well, and I am really surprised how hot these get.


Some overclocking results later hopefully, thats if it doesnt explode in a ball of flames

[Harkin]

U lucky bugga, looks like a damn nice board. Hope the OC goes well but Im sure u will find a way. Too bad about those Sata connectors, cud u stick ur gtx in and take a pic? Other than that its well laid out. Im sure TR will make a new HR-09 soon

[dave87]

Very Nice, though I'd probably hold on to the P5B incase this doesn't clock as well as it should...

[this_is_gav]

Note how close the southbridge is to the main PCI-E slot. This makes it almost impossible to use the larger heatpipe coolers such as the HR-05 or Noctua if you are using an air cooled card.

Why would you need or even want such a heatsink on the southbridge? Even giving it RAID-a-plenty it doesn't do much...

[Clunk]

Why would you need or even want such a heatsink on the southbridge? Even giving it RAID-a-plenty it doesn't do much...

Bought it for the northbridge, ended up watercooling it, seemed a shame to waste it.

It does get quite hot, although admittedly, its nowhere near the 680i boards.

[Supershanks]

Why would you need or even want such a heatsink on the southbridge?

Same reason as clunk i've this on my sb Swiftech MCX159 Northbridge Cooler It makes more sense to say if you have it flaunt it, why leave it in the box when it can help performance, personnaly i'm running with a pci-e bus speed of 112, reckon cooling sb doesn't harm that??

Sorry to detract from the P5K clunk.
Your technical analysis of the sata ports

Stupid Fecking Eejit sockets. For me, this is a silly design error. If you are running a large graphics card like an 8800GTX, 2 of the 6 SATA ports are obscured, and the location of the SATA ports makes it really fiddly for plugging cables in. As much as I hated them, the angled connectors from the Commando/Striker would have been better here.

looks right.

hows yer clocks & temps??

[Iain M]

looks like a nice board , shame about the Sata ports tho...

hows yer clocks & temps??

Some overclocking results later hopefully, thats if it doesnt explode in a ball of flames

[Supershanks]

Iain M
Quote:
Originally Posted by Clunk
Some overclocking results later hopefully, thats if it doesnt explode in a ball of flames

Thanks liam

Cheers me old mince pies ain't what they were

[Iain M]

lol

[this_is_gav]

why leave it in the box when it can help performance, personnaly i'm running with a pci-e bus speed of 112, reckon cooling sb doesn't harm that??

Really help the performance?

It's doing nothing for the x16 PCIe (which goes solely through the northbridge on P965), it ain't doing anything for hard drive speed (ICH8(R)), as you're limited by the mechanical speed that can't even saturate SATA let alone SATA2, unless you have a solid state hard drive or 2 up your sleeve. USB is limited by the USB 2.0 interface, and Gigabit LAN ain't getting close either. Onboard audio doesn't care how much bandwidth you've got or the speed it's at - it's just interested in packets.

Even if you add them all together you're gaining nothing even if the extra cooling allows you more of an overclock. The more you push it, all you're getting back is a greater risk of hard drive corruption.

[saltynay]

Really help the performance?

It's doing nothing for the x16 PCIe (which goes solely through the northbridge on P965), it ain't doing anything for hard drive speed (ICH8(R)), as you're limited by the mechanical speed that can't even saturate SATA let alone SATA2, unless you have a solid state hard drive or 2 up your sleeve. USB is limited by the USB 2.0 interface, and Gigabit LAN ain't getting close either. Onboard audio doesn't care how much bandwidth you've got or the speed it's at - it's just interested in packets.

Even if you add them all together you're gaining nothing even if the extra cooling allows you more of an overclock. The more you push it, all you're getting back is a greater risk of hard drive corruption.

just a quick correction most ssd disks use ide connection

[Supershanks]

1)

The more you push it, all you're getting back is a greater risk of hard drive corruption.

the pci-e bus is quite robust hd data corruption due to high pci-e speed kicks in around 120. running 4xraid 0 would have it me already i think otherwise. running with a higher pci-e clock:-
a) avoids rthe switch people sometimes complain of when you loose x16 the gfx sdwitching to x1.
b) speeds up gfx subsystem.

2)As the temp sensor shows 32.5C with the cooler on i think your claim that the sb runs "cool" is a bit misleading. As i said earlier it ain't gonna hurt anything.

the sb temp is running with auto voltage SB(sata) =1.52v
& SB Vcore 1.06

3)

Even if you add them all together you're gaining nothing even if the extra cooling allows you more of an overclock

Sorry i'm gaining the extra oc

4) Whos rig is it asnyway, didn't realise there was an OC police

[Clunk]

500fsb with Q6600.

[Supershanks]

That's what we're here 2 say great going Clunk
Gotta admit not managed a decent 500 without crashing my e6600 just doesn't like low multis it's the strain on the nb bus i think.

Nice

[Clunk]

That crashes under load, but that particular cpu wouldnt go that high on the P5B, stable or not.

I blame it on the SB heatsink