New Asus P5K 'Bearlake' mobo out already!

[Toobad]

Anybody in the throws of planning an upgrade may do well to consider this next-gen mobo as a way of 'future-proofing' (if such a thing exists) their next rig. Of course, on the downside you may be exposing yourself to much wailing and gnashing of teeth by being an early adopter of a new chipset.

Anyway, Tekheads had 5 in stock this morning and haemorrhaging 140 shiny gold coins of the realm will buy your place at the bleeding edge of technology. Head over to Hardwarezone if you want to check out the full (preview) skinny on this mobo and share your thoughts back here.

[wja96]

Overclockers have had 2 boards listed since Thursday

The ASUS P5K at £124+delivery and the ASUS P5K Wifi Deluxe at £177+delivery.

They also have the P5K3 on pre-order, but I doubt many peopel are taking that offer up as it's DDR3 only.

[Lucio]

Silly question time, do they also support the current range of Core 2 Duos? I.e. can you buy one now, get a nice cheap processor and upgrade later on to the Penryn processors?

[Clunk]

Still got the dreaded jmicron controller and almost £200, wonder how much the extreme guinnea pig versions will be, and I wonder if there will be any drivers for vista this year?

Edit: Bearlake than never I suppose

[Reapsy]

I was looking at these new boards too but I find it very difficult
to spent more than £90-100 on a motherboard given the frequency with which new sockets are brought in.

Add in the fact that they probably haven't finished a stable bios for them before releasing the boards and I ordered a PB5-E instead.

Edit arr Clunk don't give up your day job !

[TheAnimus]

problem is that you don't get the same level of support that you do if you buy a serverboard. By that i mean if you spent £250 at the like of supermicro. Granted overclocking isn't the target audiance, instead stability is, i've had such fantastic support from supermicro granted this was a £380 motherboard, but thats not bad when you take into account the scsi controller.

What i'm getting at is that these boards aimed at the growing enthusast market dosen't seam too come with improved support.

Seams too be almsot a rip off!

[amjedm]

I would never spend that much on a motherboard, ever since I bought a Gigabyte Pentium motherboard for £155

[dave87]

What mobo did you go for TheAnimus? I'm tempted to build a rig that I could use for a few years, and a slightly better motherboard might be a consideration....

[TheAnimus]

this was a supermicro http://www.supermicro.com/products/m...5/X6DA8-G2.cfm

very outdated now. But running 2 graphics cards at the time was still very new on that bus. Turns out there was a problem with the cheapo one i was using as my second. bios update from supermicro fixed this, now it was hardly written just for me, but i've never got through too such intelegent people so swiftly (i think i did have to dial netherlands, but thats cheaper than an 0845 )

[kalniel]

Dreaded JMicron? Those chips have almost single handedly saved motherboards from being incompatible with most current generation stuff. And they work too, unlike certain motherboards not playing ball with Vista and SATA hdd..

[Clunk]

Dreaded JMicron? Those chips have almost single handedly saved motherboards from being incompatible with most current generation stuff. And they work too, unlike certain motherboards not playing ball with Vista and SATA hdd..

Yes, the dreaded JMicron, Ive used several C2D boards with this controller on, and all have had problems that could be fixed by disabling it.

[Agent]

Yes, the dreaded JMicron, Ive used several C2D boards with this controller on, and all have had problems that could be fixed by disabling it.

Can agree with you totally on this one. Its on a lot of forums too, has been a fair number of issues with them (no idea of its the hardware / drivers / or the OEMs implementation of the chip) though.

I think its a mixture of drivers and hardware. Things like S3 have been broken at driver level, and there has also been issues when detecting at POST / BIOS level.

[IAmATeaf]

I've never had a problem with the rebadges jmicron controller on my ds3p but have read about the problems that others have encountered. I suppose it helps that I did a lot of reading before hand and that when I got my mobo the chipset and mobo had sort of matured.

[kalniel]

Have to say the jmicron controller saved me with the S3. Vista kept breaking the S3's ICH8 sata hdd connection on install, only solution was to use the jmicron port, at which point it worked flawlessly.

So in my experience the S3 actually needed the jmicron

[Clunk]

Have to say the jmicron controller saved me with the S3. Vista kept breaking the S3's ICH8 sata hdd connection on install, only solution was to use the jmicron port, at which point it worked flawlessly.

So in my experience the S3 actually needed the jmicron

It sounds like the intel controller is clashing with the JMicron

I had the DS3 and the SATA would suddenly stop working on that until the Jmicron was disabled in the bios. That was one of the reasons I hated that board so much

[kalniel]

Hehe maybe. I didn't have time to try out all combinations. Right now it's happily (I think) working with the sata hdd on jmicron, and sata dvd on ICH8.