Asus P5K ”vanilla” - speed of its LAN and other things

[marshspiers]

Hi there...

I’m considering getting the ASUS P5K. Does anybody have an opinion about the LAN controller on the board? The specs just say it’s a ”PCIe Gb LAN controller featuring AI NET2”.

Whereas more expensive versions (such as the P5K-E and Deluxe) have ”Gigabit LAN controllers, featuring AI NET2 Marvell88E8056® PCI-E Gigabit LAN controllers.”

I know nothing about LAN, so could you tell me if getting the vanilla P5K would mean a slower internet connection for me? I’m not worried so much about downloading huge files, more about FPS when gaming.

Also more generally, is there anything ”wrong” with the vanilla P5K that would make it a bad choice for gaming, compared to the P5K-E? (Quality of its... ”parts” or something. I don’t mean feature-wise, the features on the vanilla board are adequate for me, don’t need crossfire, wifi, etc.)

Hope someone can shed some light...

Cheers. :_)

[Rosaline]

I would imagine that the P5K and P5K-E actually have identical network controllers, I believe they both use the one built into the P35 chipset.

As for the gaming performance of the networking chipset, for internet gaming you are not likely to notice much difference between any of them. You could pay through the nose for something like the Killer NIC, but that only provides marginal improvements at best.

As for the other differences between the boards, the P5K-E is better for overclocking and heat management, and I believe it has a more advanced power regulation system which potentially could make your computer more stable. If the price difference is not a concern, go with P5K-E, however the practical differences for most activities between the two boards would be marginal.

[marshspiers]

Thanks for replying, Rosaline.