Talal said:
I need to buy an Asus motherboard for a new PC. P5K seems to be a good
choice, yet there are so many variations of this motherboard. Some have
small heat sinks, some have elaborate heat sinks. Please give me some
advise on how to narrow things down. Thanks.
There is a comparison tool here. It works best in Internet Explorer.
I've had trouble in the past with Firefox.
http://www.asus.com/products_compare.aspx
It gives you a comparison chart like this. The formatting of the
information is not the best, and in fact, when the marketing department
entered the information for some motherboards, the tables were not
complete.
http://www.asus.com/products_compare_show.aspx?array_model=1637,1646,1749,1921,1705&l1=3
To select a motherboard, you can start with the "must have" criterion.
For example, only a workstation class board, will have a PCI-X slot
for older RAID controller cards. The desktop boards will have PCI Express
video card slots, PCI Express x1 slots for add in cards, and the older
vanilla PCI slots.
Some motherboards have DDR3 memory slots, and some are DDR2. DDR2 is
currently the cheapest memory type.
None of the P5K boards support SLI, due to the restrictions of the
Nvidia SLI drivers. The boards may support Crossfire (if they have
two video slots). The P35 doesn't have enough PCI Express lanes to
do the job properly, but some boards may do a better job of splitting
the lanes than others.
As the price goes up, you might get the odd extra peripheral chip,
such as an extra LAN controller, a Firewire port and so on.
The Southbridge chip used, could offer four or six ports. The six
port chip supports various software RAID modes. The four port does
not. The four port may not support AHCI either (adds hotplug support
as a feature as far as I know).
Once you narrow down the feature set a bit, the comparison chart
will show you that some boards have more overclocking features
(finer adjustments) than others.
Something which is not documented in the Asus charts, is how many
phases are used to power the processor. The rules are a bit
fluid, because a three phase regulator with large phases, may be
able to match an eight phase regulator with small phases. You may
see larger toroids, heavier wire, bigger MOSFETS or more of them,
as a sign that the phases are more powerful. The CPUSupport chart
on the Asus site, should also be checked for signs that high power
processors are supported.
For example, if I look at this one ($179), I see eight small black
squares, which are the coils. There is a ninth cylindrical coil,
which is the filter on entry. (One input filter, eight output filters
if you will.) The phases are small, but generally, seeing eight phases,
implies a decent power handling capability.
http://c1.neweggimages.com/NeweggImage/productimage/13-131-182-04.jpg
I cannot select the motherboard for you, because I don't know what
you want.
When you think you've identified a board you want, check the Newegg
customer reviews, for comments on stability and whether the motherboard
was delivered non-functional. The vip.asus.com forums can also help
with comments.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16813131182
http://vip.asus.com/forum/topic.aspx?board_id=1&model=P5K+Deluxe/WiFi-AP&SLanguage=en-us
Paul
