Motherboards

- ASUS P5B Deluxe (P965)



The P965 chipset from Intel has been the chipset of choice for performance Core 2 Duo users that opt for a single graphics card solution. We emphasize the fact that it is for single card users for the plain fact that anyone serious about his or her graphics performance is going to be looking at an SLI setup from Nvidia and be using the nForce 680i chipset.

The advantage that the P965 had over the 975X and even the nForce 680i was that the overclocking ability was uncanny. High front side bus levels could be achieved, and with so many people using the chipset even newcomers to overclocking managed to get their 2.4GHz E6600 running at 3GHz with very little effort.

While the memory bandwidth was generally slightly lagging between the older but more expensive 975X, with such huge FSB speeds it did not matter, the memory performance could be made to catch up and then overtake anything that the 975X was spitting out.

The ASUS P5B Deluxe is one of our personal favorite P965 boards, it was used on our VGA test bed for a long time and managed to run our E6600 between 3GHz and 3.33GHz without much effort at all. For that reason it is being used today to see how the P35 performance has changed from the P965.


- ASUS P5K Deluxe



Performance P965 boards are coming off the shelf left right and center, and with restocking slowing down, the P35 chipset from Intel is coming in as a replacement. The P35 is capable of handling the new Yorkfield and Wolfdale processors coming later this year which carry a 1333MHz FSB. Also along with this we have support for DDR-2 800MHz or DDR-3 1066MHz. The P5k Deluxe from ASUS carries support for DDR-2 800MHz memory only. With three versions of the newest southbridge the ASUS P5K Deluxe brings with it the RAID wielding ICH9R version.


- ASUS P5K3 Deluxe



This board looks almost identical to the P5K Deluxe. Looking physically at the board the only really noticeable difference is the heat pipe design. We of course also have the DDR-3 memory slots on this model thought at first glance you could not really tell; in all honesty it probably would not be until you tried to install DDR-2 memory into that you would notice something a little weird.



As you can see the P5K3 on the left with the orange slots has an extra pipe on the right side of the CPU socket.