Starting off as we normally do here at TweakTown we are looking at the package that the board comes in as well as what extras you get for your money. The ASUS P5K board isn’t the cheapest P35 board on the market, but it’s also not going to break the bank allowing you to afford a more decent processor and RAM combo. The ASUS P5K comes in a similar black box which the P5K-E came in. Very little info is displayed on the front apart from some marketing hype about native DDR2-1066 support. This may be technically true due to divider options when overclocking at 333MHz FSB. However, this is not an official standard and is not guaranteed to be 100% stable.
The back of the box contains a full spec sheet on the board’s features, the exact same one that is on the website so that you get a full rundown of the slots, chipset and feature support. At the top of the box on the right you get a full colour photo of the board in all its glory making it easy to determine if this is the board for you.
ASUS has never been one to skimp on the reading material or the software, and the P5K doesn’t disappoint either. A black fully fledged users manual is included along with a small getting started booklet for basic setup on getting the unit inside the case. Two CDs are included as well; a driver CD contains all the drivers for Windows XP and Vista, both 64 and 32-bit. However, no Linux drivers are included so users who want to use Linux on this board will find it a task finding all the drivers necessary to get the system up and running.
ASUS does however skimp a bit on the cables, out of the five onboard SATA connectors you only get two data cables and a single power splitter with two drive support. We would like to have seen at least four as that’s what the board’s native southbridge setup supports. An IDE and FDD cable make up the final bundle along with the Rear I/O shield.
