ASUS P5K-E WiFi vs. Gigabyte P35-DS4
P5K-E Board Layout:
Starting with the ASUS P5K-E WiFi motherboard, on the upper right hand side are the four system memory slots. Intel's P35 Chipset supports DDR2 and DDR3, but the P5K-E goes strictly with DDR2-1066/800/667 support. The P35 supports up to DDR2-800 speeds but DDR2-1066 can be achieved on this motherboard using the ASUS Super Memspeed Technology. Filling the area between the memory slots and the edge of the black motherboard PCB is the 24-pin ATX power and FDD connectors. Scattered along the right hand side of the PCB are four 3-pin fan headers.
Going south on the motherboard is the ICH9R Southbridge, which is passively cooled by a small copper heatsink secured using two pushpins. Also in this area are the CMOS battery, six Serial ATA 2.0 ports, and an IDE ATA-133/100 connector. The PATA support and two eSATA ports on the rear of the motherboard are powered by a J-Micron JMB363 ASIC, which supports SATA RAID 0, 1 and JBOD. The six SATA ports provided by the Intel ICH9R provide RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10 support. Also in this corner of the motherboard are two USB 2.0 and one IEEE-1394 Firewire headers.
The expansion slots on the ASUS P5K-E WiFi include two PCI Express x1, two PCI Express x16, and three PCI slots. Unlike the PCI Express slots on Intel X38 motherboards, this motherboard is not PCI Express 2.0 compliant. Due to limited bandwidth, the second PCI-E x16 slot is limited to PCI-E x4 and PCI-E x1 modes. This motherboard does officially support ATI's CrossFire Technology, but the available Linux drivers don't currently support that functionality. The WiFi-AP edition of the P5K-E also has an integrated 802.11g WiFi adapter. This adapter is located at the bottom of the I/O panel and interfaces with the motherboard via USB 2.0. The wireless ASIC used is the AzureWave AW-GA800BT 802.11b/g adapter.
Heatpipes to aid in cooling motherboard chipsets are very common these days, and the ASUS P5K-E WiFi does utilize a copper heatpipe running from the Intel P35 Northbridge to the MOSFETs behind the I/O panel. This heatpipe cooling solution is not as elaborate as what can be found on some of ASUS's other high-end motherboards, but should prove to be adequate for this motherboard. This motherboard supports Intel Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Extreme, Core 2 Duo, Pentium Extreme, Pentium D, and Pentium 4 processors. This motherboard is compatible with 1333MHz FSB CPUs as well as those built using a 45nm process, but a BIOS update may be required. In the upper left hand corner of the motherboard is the 4/8-pin ATX +12V power connector.
The Gigabit network support on this motherboard is provided by Marvell's 88E8056 PCI-E ASIC. The HD audio codec is from ADI with a part number of AD1988B. Last but not least, Agere’s FW322 IEEE-1394a controller backs the Firewire support. At the I/O panel are connectors for a PS/2 keyboard, one S/PDIF output, two External SATA (eSATA), one IEEE-1394a, one RJ-45 Gigabit ethernet, six USB 2.0, one WiFi-AP Solo antenna jack, and the 8-channel audio I/O. The ASUS AI Lifestyle features include ASUS Quiet Thermal Solution, Crystal Sound, EZ DIY, and WiFi@Home.