| ASUS P5K PRO Intel P35 Green ATX Motherboard
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Installation and Operation:
A system with the following components was used to test the ASUS P5K PRO Intel P35 ATX motherboard:
» Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Dual Core processor
» OCZ Technology Vendetta CPU cooler
» Sapphire 1024MB Radeon HD3870 X2 PCI Express graphics card
» Kingston HyperX PC-9200 2GB DDR2 dual channel memory
» Maxtor MaxLine III 250GB SATA 3Gbps hard drive
» Tuniq Miniplant 950W power supply
» Windows Vista Home Premium (current as of April 18, 2008)
The physical installation was relatively uneventful, but a few considerations had to be made to accomodate the unique layout. The main concern was routing the 20+4 pin motherboard power cable so that it looked neat and the possibility of it getting caught in the CPU cooler fan was eliminated. The power cable and the HD audio cable running right across the board doesn't look very nice, but no real problems arose. Another consideration is that since the board is narrower, fewer mounting screws are used. The screws that would normally be installed along the front edge of the board have been eliminated, and a couple inches of the board are left unsupported, cantilevered off the next set of screws. Pushing too hard to install memory or connect SATA drives will make the board flex, which doesn't seem like a good thing.
While no issue was encountered, it became clear that owners of certain CPU coolers would have problems with the P5K's northbridge cooler. The images below show a stock Intel cooler and an OCZ Technology Vendetta cooler installed, and just how close they come to the chipset cooler. The stock cooler is just millimeters shy of intereference, and I can picture coolers from Zalman and the Thermaltake Orb series not fitting at all. Tall heatpipe coolers of any size should work just fine, but broad, low profile coolers don't seem like a good choice.
 
Other than a handful of physical oddities, the installation was simple. The system was up and running in no time, and once Windows was current, all of the latest driver / utility updates from the ASUS website were applied. The screens below show some of the key data taken from CPU-Z reagrding the configuration with the CPU and memory at default settings.
  
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