You know, as someone who's been looking for a mobo, you'd be surprised how few support what I want, without a lot of extras you DON'T want. For example, the following doesn't exist (from what I've seen, though feel free to point out one I've missed):Originally posted by: Andrewcc
If its me though, I'd buy the Asus. I bought a P5K-Deluxe back in June, and I haven't had a single problem with it.
Originally posted by: Eriol
You know, as someone who's been looking for a mobo, you'd be surprised how few support what I want, without a lot of extras you DON'T want. For example, the following doesn't exist (from what I've seen, though feel free to point out one I've missed):
- Intel Core 2 Quad Support (this is easy of course)
DDR2 (don't need DDR3 imo)
Passively-cooled (I want SOME cooling though, as I saw at least one mobo that didn't have a heatsink on the southbridge, with corresponding high-heat. Heatsinks/pipes are fine, just not none!)
Single PCIe-x16 (not doing crossfire/SLI, but I'll take it if I have to for the other features I want)
at least two USABLE PCIe-x1 slots (a LOT have only one that would be covered by a dual-width video card)
IEEE 1394/Firewire (some of the "would be great otherwise" don't have this)
6+ SATA internally (goodbye 650i)
2 eSATA (goodbye 680i)
The final 4 points there are the bad ones that you just can't find together on anything BUT the P5K-Deluxe, though I don't want/need to pay for crossfire either.
The page at gigabyte buries that information on the accessories page, but if it's standard, then that's competitive with the Asus. The tag saying "Accessories (Optional)" always makes me a bit leery though of course.Originally posted by: Drexl
Those are all on my GA-P35-DS3P. It comes with 8 SATA ports in all, and the bracket to use 2 of them for eSATA.
Now the article is about the "big brother" P5K Deluxe, but the issues should be the same (the layout of that particular piece looks the same to me at least). So that's a concern there too. Does such happen with things like an 8800 GTX? The Gigabyte board doesn't seem like it'd have this problem at all.From Tom's Hardware
Like the DDR3-equiped P5K3 version, the P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP's has two layout weaknesses. The first is that two of its Serial ATA connectors could potentially be blocked by longer graphics cards;
Originally posted by: Eriol
The page at gigabyte buries that information on the accessories page, but if it's standard, then that's competitive with the Asus. The tag saying "Accessories (Optional)" always makes me a bit leery though of course.
The main thing that worries me about the Asus P5K-E is something that was said about its SATA connectors in a review on Tom's Hardware. An excerpt is below about it:
Now the article is about the "big brother" P5K Deluxe, but the issues should be the same (the layout of that particular piece looks the same to me at least). So that's a concern there too. Does such happen with things like an 8800 GTX? The Gigabyte board doesn't seem like it'd have this problem at all.From Tom's Hardware
Like the DDR3-equiped P5K3 version, the P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP's has two layout weaknesses. The first is that two of its Serial ATA connectors could potentially be blocked by longer graphics cards;