ASUS P5K3 Deluxe WiFi-AP Edition Motherboard

Introduction:

It's coming up on a year since motherboards with 965 and 975 chipsets were all the newest hard-to-get platforms. The entry in to the market was actually quite excellent. I can't remember a time when something seemed to go so smoothly at release as the Intel chipsets have done. There are still quite a few 965 motherboards offering a standard, more budget intended set of features while the 975 motherboards offered up the biggest assortment of features. The flagship 965 and 975 boards have varied in features and specifications mainly where storage and overclocking are concerned. Most of the overclocking success has come from the 965 boards nearly by default with even a few records being set. The 975 boards just haven't had quite the success without the release of  more and more BIOS updates.

Some of the boards are still quite capable of satisfying the power hungry users and are still found on the shelves. You can usually tell when something new is coming soon by the gradual drop in prices or the disappearance of that particular product from the shelves. Now, new doesn't always particularly mean better. We've seen motherboards that didn't offer a whole lot in the area of "better", but were more of a "new" version to get around and support upcoming hardware.

P35 Block Diagram

The newest Express chipsets to found on the shelves holding the gaze of the consumer are the G33 and P35 paired up with the ICH9,DH,R chipset. The official top secret code name assigned by Intel to the chipsets is Bear Lake. The new P35 is naturally the newest chipset and boasts a few improvements over the previous successful P965, Q965, and 975 chipsets. A few of those include full 1333MHz processor and DDR3 support which has already made some huge waves among overclockers. Other features the new chipset supports are Intel ViiV Processor technology support for digital home entertainment, Rapid Recover Technology, Turbo memory for improving boot times, Quiet System and Matrix Storage Technologies via the Intel I/O Controller Hub.

ASUS P5K3 and Ai Lifestyle

All of these refinements and changes should offer up some improvements which should be evident during the final testing. Sometimes, it's better to start over with something new rather than revamp or upgrade a chipset. Intel has been pretty good about keeping things simplified so that the process doesn't slow motherboard production from various makers. This in turn has put more motherboards on the shelves. On the opposite side of the coin, NVidia's 680i chipset was way too scarce from the start to really capitalize on any broad fan base. Intel has been quite fortunate to not suffer such disappointment.

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