Asus P5K P35 Socket 775 Motherboard

Item: Asus P5K P35 Socket 775 Motherboard
Author: James Napier

BIOS & Overclocking

Published: 4th June 2007 | Source: Asus | Price: | Author: James Napier

The BIOS

As with all of Asus' most recent motherboards, the P5K is based around a BIOS from Phoenix Technologies. Some enthusiasts tend to favor the Award BIOS layout over Phoenix, but it's extremely hard to find fault with the overall layout and wealth of features available on the P5K.

Front-Side Bus speeds are adjustable in 1mhz increments all the way from 200mhz up to a rather insane 800mhz. Of course, the board isn't actually capable of hitting such a high FSB speed, but I can only think that such a wide FSB range was placed in the BIOS to remove any possibility of a "locked down" setting from hindering some insane liquid nitrogen overclocking fun!

Voltage options are equally as flexible, with vcore available in 0.0125v increments from 1.000v all the way up to 1.700v and vdimm ranging from 1.80v to 2.55v in 0.05v steps. More information on the voltage and overclocking options can be seen in the table below:

Option	Available Range
FSB	200-800mhz
PCI-E Clock	100-150mhz
VCore Voltage	1.000-1.700v
CPU PLL Voltage	1.50-1.80v
Northbridge Voltage	1.25-1.70v
Southbridge Voltage	1.05-1.20v
Memory Voltage	1.80-2.55v

Another feature brought over from the P5B series is the "O.C Profile" utility. This essentially allows you to save your current BIOS settings to a restorable profile, and can be very handy if you've spent a lot of time stabilising an overclock and don't want to lose the settings.

All other areas of the BIOS are just as feature packed and the "Hardware Monitor" seen bottom right gives fairly accurate readouts of the motherboard voltages, temperatures and fan speeds as you would expect from an enthusiast board.

Overclocking

With the success of the P5B, Commando and most P965 boards in general being a champion overclockers, the P5K certainly has quite a reputation to live up to. Using only the BIOS to overclock the installed E4300 processor with a maximum safe vcore voltage of 1.50v, I was able to achieve the following results from the P5K:

Asus P5K Deluxe (Left) - Asus P5B Premium (Right)

As you can see from above, the P5K actually managed to beat the maximum overclock we'd previously set using the E4300 chip on the P5B Premium board by ~50mhz (5mhz FSB). This certainly shows that the P35 Northbridge can offer the same (if not better) overclock potential as its predecessor the P965.

Dropping the multiplier down to 6x and increasing the Northbridge voltage to it's maximum of 1.70v allowed for some serious FSB speeds, with the P5K hitting a very impressive 520mhz. This is 40mhz higher than the maximum FSB obtainable on our P5B Premium board, and should certainly keep the overclocking crowd happy.