Product Reviews

DDR3 memory is widely available, but it's still very expensive compared to DDR2. You can expect to pay around £250 for 2GB, which is why we didn't include it in our memory Labs this month. If you're building a new PC, this could leave you with a problem. You may not want to buy DDR3 because of the price, but you'll want to use it in future to get the best performance possible.

Thankfully, Asus has an answer to the problem: the P5KC motherboard. It has four slots for DDR2 and two for DDR3 memory. This means you can keep your current DDR2 memory for the time being and upgrade to DDR3 when prices become more reasonable. You can't mix and match the two, though.

The motherboard is based around the excellent Intel P35 chipset, with support for the current generation of Intel Core 2 Duo and Quad processors, including those with 1,033MHz frontside buses (FSBs), as well as the upcoming 45nm designs, codenamed Wolfdale. The BIOS is well equipped for overclocking, as you can adjust the FSB from 200MHz to 800MHz in 1MHz steps. There's a wide range of memory speed settings, as well as comprehensive voltage tweaking, too. All are essential features considering

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the P5KC is aimed at enthusiasts on a budget.

There are no fans, as we've come to expect from modern motherboards. Instead, three small passive heatsinks are fitted, which makes for silent running. Although two of the heatsinks are very close to the processor socket, you should be able to install almost any cooler.

There's a good collection of ports on the backplate, including six USB2 ports. There are also headers for another six on the motherboard, though no brackets are supplied to connect to these. Only one PS/2 port is provided for a keyboard, so you must use a USB mouse. Eight-channel analogue audio outputs and optical and coaxial S/PDIFs are present. There's also a FireWire port and Gigabit Ethernet as well as eSATA for adding an external hard disk.

There are five more SATA ports for internal disks. One uses the same controller as the eSATA port and these two can be made into a RAID array: 0, 1 or JBOD. The other four ports are part of the Intel ICH9 chipset, which doesn't have RAID support. The two PCI Express x16 slots support ATI CrossFire graphics cards, although the second slot runs at a quarter of the speed of the main slot. There are three PCI slots as well as a single PCI Express x1 slot.

Using our standard test setup, the P5KC scored 149 overall in our benchmarks, which is about average for a P35-based motherboard. We re-ran the tests with 2GB of DDR2 and 2GB of DDR3 RAM for comparison. The DDR3 was only marginally faster and certainly not worth the extra money unless you plan on using its higher 1,066MHz speeds for overclocking purposes.

This is a well-equipped motherboard with a good range of ports at a reasonable price. The provision of DDR3 slots means it's as future-proof as possible.