THE PRODUCT
As with many other Asus top models, the board is build on a black circuit board. Furthermore, the board is dominated by the passive copper cooler that runs via heatpipes from the SB to the NB and finally to the MOSFET.

All connections and plug-ins are on the Asus P5K Premium/ WiFi-AP Black Pearl Edition placed along the edge, which makes them easily accessible. The only thing that raises some wonderings, now that it seems like much thought has gone into the placement of the other units, is the placement of the Reset CMOS jumper.



It becomes quite difficult to reach once a graphics card has been installed. In spite of the passive copper cooler taking out much space on the surface of the board, this does not have an effect on a graphics card. This is thanks to Asus’ decision of placing the two PCIeX1 ports between the north bridge and the PCIeX16 port.



The RAM sockets are clearly color encoded, so that no doubt remains as to which sockets should be used to run Dual Channel.



The 8 internal SATA ports are also color encoded, of which the 6 are run by Intel’s ICH9R chip and approve of RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10, while the two other are run by JMicron® JMB363 and support RAID 0,1 and JBOD.