The ASUS P5K Deluxe/WiFI-AP

This bundle of joy was one of the first Intel P35 Bearlake boards released. From day one it has been the WORST board I have ever used. I have had three different ASUS boards in the past that are still working flawlessly (A7N8X Deluxe (nForce2), P4C800 Deluxe (875P), P5GDC Deluxe (915P)) but this one takes the cake.

This board was used as part of Project Halcyon back in July of 2007. It was a reasonably high end gaming machine (an upgrade from the now obsolete Project-X).

From day one I had received a faulty board. It had taken me at least a month to troubleshoot and find that this piece of hardware was the culprit for all my stability issues. With 4GB of RAM inserted the board caused BSODs from every single Windows driver you could imagine, no matter if the RAM was run at DDR2-1066, DDR2-800 or DDR2-533. Stress tests and Memory Tests showed up passes but it was impossible to keep an uptime of over 2 days without BSODing from clicking a link in Firefox! With 2GB of RAM inserted I was able to keep an uptime of 8 days! Shortly after this I BSODed and the P5K would not POST. I had Googled endlessly but alas the board was not yet popular and there were few relevant answers.

I had sent the board back to the suppliers for replacement and was told the board was not faulty, it was POSTing! I was damn surprised when I heard this. They sent it back, and yeah, it POSTed but it was still an unstable piece of shit. A few days later, it wouldn’t POST…again. Yes, I had tried all the usual things….take out the CMOS battery, disconnect everything, try different RAM, reseat the CPU, blah blah blah. I sent the board back again, this time it didn’t POST when it got to them and the RMA continued. It was up to TWO FUCKING LONG MONTHS LATER till I finally received a replacement.

Within these 2 months, it took ASUS 1 month to “Flash the BIOS” (which I could fucking do at home if I had the board, THANKS GUYS). Did this fix the problem? Of course not, back it went. This time for a definite replacement….But this took yet another month because ASUS decided to make this board End of Life within less than 6 months.

Finally, I received a brand new board. Did it work? Amazingly, Yes! I haven’t BSODed since with 4GB of RAM in. But we haven’t finished yet, the board is still incredibly flawed.

1. SATA Ports are located in the most retarded place ever
OK, This board was a brand new P35 board. You’d think this would be an enthusiasts board right? You’d expect that perhaps someone would use an 8800 GTX or Ultra with this board? Well I sure did, and if you do, you lose 2 of the 6 SATA ports because the heatsink gets in the way. So how would you over come this….with a SATA controller….more on this later.

2. The CMOS battery is also in the most retarded place ever. The CMOS corrupts itself….OFTEN.
Yes, that’s right. Behind your giant 8800 GTX/Ultra. You’d think this wasn’t a problem because you should rarely have to do this. Unfortunately, no. The P5K’s BIOS (even with the latest, 705 as of Jan 08′) is the most delicate and unstable ever. Disabling a simple option like the IDE Controller, or one of the LAN Controllers will most likely result in CMOS corruption in which the only way to POST again is to take out the battery and reset.

3. More on the delicate BIOS issue….Pressing keys restarts your PC!
Being the shitty P5K BIOS that it is, sometimes you’ll find yourself that even though the board is POSTing you will be unable to enter the BIOS because pressing any keys on your keyboard will cause the board to reset. What causes this is completely random and the only way around it is to keep trying (for up to 20 resets) or a CMOS reset. The most annoying part of this is that the bug still occurs when in the boot loader. What that means is pressing F8 to get to Safe Mode…or typing in boot parameters when loading Linux, restarts your PC!

4. Adding SATA Controllers…or any controller for that matter. Limited BIOS space.
Explaining my setup will help understand this: I have 2 1TB drives JBOD (that means not RAIDed), 2 150GB Raptors (in RAID0, using Onboard Intel ICH9R) and 2 IDE CD Drives.

The BIOS works in such a way that you have the “Main” BIOS and some add-in BIOSes (Add-in BIOSes being things such as the Intel RAID manager). The P5K Deluxe also uses an Add-in BIOS for the IDE controller (so that you can RAID IDE drives if you wish). However, even if you don’t want to RAID IDE devices an Add-in BIOS still loads because it seems to be a requirement. On the other hand, if you don’t want to RAID SATA drives you can choose not to load the RAID BIOS, freeing up an Add-in space and just using the SATA drives as “JBOD”.

So, I go out and spend some money on two Adaptec PCIe SATA Controllers so that I can add more drives (seeing as the SATA Ports are in a crappy position)…I install the controllers just fine however, I find that the SATA controller will use Add-in BIOS space. The P5K Deluxe happens to have a limit of TWO, yes JUST TWO extra BIOSes before it runs out of space.

OK, so cut to the chase…what does this mean? Well I need my CD drives, that’s one position, and my Raptor drives are currently RAIDed, that’s another position. See the problem yet?

Disabling the IDE controller (loss of CD drives) means I can use all the drives however, Windows won’t boot because boot.ini needs modifying. The only way I can edit boot.ini is with a BootCD…Sure, I could go between configurations, disabling the IDE controller (or RAID) when I want to access different drives but that’s an inconvenience….oh yeah, now go back and read POINT 2. If you haven’t got it yet…the CMOS corrupts itself fairly often when messing with options in the BIOS. Taking out the 8800 Ultra to get your board to POST again is. not. fun.

If you want to use a SATA controller with this board be prepared to format, stop using the Intel RAID controller and start using the new SATA RAID controller (performance loss yay!) If you do want to use IDE drives with your SATA drives you’re not going to be able to use Onboard Intel RAID. What a pain in the ass (for me anyway). On a slightly unrelated note you’d think that by now RAID would be standardized, but no, moving my Raptor RAID over to the new controller’s isn’t possible thanks to proprietary bullshit, making this a long and annoying process.

Conclusion: What do you think?