Rebuild of Asus' dodgy P5K-E Wifi/AP

[vaporATX]

Here is my troublesome P5K-E Wifi/AP. This is the second one of these boards I've had. The first one I bought about four months ago, but sold it to a friend before I had a chance to play with it. I picked this current one up a couple of weeks ago to use as a base for an air cooled Q6600 build:

 

 

First thing I did was remove the Wifi card. I'm using a bios from the PK5 Deluxe Wifi/AP (0603 bios) and this bios has a bug where it won't allow you to disable the Wifi card. You see, except for a extra lan port and some extra (probably fake) copper the Deluxe and the P5K-E Wifi/AP are the exact same board. Back when the Deluxe was a much more expensive board I'm convinced that Asus purposefully mucked up the E Wifi's bios to make the Deluxe a better overclocker. Just look at the bios revisions on the E compared to the Deluxe. Anyway... problem solved:

 

(Note: there's discussion on various overclocking site about Asus pulling the same dirty tricks with the P5E/Maximus Formula/Maximus Extreme boards)

 

 

I removed the NB/vreg heat pipe assembly to check that it was applied properly at the factory. I had problems with Asus boards in the past with poorly attached sinks and poorly applied thermal compounds. This one was no exception. The thermal adhesive on the NB flip chip was poorly applied to only one edge of the chip. The NB sink was barely making contact. The vreg sink was poorly seated and the thermal tape was only making good contact with five out of the eight vregs. Luckily I didn't push this board hard before I corrected this or the NB chip would have probably burned out:

 

 

I'm going to be adding an active NB cooler, so I had to detach the vreg cooler from the heat pipe. I also want to seat the vreg sink properly and reattach it with 4-40 nylon nuts and bolts and apply Céramique instead of the thermal tape. When I cut the heat pipe off with my Dremel I noticed that there was no fluid in the pipe and the pipe had no vacuum in it. This isn't a real heat pipe. It's just a copper tube. This is just the first of the eye opening Asus rip-offs on this board. The mating surface of the vreg cooler was kind of rough so I decided to do a quick lap on it. well, well, well... lookie here. The base of the vreg cooler isn't even copper. It's aluminum anodized to look like copper. The fins are copper, but the base isn't. I thought it felt kind of light:

 

 

Oh well, not much I can do now unless I want to order a decent vreg sink. After what I've seen so far I don't think I want spend any money on this board. Here's the vreg sink reattached with nylon nuts and bolts and seated properly using a decent thermal compound:

 

 

I had some little swiftech cast copper sinks in my junk box so I stuck 'em on the upper vregs. Now that I think about it I should pull off that garbage Asus vreg cooler and used them on those vregs too. Oh well, maybe later:

 

 

Hey, look! They actually put thermal comp on the south bridge. Fancy that. The sink is more cheap copper colored Aluminum and weighs about as much as a bottle cap:

 

 

Since I'm not going to be using the NB sink I removed earlier I'm going to go ahead and use it on the south bridge. I decide to clean up the mating surface a bit and guess what... yep, the base of the NB sink is also colored Aluminum. At least the fins are real copper:

 

 

Added a little Thermaltake Spirit II I picked up cheap off ebay. Little sucker was a pain in the ass to mount. Nicely made, though... and very quiet... and it is real copper:

 

 

TRUE mounted with a Noctua fan:

 

 

Safe and snug in its P180 bed inherited from my water cooled rig waiting to be installed in its new Lian Li PC-B25 :

 

 

Needless to say I won't be buying anymore Asus boards for a while. Going to stick with Gigabyte and DFI from now on. I will say it is just as fine an overclocker as the P5K-E I had previously in my watercooled rig (now have a DFI X48-T2R). I was easily able to reach 3.6GHz with the TRUE keeping the temps @ 33c idle/55c load. Check you Asus factory sinks, people! This company's QC has become horrible, not to mention they are dishonest and pass off mid range boards as premium.