ASUS AiLifestyle P5KC (P5KCGREEN) Motherboard

This seemed an excellent choice for the PC ‘upgrader’ trying to work in stages with a limited budget. I started out with a Pentium D940 CPU and DDR2 memory – the best my previous motherboard would take. This new motherboard accepted them without any difficulty, and was equally quick to accept an upgrade to a Q6600 quad core CPU. With appropriate BIOS upgrades (check the ASUS web site for precise needs) the new 45nm processors are supported too. And that’s not all. When the time is right, the DDR2 memory can be upgraded to DDR3 without further motherboard considerations. This board is good for ‘silent’ running too – with a quiet PSU and appropriately quiet case & CPU fans, the ASUS Q Fan technology gives various options for slowing the fans down and minimising noise whilst maintaining proper cooling.

The only real limitation seems to be the IDE (or I should say EIDE) connector. Reviewers often comment on its awkward position, out of reach of the drive positions in any normal ATX case. It’s easy enough to get a long IDE lead on eBay – but seems silly that ASUS do not provide one long enough in the first place. But the IDE problem can be subtly more significant. I found that startup was delayed by a ‘ODD0’ error (followed by the name of the optical drive/s installed). The message read ‘press any key to continue’ but ignoring it led to startup completing anyway, and for me the drives appeared to work normally. However I looked up the error on the internet, and found many other users have experienced it too – some finding it more debilitating than others. Apparently, ASUS do not really intend the EIDE port to be used for optical drives at all – it is meant for HDDs, though they do not readily tell us! The only guaranteed way to start up normally with the optical drives fully supported seems to be to follow ASUS’s advice and fit SATA drives – which slightly goes against the benefits of such wide-ranging upgradability in other areas. It would be better if it fully supported both formats.

The IDE issue is why I only give the P5KC 4 stars – if you intend using SATA optical drives from the outset (and they are cheap enough these days), this one is well worth a 5.

Recommended!