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 (I discuss why I'm using this
bios here:
P5K-E Wifi/AP - What a piece of garbage) and this
bios has a bug where it won't allow you to disable the Wifi card. Problem solved:
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:
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. 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 fleabay. 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 :
Next up I'll see what it can do. Needless to say that is the last Asus board I'll buy for a while.
The troubled P5K-E Wifi/AP rebuild...
Linear Mode
