The Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi-AP costs around €190~200, as found at several online stores. The retail package shown below, is covered with the various logos to inform you about the motherboard features:

All cables included are shown below:

The manuals and included CDs:

Below is a list of what's in the retail package:

• UltraDMA 133/100/66 cable
• FDD cable
• 4 x Serial ATA cables
• 1 x 2-port Serial ATA power cable
• I/O Shield
• User's manual
• ASUS WiFi-AP Solo manual
• 3 in 1 Q-connector
• 1 x 2-port USB2.0 / 1-port IEEE1394 module
• ASUS WiFi-AP Solo omni-directional antenna

The board itself is well laid out and all components can be identified easily:

Let's zoom in on the CPU area.

We can clearly see the copper heatpipes that connect the north-bridge and south-bridge chipsets to the copper heatsinks that should work exceptionally well. This design distributes the heat output evenly and it also means the heat can be extracted from a central location. As Asus comments "...The Heat Pipe design effectively directs the heat generated by the chipsets to the heatsink near the back IO ports, where it can be carried away by existing airflow from CPU fan or bundled optional fan...". All nearby components are low profile so these shouldn't obstruct any of the larger cooling solutions. After installing Intel's stock fan, the space between the passive heatsinks and the CPU cooler is very limited. We also tried an AC Freezer 7 CPU cooler that had to be rotated in order to fit. Before purchasing such coolers, check the compatibility list!

The passive heatsinks do their job and keep the northbridge cool. It's advisable not to touch them though, since they get very hot. The motherboard has four banks for the memory modules:

Moving to the southbridge area on the board, we can see the passive heatsink and the 6x SATA 2 connectors, well organized, not too crowded and easily accessible.

The motherboard supports the CrossFire Technology. There are 2x PCI-E x16 slots. If you need to use both channels, the blue channel works at x16 mode while the black at x4. We didn't try Nvidia's hacked SLI drivers to see if they would work. There is plenty of room between the two PCI-E slots so no problems here with the extra large VGA cards:

There are several extra connections for USB, Front Panel Audio, COM2 as well as Firewire on the rear. Asus has include all port modules in the retail package. The back I/O panel has the usual connections:

• 1 x PS/2 Keyboard
• 1 x S/PDIF Out (Coaxial + Optical)
• 2 x External SATA
• 1 x IEEE1394a
• 2 x RJ45 port
• 6 x USB 2.0/1.1
• 1 x WiFi-AP Solo antenna jack
• 8-channel Audio I/O