ASUS P5K-E WiFi vs. Gigabyte P35-DS4

System Setup & Performance:

In the past we haven't run into any Linux compatibility troubles with motherboards using the Intel P35 chipset, and both the ASUS P5K-E WiFi and Gigabyte P35-DS4 were Linux friendly. Using Ubuntu 7.10 and other recent Linux 2.6.20+ kernel distributions we had zero problems. In fact, the integrated wireless on the ASUS P5K-E WiFi had even worked out of the box on Ubuntu 7.10! There was no messing with the Restricted Driver Manager or anything to that effect. Immediately upon installing Ubuntu 7.10, the integrated AzureWave wireless was working and had found our local 802.11g connections within NetworkManager. This was especially gratifying to see on the ASUS motherboard.

With no Linux compatibility hurdles to jump through for either motherboard, we immediately turned to comparing their Linux performance. For benchmarks we had used Enemy Territory, Quake 4, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, LAME encoding, timed disk reads, Gzip compression, and RAMspeed. The system hardware had consisted of an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 processor, 2GB of OCZ DDR2-800 Reaper HPC, Western Digital 160GB SATA, SilverStone Zeus 750W power supply, and an ASUS GeForce 8600GT 256MB graphics card with the NVIDIA 169.04 Beta driver.

When attempting to overclock both motherboards with the same set of hardware, we had experienced more promising results with the ASUS P5K-E. With absolute ease, we were able to push the FSB on the Core 2 Duo E6400 past 350MHz and there still was room to push it much further while everything was running stable. With Gigabyte on the other hand, we weren't even able to achieve a 350MHz FSB using this hardware.