Asus has done a wonderful job with the layout of the board. The CPU Socket area of the motherboard is surrounded on two sides by Asus’s copper heatsink cooling solution. One heatsink covers the Northbridge and another on the Southbridge with an Ai Lifestyle logo covering the SB. A single pipe leads out the SB to the NB with two pipes leading out to the rear heatsink. A row of solid state capacitors on the top of the CPU and on the right hand side of the CPU Socket area shouldn’t conflict with CPU installation. MOSFET heatsinks are along the right side of the capacitors may interfere with large CPU cooling solutions but the default cooler didn’t have any issues.

There are four DIMM sockets on the P5K Deluxe Wi-Fi AP Edition motherboard. They take a total of up to 8GB of DDR2 1066MHz memory. The location of the DIMM Sockets is in the normal position under the CPU Socket area. The DIMM slots are color coded for Dual Channel mode installation ease, as putting memory in like colored slots will result in Dual Channel mode being enabled. Installation of the 8800GTS 320MB graphics card did not interfere with memory removal or installation, as some boards have problems with long video cards.

Expansion on the board is extensive, as is the norm with most P35 boards. The slots are PCI Express x1, PCI Express x1, PCI Express x16, PCI, PCI, PCI Express x16 (x4 electrically), PCI from the top. The board supports Crossfire mode with two AMD graphics cards installed. Asus has added Ai slot selection which allows you to power up the system and let you know if your hardware is seated correctly in the slot via onboard LEDs. It’s a simple but effective feature that can help in installation of new hardware.

The P35 chipset supports up to 12 SATA devices including 4 via eSATA. Asus outfitted the P5K board with 6 onboard ports for SATA drives. The rear panel adds two ports for external SATA. A legacy IDE port and FDD port round out the drive expansion found on the P5K Deluxe Wi-Fi AP board. The P5K Deluxe does away with the PS/2 mouse port. Anyone still using a PS/2 mouse needs to update their mouse anyway. A PS/2 keyboard port, 6 USB 2.0 ports, a Firewire port, two RJ-45 jacks for the onboard LAN, 6 audio jacks, and S/PDIF component out and in jacks round out the rear I/O. The 24-pin power connector is on the bottom rear left hand side of the board next to the FDD controller.