Memory Performance

The memory performance is better than any of the more recent P35 boards we've tested and even the Abit IX38 QuadGT which sells for about £50 more. This is partly due to the fact that the BIOS on the P5K Pro is awesome - not only could we tune the OCZ FlexXLC PC-9200 we always use to some very fast timings, but for the first time we could also tune the P35 chipset successfully, with the transaction booster was set to a factor of "2" and remained stable.

As shown above this combination decreases the latency and increases the overall bandwidth, at least in a synthetic environment.

Drive Performance

A 74GB Western Digital Raptor hard drive was used for SATA testing. We recorded the average read speeds in all cases using HD Tach 3.0.1.0's 8MB zone test.


The driver performance is consistent with the other motherboards tested that also include the Intel ICH9R southbridge - no problems here.