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Strengths: Very flexible and stable overclocking, 1066Mhz DDR2 support, 45nm CPU support
Weaknesses: No DVI out for on board video
Summary: My goal was to build a PC that could be used both for gaming and for home theater. My budget was small, but I didn't want to skimp on the motherboard since it is the most difficult part of a PC to upgrade. I wanted to keep the system somewhat small so that I could move it easily, but still wanted it to be high performance and upgradeable. In combination with an HTPC case, E2180 CPU, Crucial Ballistix RAM and ATI 2600 XT video card, the P5K-VM has fit my needs perfectly.
This board is very flexible when it comes to overclocking. You can tweak a few settings and let the BIOS figure everything else out, or you can manually set every single option. Overclocking my CPU to 2.66GHz was a breeze and has been 100% stable. 3GHz+ was reached by adding a voltage increase to the manual settings. The memory timings defaulted to standard settings, but it was easy to go in and change them to the faster settings that I knew the memory supported. Basically, this board is a good choice for anyone who wants to overclock, whether they're new to it or an expert.
The P5K-VM strikes a good balance between small size and upgradability. It supports the new 45nm CPUs and 1066Mhz memory. With a 16xPCIe slot, a 4xPCIe slot and two standard PCI slots, there's room for enough cards to support most people's needs. If you want dual SLI video cards or room for a lot of add-in cards then you'll need to step up to a full ATX board, though. The built in sound is decent, so you'll only need to upgrade that if you have a keen ear. For anything other than office or home theater usage you'll definitely want to add a video card, though.
The only negative I see with this board is only a factor if you want to use the on board video. It's VGA out, so if you need DVI or HDMI out then the ASUS P5E-VM would be a better choice. One minor annoyance for me is that the P5K-VM only has one chassis fan header and I have two chassis fans. I just plugged the second fan into the power supply fan header since my power supply doesn't have a fan monitoring output.
A couple of final notes on issues that I ran into with a fresh install of Windows XP with this motherboard. First, the XP install CD doesn't include SATA drivers. If you are installing to a SATA drive then you will either need a floppy drive and disk with the Intel chipset drivers on it or you will need to incorporate the drivers into the XP install CD. I've read that you can also change the SATA mode to IDE in the BIOS, but didn't try that. Second, you will need a Microsoft patch to get the on board audio working. It may automatically download via Windows update, but I'm not sure. I slipstreamed the XP SP3 release candidate into my XP install CD. Unfortunately this made Windows think that I didn't need the patch that's required to get the audio working. I had to force it to install manually. Hopefully those two tips will save someone else some headaches.
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