Review At first glance, Asus' P5E-VM HDMI looks like a regular Micro-ATX design with the usual crop of integrated features. But when you take a good close look you’ll see just how much Asus has managed to cram in.

Asus' P5E-VM HDMI: packs in features a-plenty

The board's Intel G35 chipset supports LGA775 Core 2 processors, including the latest 'Penryn' chips, on a 1333MHz FSB. The four memory slots can accommodate up to 8GB of 800MHz DDR memory. There’s a PCI Express (PCIe) x16 expansion slot, a couple of PCIe x1 slots and a PCI slot, and also you get stacks of options for storage. In addition to a floppy connector and an ATA-133 connector that hangs off a JMicron controller, there are six 3Gbps SATA 2 connectors with every form of RAID that you might care to try, courtesy of the ICH9R southbridge I/O chip. The only possible quibble here is the absence of eSATA.

Above the top-most PCIe x1 expansion slot there’s a curious riser card that carries a chip which is printed with the legend ASM4136. We have no idea what this hardware does - we're awaiting an answer from Asus on this one.

You don’t get any brackets in the package but even so the list of ports and connectors is extensive. On the I/O panel there are two legacy PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard; six USB 2.0 ports with three headers on board for six more ports if your case supports them; six audio jacks and a coaxial digital output for the Realtek audio; and a single Firewire port. Gigabit Ethernet is provided by Atheros, which is the first time we’ve seen Atheros silicon on a motherboard, but the really interesting thing here is the integrated graphics - and that’s not something we often say about Intel hardware.

The G35 chipset includes the GMA X3500 graphics core, which is based on the GMA X3000 from the G965 chipset that was released last year. The X in the GMA model code marks a significant break from previous Intel graphics cores which were, to be frank, a bit feeble. Intel didn’t spell out the details of the G965 at launch so we were somewhat taken by surprise to find that a driver update transformed this Shader Model 2.0 part into a Shader Model 3.0 chip.

Tidy layout

It turned out that GMA X3000 used eight unified shaders instead of discrete vertex and pixel shaders so the initial driver release reported that the core supported Pixel Shader 2.0 and had no hardware vertex shaders. A driver update made the graphics core compliant with Shader Model 3.0 and DirectX 9.0c so Intel was able to get the hardware out of the door and then continue to work on its development in a gallant effort to fully support the Aero interface in Windows Vista.

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The specification for the GMA X3500 is very similar to the GMA X3000, with a core that still runs at 667MHz with eight unified shaders. However, the new core supports Shader Model 4.0 and DirectX 10. At present, the GMA X3500 certainly supports OpenGL 1.5. However, the Asus packaging refers to OpenGL 2.0, so perhaps Intel can also tweak OpenGL in the drivers at a later date.

This addition of DirectX 10 caused us some confusion. Clearly you need to run Windows Vista rather than XP to use DX10, but the Aero interface uses Shader Model 3.0 features. The only use for DX10 that we are aware of is gaming but we are completely unable to think of any games that use the latest advances in image quality without also demanding a pair of GeForce 8800 graphics cards.

SIMS 2 Screenshots

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Top row: SIMS 2 on G35. Bottom row: SIMS 2 on G965
Left column: Windows XP. Right column: Windows Vista.
Click any thumbnail for the full-size image

Our screen shots of Sims 2 on the G965 and G35 (above) in both XP and Vista prove the point. Both graphics cores are capable of playing the game but the gaming experience is identical as Sims 2 only requires graphics that can deliver transform and lighting, which is part of DirectX 7.

FEAR Extraction Point places a heavier load on your graphics hardware and has a minimum system requirement of a GeForce 4 or Radeon 9000, but you have to set the image quality to Medium or higher to make it look half-way decent. This gave the Intel graphics a tough time and returned a frame rate - 13-14fps - that was too low to be worth playing.

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Finally, we had a go with Crysis, just for larks. The frame rate was desperately slow - 4fps - as you might expect, and while the screen grabs show that image quality is superb they don’t tell the whole story. The screen grabs are pin sharp because they were rendered at such a terribly low frame rate while the grab from a PC with a decent graphics card has motion blur but looks superb during game play.

Crysis Screenshots
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Crysis on a G35 (top left), G965 top right and Radeon X1900 (bottom)
Click any thumbnail for the full-size image

Two of the game tests failed to complete and, ironically, they were both on the G35 chipset on Vista, exactly where you might hope that they would shine, not that it really matters as no one in their right mind will run FEAR or Crysis on these integrated GPUs.

3DMark06 Results

Longer bars are better

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During our hours of testing the G35 northbridge cooler ran at 50°C and the southbridge was even hotter, at 55°C. This isn’t the sort of thing that we expect from Intel chipsets as the passive heatsinks are generally cool to the touch.

PCMark05 Results

Longer bars are better

It took a few hours to run the graphics comparisons and our conclusion was a bit of a wet blanket. The G35 may well support DirectX 10 but it’s a complete irrelevance and from a graphics standpoint the GMA X3500 has made minimal advances over GMA X3000. The significant point of this chipset is the support for 1333MHz processors with DDR 2 memory. On which subject, we suffered a glitch during our PCMark05 testing as the memory figure was rather low in Windows XP.

The good news is that Asus has provided both VGA and HDMI outputs along with an HDMI-to-DVI adaptor and this support for dual monitors and HDTV puts G35 head-to-head with Nvidia’s MCP73 chipset if you’re building a Media Centre PC. There’s no denying that Nvidia has a better IGP for gaming but non-gamers won’t give a hoot about that and in every other department the Asus P5E-VM HDMI delivers the goods.

Verdict

We’re disappointed that Intel didn’t add more graphics grunt to the G35 at the same time that it added the rather irrelevant support for DirectX 10. Asus has used the G35 to produce a tidy motherboard that is packed with features but you pay a hefty price compared, say, to an AMD 690G-based board running an Athlon 64 processor.

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