ASUS P5E3 Deluxe is based on the upcoming X38 chipset. This chipset is one of the most highly anticipated chipset to have been spawned for many years. The rumors have been plenty and in this short preview we hope that you will get some of your questions answered.
Intel will launch its new high-end and highly anticipated chipset X38 in just a few days, but already we can present you with this preview. ASUS has supplied us with one of the first X38 boards on the market, the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe. X38 has been the source of many rumors, where the performance of the board has been in the center of most of them. Intel’s X38 chipset is namely rumored to be something out of the ordinary, even make benchmark results reach outside the scale of current chipset.
We will not be presenting you with any benchmarks here today, but will in the near future. Today we will focus on the layout and physical details of the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe.
On the following pages you will find pictures and information on the upcoming high-end motherboard ASUS P5E3 Deluxe.
This boards comes with three PCIe x16 slots, where two of them sports full x16 bandwidth and the third “only” 8x. They are easily identified through their colors, blue for x16 and black for x8. There are two PCI slots an two PCIe x1 for further expansion.
 |
The most obvious with this board is if course the cooling. ASUS has stuck with its advance heatpipe cooling that moves around the socket for cooling of the chipset and voltage regulators. The angled PATA and SATA ports at the bottom/left will certainly be appreciated by many.
ASUS has also thought through the power connectors and placed them at the very edges of the board. Much like the reference design by Intel. Since this is a board of the Digital Home series it doesn’t have the on-board power/reset buttons overclockers have gotten used to, but you can expect them to appear on the coming R.O.G. Maximus board.
ASUS P5E3 Deluxe comes with four DDR3 DIMM slots, but DDR2 boards with the X38 are due.
 |
As you can see on the picture above the socket is a bit crowded, but there’s still enough room to fit a quite large CPU cooler in there.
 Close-up of the capacitors around the socket |
ASUS has chosen to use an 8 phase power design for stable currents to the CPU. We’re glad that the number of phases are increasing again after going in the wrong direction for a while.
 You can see some nice craftsmanship on this picture of the southbridge cooler, also it’s a pretty sweet picture. |
Same here, precisely crafted fins of the northbridge heatsink. ASUS has spared little expense in its design of this board.
|
All in all there are six SATA ports on the board working through the ICH9R southbridge. Dual Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, six audio connectors, Firewire, two eSATA connectors, six USB ports and one PS/2 connector for your keyboard can be found on the back and through the I/O bracket when installed inside a case.
It’s too early to pass any kind of judgment, but there will be one eventually. The board is in Marcus ‘Kinc’ Hultin’s hands now and he will test it thoroughly, we can assure you that.
Until then we hope that this has given you at least a little taste of X38. We will have some more information coming up soon. Stay tuned!
 |
We wish to thank ASUS for supplying this so far wonderful board.
