Here’s my completed review of my ASUS P5E3 Deluxe X38 Motherboard, this is basically the earlier indivdual parts combined to make one review. I bought this motherboard as part of a complete PC overhaul and Vista upgrade. Was it a good choice – read on to find out…

Page 1 – Features

Chipset
The P5E3 is an Intel X38 chipset based motherboard which means that it supports the latest 775 socket Intel CPUs. The X38 chipset supports both DDR2 & DDR3 memory but ASUS have chosen to provide support for DDR3 only on this board. I consider this to be the better choice now that DDR3 memory has come down significantly in price. Of course the much cheaper Intel P35 chipset offers all this and is also very good, however what sets the X38 apart is it’s superior graphics card handling. The X38 chipset supports PCIe 2.0 rather than the old 1.1 standard but still retains backward compatibility with 1.1 and it offers dual graphics card support with a full 16 lanes per card whereas the P35 only supports 16+4 lanes. The ASUS P5E3 Deluxe takes this one step further an adds an additional 16x slot capable of running at 4x.

Onboard Features
As discussed above the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe is a 775 socket board, it has 4 DDR3 slots, 3 PCIe 16x slots (one running at 4x), 2 PCIe 1x slots and 2 x PCI slots. The northbridge, southbridge and voltage regulation chips are all cooled by copper heatsinks connected by heatpipes. There are two storage controllers, a JMicron JMB363 controls the single PATA (IDE) connection for a master and a slave device and 2 eSATAII ports supporting RAID 0, 1 and JBOD. The Intel ICH9R southbridge controls the remaining 6 SATAII ports and offers Intel Matrix RAID supporting RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10. The remaining on-board headers are as follows – 1 x floppy, 3 x USB, 1x Firewire, 4 x 3pin system fan headers, 1 x 3pin PSU fan header, 1 x 4pin CPU fan header, Front panel audio, the usual system connectors (LEDs, power and reset switches etc) and a chassis intrusion connector.

Backpanel Connectors
ASUS, like most other motherboard manufacturers, have done away with most of the legacy connections on the backpanel which is nice to see. The only remaining legacy connector on this board is a single PS2 connector for use with a keyboard (1). There are no serial, parallel or PS2 mouse connectors – so your mouse will have to be USB now!

So there’s plenty of room for useful connectors and you get 6 USB ports (12/14/16), 2 gigabit LAN ports (3&5), 1 firewire port (4) whoops did I just say useful?, 1 coaxial (2) and 1 optical (15) S/PDIF out and 6 connections for the surround sound (2,4,6 or 8 channel) and mic input etc (6-11).

ASUS Features
These are the jargon features that ASUS use in their marketing – I’ll try to decipher a few of these for you, explain how they work and suggest if they’re useful or not.

1. ASUS EPU- This is a power saving feature to be used in conjunction with AI Gear to improve energy efficiency by up to 80%. I’ve not had much chance to test this really as AI Gear doesn’t work with overclocking and I was unable to put the computer into standby with EPU activated.
2. AI Nap- Allows the PC to continue working in the background whilst being in a low power state, I’m not sure how this differs from just letting windows park your HDDs and turn off the monitor.
3. ASUS 3rd Gen 8 phase power design- It’s a good marketing phrase and it’s supposed to lead to longer life and better efficiency. Well I’ve not had any component failures which is good and the power supplied from the motherboard is extremely stable, I’ve been very impressed by lack of CPU vdroop and high stability for overclocking.
4. Stack Cool 2 - A copper heatsink and heatpipe combination designed to keep the southbridge, northbridge and power VRMs cool. Although my system has pushed the boundaries of the E2160 CPU it’s well within the motherboard’s fsb limits so I wouldn’t expect heat issues and I haven’t seen any. The copper heatpipes and heatsinks do look pretty cool too which is good if you have a windowed case and they remove the need for a noisy active cooling solution. Additional fans are provided for the Stack Cool 2 and are recommended by ASUS for watercooled or passive CPU setups.
5. QFan2- ASUS’s BIOS adjusted temperature controlled fan feature. This is a feature that I am very impressed with, it supports the PWM CPU fan and all 4 ‘system’ fan headers but not the additional ‘power’ fan header. The CPU can be set to one of three settings, silent, optimal and performance. I’m using silent mode which keeps the noise down to a minimum at idle but still reaches 100% fan speed under a full load stress test, you might want to use the optimal or performance modes if you want to keep lower idle temperatures for a potentially longer CPU lifespan. The system fan setting allows you to specify a motherboard temperature for the system to try to maintain and the system fans are adjusted appropriately. Coupled with some good quality quiet fans this feature can really help keep your system quiet at idle and cool at load.
6. ASUS Crystal Sound- This feature is for enhancing audio inputs such as skype, online in-game chat etc. It suppresses and filters noise from incoming streams. I’m not really an audiophile and when I’ve used skype and MSN messenger I’ve never been at the other end to hear what it sounds like so I really cannot comment on this feature.
7. ASUS EZ DIY – Features aimed at the system builder and enthusiast. This is where the features start to catch my interest, most of these features are small touches that make a big difference when setting up your PC.
   1. ASUS AI Direct Link is a Peer to Peer network feature to help transfer large amounts of data quickly from one PC to another. I haven’t used this feature but I can see it being useful when building a new PC as an replacement, especially if it achieves the quoted 70% time saving.
   2. The Q-Shield is an alternative to the standard IO shield, it is much easier to fit and apparently it protects the motherboard better from EMI and static but this is difficult to prove. It is however a feature I like and it does help give the product an overall quality feel.
   3. To help connect those fiddly system connectors, you know the ones, power switch, HDD LED etc ASUS have invented their Q-connectorand it really does help. It’s a simple idea well executed, you get a small intermediate block which you connect the LEDs and switches to and then all you need to do is push the completed block onto the motherboard header.
   4. Those who dabble in overclocking will find the ASUS O.C. Profile feature useful as it allows you to save multiple sets of BIOS settings. You can save two sets in the CMOS and any additional sets to disk. The save to disk feature also allows for transferring BIOS settings to another PC, although it would need to be ‘hardware identical’.
   5. Coupled with the OC Profile is the Crashfree BIOS 3 which allows you to recover from a corrupted BIOS with a CD or USB device. A nice safety net for bad BIOS flashes. If the motherboard believes the BIOS to be corrupted then it automatically tries to access the CD and then USB device for a new flash.
   6. EZ Flash 2is an in BIOS flashing utility to allow you to flash the BIOS without needing a bootable floppy disk. This would be useful if windows flashing utilities weren’t so reliable these days but I’d much rather flash from within the operating system.
   7. The final EZ-DIY feature is the AI Slot Detectorwhich lights up LEDs on the motherboard for each incorrectly installed add-on card including the graphics card(s). The only time I can see this being useful is when installing a 1x or 4x times PCIe card into the 16x slot, as only the last black 16x slot will accept a 1x or 4x card.
8. ASUS MyLogo 3 – Allows you to use a picture of choice as the boot logo. I’ve not used this feature and considering the short amount of time you actually see the logo for I can’t see much point.
9. ASUS Multi-language BIOS- This is self explanatory but I can imagine it’s a feature that non-english speakers would want.

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