Asus P5E3 Deluxe

If it's a deluxe motherboard... where's the velour?

The P5E3 Deluxe represents the next step in the development of solid high-end motherboards. Starting with the P5B Deluxe during the P965 era, and moving onto the P5K Deluxe and P5K3 Deluxe for the P35 chipset, further evolution has lead to the introduction of the P5E3 Deluxe sporting an X38 chipset.

Initial belief was that this board would simply be an incremental addition to the range, more or less mimicking the P5K3 Deluxe but this time with PCIe 2.0 support from the X38 chipset. Thankfully and much to our pleasure, this motherboard is much more then an incremental increase in a product tree with barely any changes – quite the opposite actually.

At a BIOS level this board is dramatically different to any other we’ve seen in this price and performance bracket. For starters, the options available and level of detail in which the settings can be tweaked, both in terms of value steps (i.e. 0.025v increments rather then 0.05v increments) and the level of voltage adjustments available with high max voltages etc. This unfortunately wasn’t extended to the CPU vcore, which is still seemingly chopped it off at the knees with only 1.7v as the max BIOS settable value and leaving the high vcore gig to the R.O.G. line of boards.

Most intriguing within the BIOS mechanisms, however, was the way in which values were entered, removed and generally modified. Instead of the traditional method of pressing enter to then be presented with a number of options, this time around you simply key in the value on the num pad. It takes some getting used to at first as you re-train your BIOS micro-l33t abilities to be a num pad warrior, but in the end it leaves you with an ultimately more intuitive BIOS. This could perhaps be seen as an initial hurdle for new comers to the overclocking scene who aren’t quite clued in, but we can’t see that being a serious issue for long.

Layout wise, however, there are some poor choices. One example is the small spacing between the PCIe 2.0 slots. This is a big issue problem due to the amount of heat generated by today’s cards, which are commonly thrown into a CrossFire configuration. Also of concern is how close the DIMM slot clips are to the back end of the PCB when using a long graphics card, such as the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 series and HD2900XT, HD3850 and HD3870 from AMD ATI.

A heatpipe jungle is present, though this is not an intrusive or obstructive issue and maintains a clear socket area for third party heatsinks. Also sticking out of the board is the built in 300Mbps IEEE 802.11n wireless LAN, with backwards compatibility to IEEE 802.11g and 802.11b. There are six SATA ports, four of which are on a 90 degree angle to the board, a single EIDE connection and a plethora of USB ports both on the I/O panel and headers on the board itself; this motherboard presents a high level of connectivity and features.

With the presence of DDR3 DIMM slots and an X38 chipset, we once again reached for the Corsair Dominator DDR3-1800 7-7-7-20 memory kit to review this board. These once again performed admirably during the overclocking testing.

The P5E3 Deluxe shows itself not only as a feature rich motherboard but also as one hell of a strong overclocker, partly due to the powerful BIOS options but also thanks to the strong feature set. Breaking through with a 585MHz FSB, the board comfortably matched the Maximus Extreme, and then some. We were pleasantly surprised, to say the least.

We found the P5E3 Deluxe to be a strong overclock, particularly in the realm of memory overclocking, regularly capable of sustaining slightly higher frequencies at the same latencies and volts, or tighter timings at the same frequencies, be this a whole CAS level change or simply running 1T rather then 2T command rate timing.

The board offers comparable overclocking to the Maximus Extreme and a strong feature set to boot. This is definitely one for the pool room.