ASUS P5E3 Premium

Josh Collins finds out how the Premium stands up against the Deluxe.

Big things were expected of this otherwise humble high-end motherboard, considering its strong heritage. Not only that, but X48 is yet to be officially released – or as we snigger, officially acknowledged – by Intel, even though all major partners such as GIGABYTE, ASUS and MSI have already been steadily releasing X48-based products since January. Heck, even DFI is polishing the final touches on its X48 board.

The P5E3 Premium is the X48 incarnation of the P5E3 Deluxe, based on the X38 chipset. Knowing this, we were curious to discover what was different... or rather, what wasn’t.

Visually the two models, the Premium and the Deluxe, look exceptionally similar, featuring near identical component layout. Additionally, the Premium still incorporates standards we’ve come to expect from high-end ASUS motherboards such as solid state capacitors and dual 16x electrical PCIe slots, with an additional slot running 8x electrical. Also included are features such as DDR3 memory and 45nm processor support; we also hoped for the same overclocking potential experienced with the Deluxe.

What we received was very much what we expected.

The P5E3 Premium was an almost already entirely spoken for board from the get go. There was simply no getting to know this motherboard. Why? To us, it was a P5E3 Deluxe with a glorified X38 chipset in the form of the X48, tucked snuggly under a passive heatsink with some pretty blue painted metal trimmings to differentiate it from the silver colouring on the Deluxe model.

For many products in this cut throat market, to be the same is to be non-existent, or at best lesser than the original, first, pioneer

or whatever initially set the benchmark. For this particular contender it was fortunate to have had such a smooth road laid out for it to travel on. With the P5E3 Deluxe being a board that we enjoyed working with – we even used it for the torturous memory roundup last month (I’m yet to decide if it tortured me or the modules tested –Josh) – all the P5E3 Premium had to do was live up to its brother. Easy... right?

Ask any sibling and they’ll tell you it ain’t easy being compared to your brother or sister; be it older, younger or even the same age. Well, we’re sure that if you asked PC components of the same family or silicon (blood) lines, they’d answer much the same way.

If you haven’t read between the lines yet, let’s be blunt for a moment – we like this board.

The P5E3 Premium did everything we asked of it and unsurprisingly, it did it all in much the same manner as the Deluxe. Even the BIOS options are laid out in exactly the same manner, at least as far as we could see. Furthermore, and adding to our cynicism about the X48 chipset, it performed identically to the X38-based P5E3 Deluxe.

But if you’re like us, you’re still crying out wondering what in the name of all things Atomic is different between the P5E3 Premium and the P5E3 Deluxe. If we may be blunt once again, it’s about $200 no longer in your pocket – that is the difference.

Seeing as there is nothing other than some performance binning of the chipset splitting the difference between the X38 and X48, and having enjoyed the strong performance experienced from the P5E3 Deluxe, we were left feeling like we’d just taken a P5E3 Deluxe for a second spin around the block, only this time Xzibit pimped it first.

With next to no performance difference found between the two, a price difference floating around the $200 mark and a far, far more immature post-release product development cycle (BIOS updates etc), it’s a sad fact that the X38-based Deluxe model out shines its X48-based Premium brethren.

As was expected, this motherboard is a strong performer but if you’re interested in buying the board; do yourself a favour and just buy the Deluxe instead. That, or enjoy throwing away your hard earned cash – we know what we’d be opting for.