14 DAY TRIAL // Just as Intel announced officially that it will delay for some time the launch of its latest and greatest performance centered X38 chipset for mainboards in order to give more time to manufacturing companies to finish their boards' designs, Asus rolled out its very first X38 compatible motherboard, the P5E3 Deluxe Motherboard - WiFi AP. Keeping up with Asus' tradition this mainboard is representing the high end offering while lower level editions are to be expected soon.
The Asus P5E3 Deluxe motherboard comes with state of the art hardware components and technical specifications and, of course, it is based on the Intel X38 chipset and on the ICH9R southbrigde. As this mainboard must support the Penryn class of central processing units which is just around the corner, according to Intel, it also comes with a system bus that goes from 800MHz to 1066, 1333 and 1600MHz.
On the random access memory side, the Asus mainboard looks very good as it is equipped with four DDR3 compatible DIMMs and it supports up to 8GB of memory running at 1333Mhz, that could eventually be overclocked to 1600MHz. On the expansion slots side this mainboard comes with 3 PCI Express x16 slots of which two are blue for the PCI Express 2.0 x16 mode and a black one for a PCI Express x4 or x1 mode.
Legacy PCI slots are also supported and the latest Asus product comes with two of them just like it also comes with two PCI Express x1 expansion slots. Connecting hard disk drives or optical drives to this mainboard will be fun as it comes with six Serial ATA II connectors that are able to form up RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 configurations.
On the networking side it sports two gigabit Ethernet connections and the patented Asus WiFi AP, 300Mbps 802.11n with Software Access Point as well as FireWire and USB 2.0 ports and connectors. Like all mainboards, this one too comes with an integrated sound chip and the solution chosen was the ADI1988B 8-channel High Def Audio CODEC.
This high end Asus mainboard comes with a number of innovative technologies like the Energy Processing Unit, or EPU for short, as well as the Asus Express Gate which according to the news site hothardware can be used to access the Internet without booting into an operating system.