ASUS P5E3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP@n Motherboard Review :: Intel X38 Chipset

The X38 is Intel’s next leap in chipset design, but only differs from the P35 in a few ways. The major changes to the chipset involve support for Intel’s latest CPUs that have a very fast 1600MHz front side bus, and additional DDR3 support. As the support for the X9770 CPU is currently only available on the X38 and NVIIDIA’s nForce 780i SLI chipset at the moment, the separation from the top of the line motherboard chipsets is pretty clear. P35 does not support the 1600MHz FSB, nor are there two PCIe 2.0 slots on any of the P35 chipsets.

PCI Express 2.0 is the new standard for graphics cards. It provides up to double the bandwidth compared to the earlier PCI Express standard. PCI Express 2.0 provides up to 16GB/second of bandwidth to the graphics card, with each x16 lane slot on the motherboard. Asus’s P5E3 board sports three PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots with the last slot being a PCI Express 1.0a x16 slot (x4 electrically). The P5E3 also sports two PCI Express x1 slots which are controlled by the ICH9R Southbridge, and two PCI slots for legacy devices.

DDR3’s main advantage over DDR2 is the increased bandwith due to the higher speeds possible compared with DDR2. Latency increases in comparison to DDR2 speeds as the speed increases, meaning that the theoretical benefit of DDR3 will only be shown with DDR3-1600, to match the FSB of the new Intel CPUs. Many manufacturers include DDR2 support on their X38 boards at the moment, but as we move forward DDR3 will replace DDR2 as DDR2 replaced DDR and SDRAM. Prices are still extravagant for high speed DDR3 and that may sway some users form making the switch.