ASUS P5E3 Deluxe/WiFi-AP@n Motherboard Review :: Asus P5E3 Deluxe Layout

The layout of the P5E3 Deluxe board is excellent, with one exception that only affects those wanting to use water cooling. The CPU Socket area is surrounded on all sides by a copper heatsink which does not interfere with normal cooling solution installations, but may cause problems for people like myself that have fat fingers wanting to use a water cooler as it is a bit confining. Asus chose to use all solid-state capacitors which have the benefit of not leaking and being stronger in general compared to the earlier capacitors.

Board Layout

CPU Socket area

DDR3 slots

Ai Lifestyle

Four DDR3 slots lie below the CPU which is the normal place for most motherboards today. Asus chose to include two colors, indicating Dual-Channel mode when installed in the indicated slots. DDR3 memory currently is available in DDR3 1333MHz and 1600MHz and 1800MHz incarnations. DDR3 1800 memory provides up to 14.4GB/second of memory bandwidth compared to the 8.4GB/second of DDR2-1066 memory.

Expansion slots

PCIe x16 2.0 slots

SATA

SATA ports

The location of the expansion slots is dictated by the necessary separation of the two PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots required for Crossfire operability. The slots are PCI Express x1, PCI, PCI Express x16 2.0, PCI Express x1, PCI Express x16 2.0, PCI, PCI Express 1.0a x16 slot. As noted before, the third PCI Express slot is electrically wired to x4 mode.

ZIF

Copper heatsink

24-pin

8-pin

Drive support on the P5E3 Deluxe comes in the form of 6 SATA 2 3.0 Gb/second ports, two of which are located next to the CHA_FAN2 header and four next to the IDE port that is controlled by a JMICRON chip due to the inability of the ICH9R Southbridge to support Ultra DMA 133 natively. One nice touch is the placement of the four SATA ports horizontally, instead of vertically, meaning that the cables won’t cross over things and cause a mess. A floppy port is also present on the board, rounding out the internal drive connectors.

The rear I/O panel contains an additional two external SATA ports, which are controlled by the ICH9R SB. A PS/2 keyboard port is included on the rear panel (though why anyone would want or use a PS/2 keyboard today is beyond me). Rounding out the I/O are 6 USB 2.0 ports, a Marvell Ethernet port, a Realtek Ethernet port, 6 jacks for the audio, S/PDIF RCA component and optical audio outputs for the full experience.

FP I/O

USB

Firewire

PWRFan

The 24-pin power connector is located next to the Floppy connector, the normal place on the motherboard for this connector. The 8-pin power connector is on the upper left portion of the motherboard. Asus decided to include something new with their P5E3 Deluxe, something called the Energy Processing Unit. With the whole world going green environmentally, the EPU is designed to run the computer in low power mode, saving energy. It only works in Windows, so Linux and Mac users are a bit out of luck. However, as the vast majority of computers are Windows based, this shouldn’t affect the purchaser of this product.

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