ASUS P5E3 Premium WIFi-AP @n Edition :: ASUS P5E3 Premium WiFi-AP@n Layout

The P5E3 Premium is a well designed motherboard from a layout perspective. The CPU area is surrounded on two sides by capacitors but otherwise clear, leaving plenty of room for after-market cooling solutions. The Northbridge (X48 chip) is cooled by a long heatsink with the ASUS logo on it. Two heatpipes lead out to two different heatsinks from the NB. The Southbridge (ICH9R) has a AI Lifestyle logo on the top with a heatpipe leading to another heatsink.

X48 chipsets can take DDR3 memory, the latest memory available on the motherboard market. The fastest available DDR3 memory at the moment is DDR3-2000, running at 2000MHz. The P5E3 Premium WiFi-AP@n supports memory up to 2000MHz when overclocked. Default clocked memory of 1600/1333/1000 is supported as well. Four DIMM slots are on the board allowing up to 8GB of DDR3-2000 memory to be used.

SATA HDDs and optical drives (DVD-ROM) have taken over for IDE HDDs. The P5E3 Premium WiFi-AP@n board sports six SATA 3Gb/second ports. Four of the SATA ports are angled so the cables are easy to route from the HDDs. Two external SATA drives (eSATA) ports are on the board’s rear IO allowing for external SATA devices to be installed. A JMB363 PATA and SATA controller controls the UltraDMA 133 port and the external SATA ports on the board.

PCI Express 2.0 doubles the available bandwidth to the video card from the system. PCI Express x16 2.0 slots can transfer up to 8GB of bandwidth between a video card and the system. The P5E3 Premium has three PCI Express x16 slots with two of them operating at x16 mode and one at x4 mode (black slot). The board supports ATI’s Crossfire multiple-GPU technology, allowing two or three video cards to improve performance in games.

The 24-pin ATX power connector lies on the bottom of the board next to the FDD port and the two external SATA ports. The 8-pin power connector is on the top right hand side of the board meaning that the cable will not interfere with the cooling of the board. Three USB 2.0 connections are on the board, bringing the total supported by the P5E3 Premium board to ten with the four on the back panel IO. A IEEE-1394 Firewire connection is also present.

Onboard audio is rapidly becoming as good as any discrete audio on the market today with the exception of the Creative Labs EAX features, the onboard audio available today has all of the features you want from an audio card but comes with the motherboard. The P5E3 Premium board comes with an ADI ADI1988B CODEC which features support for all of the High Definition Audio features.

The rear IO of the board contains the PS/2 keyboard port. PS/2 mice have long been relegated to the scrap heap for most people and it is welcome to see ASUS remove that port from their boards. Two external SATA ports, a S/PDIF Out port, a IEEE-1394a port, 2 RJ-45 LAN ports, 6 USB 2.0 ports, 8-Channel Audio I/O and two WiFi-AP@n antenna jacks round out the back panel I/O ports on the board. The Gigabit LAN controllers are Marvell 88E8056 chips using the PCI Express bus.