Related Articles

The Board

As you can see below, the Asus P5E3 Deluxe WiFi has a striking appearance, replete with heat pipes and heatsinks.

The two blue slots are PCIe 2.0 x16 slots both physically and electrically, whereas the black slot is physically 16x ,but only 4x electrically. Note the connectors for additional USB ports, and an internal FireWire connector.

The six internal SATAII ports are in the front, with the first two oriented vertically, and the other four at a right angle, with the IDE port close by. The DDR3 DIMM slots are orange and black, and thankfully, the colors indicate matching pairs. Note the solid state capacitors all over the board.

Here's a closer look at the heatsinks surrounding the CPU socket. Note the solid state capacitors and ferrite cores surrounding the socket; and I was happy to see that the heatsinks were low enough to not interfere with the mouting of our Noctua 12 heatsink.

There are plenty of connectors on the I/O backplate:

• PS/2 keyboard
• six USB 2.0
• IR receiver (for the included remote control)
• SP/DIFF output
• dual Gigabit Ethernet
• FireWire
• dual eSATA
• six audio jacks
• two antenna connections

What's in the Box

Asus did not skimp on accessories.

First we have the usual suspects:

• quick start guide
• motherboard manual
• WiFi manual
• remote control manual,
• driver CD
• software library (AV, media player etc)

Then we have a whack of cables and helpful parts, such as such as:

• six SATA cables
• one SATA power cable to four pin molex converter
• two heatsink fans
• two antennas for WiFi
• IR receiver
• IDE and floppy cables
• I/O backplate
• rear bracket (if you want two more eSATA ports)
• and a keyboard/speaker connector accessory

I promise we will get to the benchmarks soon :-)