Author: William Henning
Editor: Howard Ha
Publish Date: Wednesday, October 24th, 2007
Originally Published on Neoseeker (http://www.neoseeker.com)
Article Link: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/asus_p5e3_deluxe/
Copyright Neo Era Media, Inc. - please do not redistribute or use for commercial purposes.
Asus has a reputation of producing fine high-end motherboards. Today we look at their X38 based offering, the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe WiFi.
The motherboard comes in a low-key black motherboard box with a simple plastic handle. No money is wasted on a fancy, fold-out windowed packaging, and no holographrams adorn the box - Asus is betting that people will seek out the board based on its reputation and model number, instead of being taken in by fancy packaging.
Gamers are an obvious target for the board as it supports dual PCIe 2.0 x16 slots, offering increased bandwidth for future PCIe 2.0 x16 CrossFire graphics cards.
The P5E3 supports a plethora of features, here are some of the highlights:
Just in case you want more details, here are the spec's straight from Asus' site:
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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:
What's in the Box
Asus did not skimp on accessories.
First we have the usual suspects:
Then we have a whack of cables and helpful parts, such as such as:
I promise we will get to the benchmarks soon :-)
Introducing Splashtop
When you power up the Asus P5E3 Deluxe WiFi, instead of the expected splash page or BIOS startup you get “ASUS Express Gate” – a GUI selection tool that lets you choose between browsing the web, using Skype, booting the “normal” OS, going into BIOS Setup, or shutting down.
That’s right.
A GUI even before the BIOS screen!
If you choose “Web”, the P5E3 launches “Splashtop” – a tiny embedded Linux OS residing in part of the BIOS flash chip – from where you can run a web browser, use Skype, and configure Splashtop's settings. (For more on Splashtop, go to www.splashtop.com)
Here you can see the web browser showing the P5E3 Deluxe page on the ASUS web site.
And here is the Splashtop web site.
As I don’t use Skype, all I can show you is its unconfigured contacts list.
Here you can see the applets in the Splashtop control panel
The time and date is set with a simple, familiar looking applet.
And there is an applet for the input method.
Set your language and keyboard here…
Splashtop also has a really nice network configuration dialogue, showing a diagram of the back panel I/O
The video card / monitor configuration lets you set up the Splashtop resolution.
And last but not least: mic and speaker volume controls.
Splashtop is a nice addition to this board, however, as much as I like having an embedded Linux, its utility is limited by being stripped down to only a web browser and Skype. If Asus added a gigabyte of flash, they could have Splashtop additionally include OpenOffice and a bunch of games, making it far more useful than its current limited form.
As an aside, for those of you looking for a small, useful Linux distribution, take a peek at PuppyLinux – it can run in as little as 48MB of ram, and comes with a
The BIOS
Once you get past the splashtop screen, you are greeted by the standard ASUS “Ai Lifestyle” boot screen; which leads to the AMI boot status screen.
You can enter the BIOS by pressing DEL.
Here you will find a pretty standard AMI BIOS, with some customization by ASUS.
Most of the screens below are fairly standard, and as we have described them before in other reviews – and given that you can see them here again as well – we will only comment on the screens that are somehow special, on the next page.
Ai Tweaker
Okay, enough of the boring BIOS screens... now we get to the fun stuff!
First thing any self-respecting overclocker will do is disable anything remotely resembling "Ai" overclocking. Sorry Asus, you do a good job on it, but simple 5%-25% "automatic" overclocks just don't cut it for advanced tweakers - which you well know, as you give us so many more nice tweakable parameters!
(As an aside, I always disable the "Spread Spectrum" settings as well.)
The FSB Strap lets us choose from memory dividers the chipset supports for each "approved" FSB setting - but on modern systems, you will normally choose "333" or "400" here, and pick from the DDR3 speeds made available in the DRAM frequency setting.
There is, of course, the normal processor multipler, FSB frequency, and PCIe frequency settings; and I was also glad to see an exposed "DRAM Command Rate" control - even though DDR3 at high speeds is unlikely to run at 1T rates.
There are quite a few DRAM timing parameters to play with.
Strangely, I left the Ai clock twister, skew, and transaction boosters on auto.
Yes, you are seeing right -- I was using 1.575V for the CPU core voltage to get the max overclock; as well as boosing the FSB termination voltage to 1.5V, the memory to 1.86V and the Northbridge voltage to 1.5V.
Here's the "Advanced" tab's "CPU Configuration" screen - for some reason the CPU multiplier is duplicated here, and the C1E (SpeedStep) disable control is here too.
We must be getting close to actual benchmark results now...
Test Setup
We made the test systems as similar as we could, other than the memory - so it should give us some very interesting results! Hardware used for testing the motherboards:
Benchmarks Used For now, here is a listing of the tests performed: Video drivers used were the NVIDIA ForceWare version 93.71 package.
Business Winstone
Let’s make this simple.
Look at that stock Winstone result!
Then drool at the maximum overclock Winstone.
Content Creation
The P5E3 also does very well at stock speeds on the Multimedia Content creation test, but is slightly bested by a DDR2 X38 board with high speed low latency DDR2 memory.
Moral of the story: DDR2 1066-4-4-4-12 beats DDR3 1333-8-8-8-24
When overclocked, the P5E3 ties for top spot – with the DDR2 based Gigabyte X38-DQ6
WinRAR
The stock speed ASUS P5E3 Deluxe does well at WinRAR, slightly beating the DDR2 based Gigabyte X38-DQ6 – but both are beaten by the Gigabyte P35-DS3R with high speed DDR2 memory.
HDTach
For SATA HDTach, the P5E3 ties the Gigabyte X38-DQ6, and both beat the P35 based boards badly.
For IDE HDTach, the X38 chipset based P5E3 is beaten up – VERY badly – by other boards. Frankly, it looks like ASUS may be using a USB to IDE controller to support the IDE channel on the motherboard.
USB performance is basically even across the board, except for the horrible %8 CPU utilization at stock speeds by the P5E3.
Lame MP3
The Asus P5E3 Deluxe WiFi does well on the Lame MP3 encoding benchmark, tying for top result with the Gigabyte X38-DQ6 – and takes top spot on the chart when maximally overclocked.
TMPGEnc
The Gigabyte X38-DQ6 slightly beats the P5E3 at encoding with TMPGEnc at stock, and the P5E3 slightly takes top spot when overclocked.
XVid
The XviD results are quite interesting, the P35 DDR3 based Gigabyte P35-DS3R and DDR2 based Asus P5K3 both significantly beat the P5E3; however when overclocked, the P5E3 dominates these results.
Call of Duty
The Asus P5E3 Deluxe WiFi takes top spot (by a hair) at stock, and dominates when overclocked for Call of Duty.
Commanche 4
The P5E3 at stock is slightly faster than the other boards; and it is faster than all of them when overclocked.
Doom 3
Doom 3 likes the Asus P5E3 Deluxe. The P5E3 takes top spot, at both stock and overclocked settings.
Quake 4
For Quake 4, the P5E3 -- at stock -- even beats a number of other overclocked motherboards! It was, however, only third place overall when running at its top stable overclocking setting.
Halo
Okay, I do not have to be beaten on the head with a clue stick. I can read my charts as well as the next guy… it seems clear the ASUS P5K3 does very well for gaming, at least at low resolutions.
For Halo, the P5E3 takes top spots both at stock and overclocked speeds.
Jedi Knight
And we have a repeat performance for Jedi Knight – top spots at stock and overclocked for the P5E3.
UT 2004
This looks familiar. Top spots for the P5E3 for stock and overclocked results for Unreal Tournament.
Sandra
Okay, so the ASUS P5E3 does well for business, multimedia and games. But how does it fare for artificial benchmarks?
Quite well in fact – at stock, the boards are running neck and neck; however, when overclocked, the P5E3 took the top spot for the Sandra Dhrystone tests.
For Sandra memory bandwidth, the P5E3 dominated both the stock and overclocked results.
RightMark Read
For RightMark Read, the Asus P5E3 Deluxe WiFi at stock beat not only the other stock results, but also some overclocked results; and when overclocked, it topped the chart.
RightMark Write
For RightMark Write, the P5E3 was slightly beaten at stock speeds by the n680i based Gigabyte N680SLI-DQ6 with high speed DDR2 memory, and by the Gigabyte P35-DS3R with high speed DDR2 memory – otherwise, it did very well.
RightMark Latency
At stock speeds, the Asus P5E3 Deluxe WiFi managed to beat the stock and some overclocked results for memory latency – including some low latency DDR2!
When overclocked, the P5E3 had the best believable results on the chart.
RightMark Bandwidth
At stock speeds, the P5E3 beat the other stock and some overclocked results, however the overclocked Gigabyte X38-DQ6 with high speed DDR2 turned in significantly better results, so the P5E3 has to be content with second place on this chart.
Overclocking
The Asus P5E3 Deluxe WiFi is an above average overclocker; I was able to run it with a 500MHz FSB stably, albeit with only a 7x multiplier. However, for most benchmarks, the best scores were obtained at 450x8 with the DDR3 memory running at 1800MHz data rate with a 8-8-8-24 timing.
In order to reach 3.6GHz, we took the following simple steps:
3.6GHz with a Core 2 Duo E6400 is nothing to sneeze at, and a stable 500MHz FSB is quite a good result. I know, there are some golden samples out there that will reach a higher FSB frequency, and I was able to POST and even get into Windows at somewhat higher speeds - but I do not report unstable results.
Conclusion
The Asus P5E3 Deluxe WiFi is an excellent motherboard, with the best DDR3 performance I’ve seen to date.
The benchmark results earlier in this article speak for themselves – in the vast majority of cases the P5E3 was at the top of the stock results, and almost always dominated the overclocked results.
Personally, I can hardly wait to see how this board will perform with future 45nm processors such as Penryn based 45nm dual and quad core processors!
DDR3 seems to come into its own above 1600MHz; at 1800MHz it finally has a performance edge over low latency 1066MHz DDR2 in the vast majority of the benchmarks – however, this does again drive home the discrepancy between the cost and performance of DDR3, because when you look at the costs of high performance low-latency DDR2 at 1066MHz, against the cost of DDR3 at 1800MHz, the price advantage still remains with DDR2.
Some aspects of this board could not yet be tested, as we do not currently have two PCIe 2.0 x16 Crossfire boards to test it with; however, as higher speed video cards come on line, we are likely to revisit this board to see how they will perform.
Here's the bottom line:
The Asus P5E3 Deluxe WiFi is a very fast board, with excellent overclocking potential. Add to the mix the extensive PCIe 2.0 support, great SATAII transfer rates, and more I/O than you can shake a stick at - and it becomes an obvious choice for gamers and overclockers looking for a good high-end X38 DDR3 board. Really, the only 'flies in the ointment' for the P5E3 Deluxe WiFi are the poor IDE performance, and the expense of high-end DDR3 memory modules; neither of which will stop devoted enthusiasts with money from plunking down cold hard cash for the great performance offered by this board.
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