ASUS P5E3 Deluxe - fully-loaded and ready to fly

[HEXUS]

The race to produce the most feature-rich, fastest LGA775 chipset has lead to Intel releasing the X38. ASUS was only too happy to oblige with a retail example in the form of its fully-laden P5E3 Deluxe. HEXUS puts it through the mill and tells you whether it's worth buying or not..

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[DeSean]

It is certainly a very expensive device, but if you are very keen on wireless 'N' support then you save around £20-30 on a wireless card. The sound codec is very good (as it is on my Asus mobo - Creative's retarded driver team seems to have an issue with 64bit Vista + 4GB RAM), so you may do without a seperate sound card.

Basically what I'm saying is that mobos are more expensive than they were but they offer more features than ever. The question is whether or not these features will be used. How many will make use of that last x4 PCIe slot for example.

I actually think that very high end Asus boards might benefit from an extra couple of SATA ports. Potential overkill I know but I only have one spare at the moment - for me the eSATA is currently redundant.

[Tarinder]

Pretty good summary, DeSean.

The problem is one of integration. You will need to replace the entire motherboard if one feature was to fail.