ASUS P5E3 Deluxe
BIOS:
The P5E3 Deluxe motherboard is loaded up with an AMI BIOS and contains the usual assortment of ASUS overclocking and tweaking features we have been accustom to seeing on their enthusiast motherboards. However, what makes this motherboard special is the ASUS Express Gate / DeviceVM SplashTop feature. We covered this technology earlier this month using this same exact motherboard, and for more information check out the article. This is truly something very impressive!
Performance:
Like the Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 we reviewed earlier this month, the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe had run exceptionally well under Linux for being based upon Intel's newest high-end desktop chipset. Neither Fedora 7 nor Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon had any compatibility problems with the core functionality of this motherboard. However, one of the ASUS motherboard add-ons, the WiFi-AP @n wireless adapter, hadn't worked out of the box. This 802.11n wireless adapter had worked inside the Linux-based SplashTop environment. The ASUS DVD though does contain Linux (and some Solaris) hardware drivers for the onboard components. Among the drivers are ALSA audio (v1.0.12 and v1.0.13 compatible), sk98lin LAN, RTL8110SC LAN, RAID, and RTL8187 WiFi drivers. Linux drivers on the included motherboard DVD aren't new for ASUS, but still they are among the few vendors taking this extra step.
The hardware we had used when testing the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe included an ASUS GeForce 8600GT 512MB graphics card (that will be reviewed at Phoronix shortly), 2GB of OCZ Gold DDR3-1333 memory, Seagate 200GB hard drive, SilverStone 750W Zeus power supply, and an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400. With our Linux benchmarks we had compared the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe to the Blitz Extreme, Gigabyte X38-DQ6, and the P5E3 Deluxe when it was overclocked. While we were running on air-cooling, we were easily able to achieve a modest overclock with the Core 2 Duo E6400 to 2.82GHz using a 351MHz FSB, but this motherboard can be pushed much further than that. The GA-X38-DQ6 is DDR2-based, so for this system we had used OCZ's Reaper HPC PC2-8500 memory. Benchmarks had consisted of Enemy Territory, Quake 4, LAME encoding, timed disk reads, Gzip compression, and RAMspeed. The Linux distribution used during the benchmarking process was Fedora 7 with the Linux 2.6.22.4 kernel.