A Closer Look at the ASUS P5E3-Premium

If there was a way to judge a motherboard by looks alone, the P5E3-Premium would be ranked right up there with the best of them. The subtle touches of color but overall dark PCB give the P5E3-Premium that edge that makes it look good. The quality looking finish of the heat sink covers give it that prestige look of a high price motherboard. In the image above, we have outlined all of the major areas and components, we will now take a closer look at each of the major areas on the motherboard.

We will start the tour at the CPU socket and what ASUS call 'Stack Cool 2'. All we can say is that we missed the days of a simple heat sink with a 40mm fan buzzing away. In jest of course because cooler, quieter, better all seem to form in that order in customer demands so ASUS simply obliges. In all honesty, as large and abundant the heat sinks are, they don't really intrude upon the CPU socket and do a great job of keeping the whole system running cool. Using a Thermalright Ultra-120 w/fan is possible in either direction and the heat sinks play no role. The CPU 8-Pin 12v connector is also found up here right at the top edge for easy cable management not having to stretch across any of the motherboard. The inductors and main capacitors are the exact same hardware as the ASUS Rampage Formula.

But that is where the similarities end and the P5E3-Premium goes off on its own. The first notable upgrade on this board from others is the three-phase vDIMM circuit for supplying the power to our memory. An overkill setup like this is designed to provide as clean a supply of power to the component as possible, this isn't the last multi-phase power supply for a component. Another interesting item in the first photo is the jumpers at the end of the outside black DIMM slot. These jumpers enable ridiculous voltage options for the CPU and NB. There is absolutely no reason most users would need to enable these so only do so if you understand the results would be our recommendation.

Overall, the memory area is nicely spaced from the CPU socket and still providing plenty of room for the top PCI-E 16X slot to stretch out. This will become repetitive but it can't be mentioned enough, ASUS does a superb job at routing all connectors to the direct edge of the motherboard. Every connector from the 24-pin ATX connector to the floppy, SATAII, and even the 3-pin fan headers; everything is right on the edge of the motherboard for easy routing and hiding.

The tidy layout continues down to the lower forward corner where the passive south bridge cooler, note the mounting hardware, meets six SATAII connectors, all of which run off of the ICH9R chipset. Four of the SATA connectors are on a right angle with the last two vertical. The right angled IDE connector is tied to the system via a JMicron JMB363 controller that we will see in a minute. Yet another two 3-pin fan headers can be found on the edge as well as the CMOS battery and just out of reach of the camera is the clear RTC jumper. Moving along the bottom edge takes us along additional USB 2.0, FireWire, and a COM port header. These two USB headers provide an additional four potential USB ports on the front panel of your case or for additional internal card readers.

The back edge below the I/O panel houses the JMicron controller just discussed that also powers the two eSATA ports on the rear panel. There are two other inhabitants of this area are the RealTek RTL8110SC, and the smaller ADI1988B Audio CODEC positioned just behind the 4-pin audio connector. This Analog Devices solution provides plenty of features that can be found here. The RTL8110SC is a 'Single-Chip Gigabit LOM Ethernet Controller' which provides one of the Gigabit network connections while a Marvell 88E8056-NNC1 provides the other. This is sort of a love/hate outcome with the network controllers, the Realtek would be considered inferior and a cheap solution running over the PCI BUS and the Marvell considered substantially better and running on a single PCI-E lane.

The overall layout of the expansion slots is a little bit interesting. The two 16X PCI-E connectors are separated by the only PCI-E 1X connector which does leave the top PCI slot free, however, the length available to the top PCI slot may be shortened by memory slots. This leaves the three PCI-E 16X slots even spaced and able to each fit a dual slot cooler. The layout is the best and only way a tri-Fire setup could be run though so some exceptions had to have been made somewhere. Unfortunately it also means that running CrossFire X with a pair of HD3870X2s means they will be back to back causing the second card to run a good pinch warmer than the front. It was mentioned earlier, but take a look at the mounting hardware for the north bridge and south bridge heat sinks. ASUS has really stepped up the quality of their chipset cooling with this mounting hardware alone.

We would have liked to see screw mounting hardware on all of the heat sinks but won't complain with at least the two most substantial receive this quality treatment. Speaking of which, the main center piece of the P5E3-Premium is the blue highlighted north bridge cooling section. Despite being completely silent and looking almost too fancy to work properly, the chipset cooling is more than adequate for most users. We haven't even changed the thermal paste out and results have been very good with this stock cooling.

One final item of interest I wanted to show was the dual-phase power supply for the north bridge. This feature is reserved for only the upper end of ASUS motherboards and again cements the P5E3-Premium as one of the premier ASUS offerings of the X48 chipset.

The rear I/O Panel is quite busy on this particular motherboard with 6 USB 2.0 ports, two gigabit LAN adapters, two eSATA and a FireWire connection along with the full supply of audio connections. At the far end are the two WiFi @N connectors that ultimately use up the last two USB ports that the chipset offers. The continued push for a serial device free environment continues and my cries fall on deaf ears that PS/2 mouse ports are still proffered for those of us with older KVMs.

The final touch on the cooling discussion is shown in the second photo above. Not only are screws used to secure the north and south bridge heat sinks, back plates are used for both providing an excellent and secure mount to ensure even and complete contact between the chipsets and the heat sinks. In the past ASUS has drawn criticism for some of their lack luster chipset cooling solutions but they have really started to step up their game, on the extremely expensive motherboards at least.