ASUS P5E3 Premium WiFi-AP @N X48 Motherboard Review

For avid readers and forum dwellers of Hardware Canucks, this is what you were asking and waiting for. We recently took a trip to X48 / DDR2 country with our ASUS Rampage Formula Review. Today we hop a trans-continental flight and head over to another region of the motherboard world, again, courtesy of Air ASUS. Probably one of the most familiar names in the computer hardware industry is ASUSTek or commonly referred to as ASUS. Encompassing everything from mainboards to graphics processors and enclosures to laptops, ASUSTek has a very large foot in the door of nearly every consumer electronic market you can think of. ASUSTek is not only a leader in all of these markets but a highly trusted manufacturer that provides excellent quality, performance, and support to back it up.

Today we aren't discussing the merits of the ASUS enterprise though, we are only interested in one market, the motherboard market. More specifically, the ultra high-end X48 / DDR3 segment of that market. Boasting a wealth of features, the Intel X48 chipset is at the top of the Intel chipset offerings right now. That means that when paired with four DDR3 memory slots, the P5E3-Premium is at the top of the mainstream motherboard food chain in the ASUS ecosystem.

With a heritage that has pretty much run the roost on the Intel platform for as far back as one can see sitting at a desk behind a wall of LCD monitors, the X48 chipset that powers the ASUS P5E3-Premium is a very refined and capable chipset at this point. Offering dual full 16X PCI-E lanes for outstanding CrossFire performance and a host of user friendly features, the P5E3-Premium is targeted at the gamer who wants to have their cake, and eat it too. Fortunately, the P5E3-Premium appears to be able to offer that very thing, at least on paper anyway. This is what we plan on finding out today, whether the P5E3-Premium can satisfy our gaming, overclocking, and general computing needs. There is plenty to cover, so let's get started.