Asus P5K3 Deluxe motherboard aiming to capture the enthusiasts by supporting DDR3 ram ONLY

INTRODUCTION

We've had the Asus P5K3 Deluxe motherboard in our labs for a while, in fact we had it the same time as the P5K Deluxe, which we reviewed last month. It's only now that we've managed to get some decent DDR3 ram to test this motherboard. And thanks to Asus and Kingston Technology, we're now able to take a proper look at the Asus P5K3 Deluxe motherboard.

       

This motherboard uses Intel's P35 chipset and supports DDR3 ram ONLY. Designed for the enthusiast market, it's equipped with all the latest technologies such as support for 1333FSB, DDR3-1333, Quad Core ready. Other features include the pure copper heat-pipe chipset cooling, dual PCIe for Crossfire configuration, dual gigabit ethernet, 6 external USB ports, 1 firewire, 2 eSATA connections and of course Asus's integrated 54g wireless LAN. All of this makes the Asus P5K3 Deluxe ... one feature packed motherboard.

In our previous reviews, motherboards using Intel's P35 chipset with DDR2-1066 ram produced very good results. I wonder whether the same could be said about a system using DDR3-1066 ram. One concern is that DDR3 ram is still very expensive and not widely available yet. And you will see from some of our tests, the performance of DDR3-1066 offers very little over DDR2-1066. This is probably because of the higher CAS latency of DDR3 ram.

       

What's more interesting though, is the question whether DDR3-1333 ram with 1333FSB will give us the performance we expect. My feeling is that many mainstream consumers will shy away from DDR3 until the performance will justify the higher cost.

The Asus P5K3 Deluxe should appeal to the hardcore performance user or enthusiast. It should give us what we've been expecting from DDR3 ... even if it will cost us an arm or a leg. I hope in time, consumers will see the brighter side of DDR3.  

OK, Let's not waste any more time and take a closer look at the specifications of the Asus P5K3 deluxe ...