Asus P5K3 Deluxe Motherboard

The Asus P5K3 Deluxe WiFi-AP edition motherboard comes with integrated WiFi,

which can be configured in software access point or station mode. Like most

high-end motherboards, this also has a heat pipe running from North to South

bridge, but unlike others, it has an extra fan mounted over the heat pipe for

extra cooling. The board supports up to 8 GB DDR3 RAM, has 2 PCI Express x16, 2

PCI Express x1, and 3 PCI 2.2 slots along with dual Gigabit LAN controller. It

has 6 SATA ports which support RAID 0 and 1. Plus, it supports 2 external SATA

ports, 1 FireWire, and 6 USB 2.0/1.1 ports. It doesn't have a PS2 port for

mouse, so one needs to get a USB mouse to work with.

The performance of this motherboard is good. We tested it with an Intel Core

2 Duo 2.6 GHz processor, 1 GB DDR3 RAM and an ATI Radeon X1950 series graphics

card. In 3D Mark 05 and 06, it scored 12746 and 6538, respectively, which are

good scores. As compared to Gigabyte P35-DQ6 (also reviewed this month) the

performance is a little better. In PCMark 05 also, it scored 7019 PCMarks, which

is better than most high-end motherboards. In Doom 3, this motherboard clocked

up to 216 fps and its score in CINEBENCH10 was also very good.

Bottom line: Being a 45 nm

processor-ready motherboard and having DDR3 memory support, makes it a worthy

buy.