Asus P5E3 Premium WiFi-AP @n Edition Motherboard

Bundle and BIOS

The packaging is just as classy looking as the board itself. Although, I do sort of miss having large monsters, space aliens and unrealistic gas-hog trucks plastered all over the box (JK!). It is classy looking though!

Inside the box we have just a ton of accessories, including: IDE, floppy and six SATA cables, a SATA power adaptor, a Q-connector for the I/O pins on the board, a firewire and USB header, two fans for further cooling options, two omni-directional antennas for the wifi, manuals for the wifi and the board, and of course, the back plate for your case. That really is quite a bundle. Asus did not skimp with this board at all.

Asus chose to use an AMI BIOS for their P5E3 Premium board (nothing new here). Lets take a look at the highlights of the BIOS.

The AI Tweaker page is certainly where the bulk of time will and should be spent as you tweak the board out to the max.

FSB/NB strap options are 200/266/333 and 400.

Your DDR3 frequency settings are many, and each setting changes depending on your fsb setting. If you raise the fsb, than your DDR3 speeds go up accordingly. Certainly there is a LOT of flexibility here as you tweak out your system.

Command rate can be set to 1N, 2N or auto.

DRAM CMD Skew settings…

DRAM timing control… lots of options here as well!

Vcore goes all the way up to 2.1v in increments of 00625v… a very good and dangerous number!

CPU GTL can go as high as .8 in increments of .005.

CPU PLL voltage can go as high as 2.78v in .02 increments.

FSB Termination voltage can go to 1.5v in .02v increments.

Our vdimm goes to an incredible 2.78v! Certainly, no one should run their DDR3 at those voltages for anything that is remotely normal!

Northbridge voltage goes to 2.21v.

Northbridge GTL voltage maxes out at .67v

Southbridge voltage has a max selection of 1.2v.

The clock over-charging voltage has a top option of 1.0v.

The AI Clock Twister is an auto overclocker and performance enhancer. This is a nice feature to have for those that are not into tweaking a system out, but would like to have the added benefit that a little overclocking can bring.

The next few shots are not really of any real neat features, but since I took the pictures, you might as well look at them!

The tools page does have a few interesting things on it. EZ Flash 2 is a nice and easy way to flash your BIOS. The Overclocking Profile is an area that you can save and load BIOS settings so that you can change them on the fly. I love that option! Also, on this page we have the ability to turn on and off the Asus Express Gate. The next two pictures show us what the Express Gate looks like…

Instead of booting into the OS, you can boot into the Express Gate…

Once it is booted, you can connect to the internet or SKYPE without having the OS overhead. This is a novelty at best really, as most people do not mind waiting a few extra seconds for the system to boot. It does make it nice to download a BIOS or driver without having to have a system up and running.