Hardocp's review of the ASUS P5E3 Premium

[bigsnyder]

The ASUS P5E3 Premium is one of the fastest Intel boards I?ve seen, ever. The X48 chipset paired up with the board is a stellar performer, giving the board a leg up in both the stock and overclocking performance realms. The benchmarking numbers alone are enough to demonstrate this fact, with the stellar overclocking results acting as icing on the cake.

I am not denying this board might be the greatest since sliced bread, but looking at their own benchmarks, the P5E3 Deluxe is nearly as fast. I could be missing the bigger picture here, but I just don't see the big deal. Feel free to disagree, I am just looking for feedback here.

 

[krunt]

I looked at the gaming benchmarks and the board beats the deluxe by 1% to 2%. ok, thats fine, but thier comments are totaly overblown. my favorite is after the quake benchmark "The P5E3 Premium again differentiates itself from the competition"

Well, it beat the AMD boards pretty well, but the only other intel board was the P5E3 deluxe, and it beat it 202 to 200 fps. not quite differentiating... The slightest voltage fluctuation will account for that. (When my bios is set to a 333fsb it is actually a 333.63 fsb. gives me an extra 5.8mhz on the cpu, that could be worth a frame rate right there).

Looking at some more of their reviews, they don't do much in the way of realworld benchmarks, but i guess thats ok as many sites do not. My problem with what they are doing is that they never give you the chance to compare apples to apples. they should have thrown in a reference system or something. Just to compare the gains against. oh well, it just seems an odd way to introduce new technology.

 

[Gary Key]

ASUS just did some modifications to the capacitors and we will have a new board early next week. We had our review going up today and pulled it until we look at the final (new final) design that is shipping into the channel in two weeks.

Unless something drastically changes, the board will get an Editor's Choice award from us. Not because of its stock performance. In fact, a $80 abit IP35-E will match up consistently against the X48 boards at stock levels, so unless you buy this board to overclock or want a long term workstation type platform, it will not be worth the money for most people.

So the big difference between this board and others at the high end is in its overclocking capabilities, BIOS options, quality, and general features. We will show those capabilities shortly, consider this board to be like the Rampage that Kris just previewed, only having an additional shot of steroids thrown in.