Verdict: Is Intel's new high-end X48 chipset worth the cash?
With the imperious £113 Asus P5K Premium WiFi-AP still offering all the oomph you need to overclock the latest kit, we were curious to see what goodies the P5E3 Premium WiFi-AP offers to justify the price. The new Intel X48 chipset is the obvious answer - it's the first to natively support Intel's newly released 45nm 1,600MHz FSB Penryn architecture CPUs. With the Intel X38 officially supporting a maximum FSB of 1,333MHz, you can see why the new release was necessary.
As with the X38, there's PCI-E 2.0 support and enough PCI-E lanes to allot 16 each to two graphic slots for full-speed CrossFire (SLI isn't supported). This is far superior to the 16-lane/4-lane arrangement the P35 chipset uses, although the lack of PCI-E 2.0 support on the P35 is less worrying at the moment. Like the P35 and X38, the new X48 is available in two flavours - supporting DDR2 or DDR3. As DDR3 is much more costly than DDR2, it will significantly raise the overall price of your new PC.
It's easy to criticise DDR3, especially when DDR2 memory is still capable of fast speeds and doesn't hinder performance much, if at all. However, DDR3 will make much more sense once CPUs start to demand the extra bandwidth that DDR3 modules can provide. We've seen quad-core Core 2 Extremes benchmark faster with raised FSBs (rather than raised multipliers) to attain the chip's maximum overall frequency; octo-core CPUs are likely to be even more bandwidth-hungry. You could therefore argue that DDR3 motherboards, while not 'future-proof', are at least more 'future-resistant' than DDR2 boards. As the P5E3 is an Intel DDR3 board, you can use XMP DDR3 memory, which should make memory overclocking easier.
There's plenty of space between the three full-length PCI-E slots, so you could have three dual-height graphics cards without worrying too much about overheating and, as the X48 chipset supports CrossFireX, three HD 3-series cards could be used collaboratively. However, the X48 has only 40 PCI-E 2.0 lanes, so the third slot gets only four lanes. With one of the two PCI slots being above the primary graphics slots, you'll always have space for a sound card, too. The built-in WiFi, which supports 802.11b/g and n (Draft 2), reduces the need for expansion cards. However, that super-fast WiFi also contributes towards the massive price of this board.
The four huge heatsinks surrounding the CPU socket don't get in the way as much as we expected, although fitting our Freezer 7 Pro HSF wasn't quite as easy as with the more reserved Abit IX38 QuadGT. The copper heatpipes and azure blue metal plates on the heatsinks give the board a sleek and attractive appearance.
This motherboard has Express Gate, and when you power up this board, it offers the option of booting quickly into this minimalist Linux OS for quick web browsing or Skype. We wonder why you would bother though - waiting 40 seconds to load Windows won't kill you.
At stock speeds, the board was a decent performer, keeping pace with our reference system for the most part in our GIMP photo editing and Handbrake tests with good scores of 999 and 1,004 respectively. Our multitasking test was slower at 922, but we've seen worse.
A £260 ATX motherboard is all about the overclocks though, and the BIOS is an overclocker's dream. We applied the usual 1.525V vcore and 458MHz FSB (1,832MHz effective) to push our Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 to its maximum of 3.66GHz with no problems. However, the far cheaper P5K Premium WiFi-AP proved to be faster than this board when both were overclocked, with a 1,307 overall score compared to 1,212. When determining its maximum FSB, we again found the P5K Premium WiFi-AP to be ever so slightly superior, with 540MHz compared to 535MHz.
Conclusion
Intel would have you believe that the X48 chipset offers features never seen before, but the only difference of note is the official support for a 1,600MHz FSB. We say 'official', as even the P35-based Asus P5K Premium WiFi-AP can manage an FSB of well over 1,600MHz without much overclocking effort. With a BIOS update, it will take a shiny new Penryn Core 2 without a worry, too. That the P5K Premium WiFi-AP is faster, less than half the price of this Asus board and has DDR2 slots, rather than insisting you use pricey DDR3, all count in its favour. As a counter, this X48-based board provides 802.11n (Draft 2), PCI-E 2.0 support, DDR3, which might be better than DDR2 with octo-core CPUs, and full-speed dual-card CrossFire. None of this is enough to impress us into spending more than £250 on it, so the P5K Premium WiFi-AP remains the king of motherboards.
