Closer Look:

The product presentation is what you would expect in terms of what ASUS wants you to understand about what your're buying. The most important features are stated clearly on the back of the cover box. Flipping open the cover shows much larger list of features and specs. Pride in one's end result has always been important to ASUS and you can see that in what you are buying.

Front

Important Features

And Even More!

The first thing you notice about the board is all of the copper which makes up the ASUS Stack Cool 2. The PCB is black which adds a bit of contrast to the copper sinks. ASUS kept things toned down just a bit going with white, blue, and black peripheral slots most likely to not take anything away from the board. The memory (DIMM) sockets are black and orange which is also probably meant to stay in line with the board's theme.

Bottom

Top

What you really see is a copper heat pipe cooled network of sorts placed over the most important components that always get the hottest during any type of operations especially when overclocked. This includes the PWM components and chipsets with the Northbridge getting the largest between the two. The small heat pipe network spans completely around the CPU socket allowing enough room to install your own large CPU cooler. Other motherboards have utilized anodized aluminum to give their piping a copper like appearance. Does one offer better performance over the other? It's possible that it would matter a few degrees at maximum settings, but then rarely will anyone need to worry about what kind of materials were used unless you're an overclocking fanatic. In which case, copper is your top more expensive choice. So, it has it's draw backs for consumers.

Front Angle View

Back Angle View

There is a great deal of thought put in to the P35 based motherboards. From a few of the Computex pictures, you could tell that ASUS had put serious effort in to planning and designing the layout. The largest connection ports are at the very edge of the motherboard which is just about the safest place possible. Everything else is either low profile such as the solid state capacitors and peripheral sockets whether PCI or storage based. Interestingly, the entire board's profile isn't any taller than the heat pipes, RAM modules, or I/O ports on the back of the motherboard. It blends nicely together for a clean organized look. Even the sockets don't get too wild by sticking with safer color codes and themes. Nothing takes away from the really sweet looking intricate copper.

Front

Back

And what about DDR3 support? You can have up to 8GB of DDR3 of any frequency. Of course, the best DDR3 will naturally operate better under any serious overclocking. This is a serious looking motherboard that should be able to handle even higher frequency modules like the 1600MHz DDR3 that our own Diceman will have in his sexy hands soon. Modules of that magnitude should work perfectly on the P5K3 Deluxe Wi-Fi without issue assuming the test processor can keep up. And as long as your processor is an LGA 775, you can use this motherboard though it really seems like a waste not using a good Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad. If you've got a Ferrari, why would you use low octane fuel?

While the copper heat pipes look like they crowd the DIMM sockets, they really don't. There is enough space to use any memory modules that might have a RAM sink the size of OCZ's Reaper or Corsair's Dominator. Some Reaper DDR3 with matching copper would look excellent on this board. Copper based or copper colored anodized aluminum looks so clean and neat no matter what board it might be. In this case, the copper just works.

DDR3 DIMMs with Plenty of Room

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