ASUS P5E3 Premium (Intel X48)
Expansion options
On Asus P5E3 Premium, there is the ICH9R south bridge with a radiator. Therefore, the board supports 6 SerialATA II ports and allows merging disks into RAID arrays of levels 0,1,5 and -10.
Besides, the motherboard supports one Parallel ATA link with an additional JMB363 controller made by JMicron. The same chip provides support for two more SerialATA II links which are brought over to the rear panel of the boards.
Therefore, as many as ten hard disks (eight SATA II + two PATA) can be plugged in to ASUS P5E3 Premium and arranging two RAID arrays. Then, the board offers 10 USB 2.0 ports: six on the rear panel, with 4 more plugged in with brackets (the board comes bundled with 1 bracket for 2 ports).
In fact, the south bridge ICH9R supports 12 USB 2.0 ports, but engineers at ASUS have sacrificed two ports for the installation of a Wi-Fi module.
This module is special in that it supports two aerials which provide a better quality of the signal.
Besides, the motherboard supports the IEEE1394 ("Firewire"). For that, there is an additional L-FW3227 controller made by Agere.
Therefore, the board offers support for 2 Firewire ports: one mounted on the rear panel, with the other one connected with a plate (available in the package bundle).
ASUS P5E3 Premium offers 8-channel integrated Intel High Definition Audio, with AD1988B chip used as the codec.
Now a few words on the network support: the board uses two high-speed LAN controllers: Marvell 88E8056 (Gigabit Ethernet) connected to the PCI Express x1 bus:
and Realtek RTL8110SC plugged in to the PCI bus:
Both the RJ-45 connectors are brought over to the rear panel which has the following configuration:
Engineers at ASUS have completely given up installation of an LPT and COM ports (one COM port is supported via a bracket, which is missing in the bundle). Missing is also a PS/2 connector to plug in a mouse. On the other hand, USB 2.0 ports are in abundance; there is a Firewire, as well as an optical and coaxial SP-DIF outputs. And, as you can see, on the panel there are two connectors to plug in aerials to the Wi-Fi module, and a couple of SerialATA ports.
Traditionally, here is the diagram of components:
ASUS P5E3 Premium uses three jumpers: CLR_TC - to clear the CMOS (on the left-hand edge of the board), as well as OV_CPU and OV_NB - to select the adjustment range for tuning voltages at the CPU and the north bridge (in the bottom right-hand corner).
Now on to the BIOS settings.
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