- The Package

Asus P53 Deluxe WiFi costs around €190~220, as found at several online stores. The retail package is packed with feature logos:

All included cables are shown below:

The manuals and CDs are also included:

Below is a complete list of what's included in the retail package:

• UltraDMA 133/100/66 cable
• FDD cable
• 6 x Serial ATA cables
• 1 x 2-port Serial ATA power cable
• I/O Shield
• User's manual
• ASUS WiFi-AP Solo manual
• 3 in 1 Q-connector
• 1 x 2-port USB2.0 / 1-port IEEE1394 module
• Optional Fan for Water-Cooling or Passive-Cooling only
• ASUS WiFi-AP Solo omni-directional antenna

The board itself is well designed and all components can be identified easily:

Let's zoom in ont the CPU area:

We can clearly see the big copper heatpipes that "surround" the CPU area. This design distributes the heat output evenly and it also means the heat can be extracted from a central location.

After installing Intel's stock fan, the space between the heatpipes and the CPU coolers is very limited. We tried the AC Freezer 7 CPU cooler, which had to be rotated in order to fit. Before purchasing a 3rd party cooler, check the compatibility list!

The motherboard has four banks for DDR3 memory modules. You cannot install DDR2 modules in these memory slots, since DDR3 memory has a different "cut" on the bottom of the module:

Moving to the southbridge area on the board, we can see the passive heatsink and the 6x SATA 2 connections, well organized, not crowded and easily accessible.

The motherboard supports CrossFire Technology. There are 2x PCI-E x16 slots, in case you use both channels, the blue channel works at x16 mode, while black @ x4. There is enough space between the two PCI-E slots, so no problem here for extra big VGA cards:

There are several extra connections for USB, Front Panel Audio, COM2 and Firewire on the back. Asus has include all modules in the retail package. The rear I/O panel has the usual connections:

• 1 x PS/2 Keyboard
• 1 x S/PDIF Out (Coaxial + Optical)
• 2 x External SATA
• 2 x IEEE1394a
• 2 x RJ45 port
• 6 x USB 2.0/1.1
• 1 x WiFi-AP Solo antenna jack
• 8-channel Audio I/O

As with the P5K series, the P5K3 Deluxe doesn't include any PS2 Mouse connection... Finally, our motherboard was revision 1.01G: