Asus First Out Of The Gate With X38 Motherboard

The shipping department had a nice surprise for us today, courtesy of Asus.  It seems indeed Intel's X38 Express chipset has arrived.  Below are pics hot off the press of the new Asus P5E3 Deluxe Motherboard - WiFi AP edition.  Emblazoned on the box is a hot pink "supports 45nm CPU" symbol suggesting Penryn is also just around the corner...

And here are the particulars of the new P5E3 Deluxe:

• Intel X38/ICH9R Chipset
• System Bus Support - 1600,1333, 1066, 800
• 4xDIMMs, max 8GB supported memory - up to DDR3-1333
• 3x PCI-E X16 slots (blue PCIe 2.0 X16 mode, black PCIe X4 or X1)
• 2x PCIe X1
• 2x PCI
• 6 SATA 3Gpx ports - RAID 5, 0, 1, 10
• Dual Gig-E LAN
• Asus WiFi AP @n, 300Mbps 802.11n with Software Access Point
• ADI1988B 8-channel High Def Audio CODEC
• USB2.0 and Firewire

Also, interesting notables are the stickers covering the CPU socket and PCIe slots from the retail packaging - claiming functionality like the "EPU" or Energy Processing Unit and Asus Express Gate for internet access in 5 seconds without entering Windows.  Express Gate is actually a self contained instant-on environment that boots before the OS and gives you basic web connectivity as well as Skype and other functionality, like access to the BIOS and more.  The EPU (hiding underneath the socket area heat sink - top right), as the name suggests is a small microcontroller of sorts that provides digital monitoring of voltage regulation to the CPU for higher efficiency and stable operation.  

We'll have more details and a full review of this product in the weeks ahead, so stick around.