Motherboard: Asus P5K3 Deluxe With P35 Chipset

Asus' P5K3 Deluxe is the DDR3 top model of its P35 chipset motherboard line, ready for all current 65 nm processors up to the QX6580 quad core and the future 45 nm Penryn processor family. Although the chipset wasn't designed for dual graphics modes, this model supports Crossfire graphics with one x16 and one x4 PCI Express slot. The x4 slot (the black one) can also be used for other PCI Express peripherals of any link width between x1 and x16. Three classic PCI slots are ready to accept existing add-on cards, which you might not want to throw away when upgrading your rig. However, using two dual-slot PCIe cards will prevent you from using the PCI slots adjacent to the PCIe slots.

The ICH9R Southbridge provides six SATA/300 ports with Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and the board has plenty of USB 2.0 ports and Firewire 1394a. The board comes with a massive copper heat pipe solution to cool the 8-phase voltage regulator, Northbridge and Southbridge. We had to use a fan when we overclocked this motherboard past the 500 MHz line (FSB2000).