The P5K3 Deluxe Wi-Fi AP Edition is Asus's take on a high-end gaming motherboard that uses the Intel P35 chipset. Naturally it supports the new 1,333MHz FSB and, as you might have guessed from the P5K3 name, Asus has chosen to support DDR3 memory instead of the DDR2 to which we are all accustomed.

First impressions are very favourable, as the Asus simply oozes the feeling that it is solidly built. The memory slots are coloured orange and black for the two channels, but what really catches the eye is the passive cooling system. The Southbridge, Northbridge and power regulation hardware all sport passive coolers that are linked by heatpipes. The Southbridge cooler is low profile and won't cause any problems, regardless of your choice of graphics card. Or rather 'graphics cards' in the plural, as the P5K3 has dual PCI Express graphics slots that support CrossFire.

Although the cooling hardware surrounds the processor socket, it is spaced out and gives enough clearance to install any cooler that we can think of. In the event that you're using a water cooling solution, you'll want to install the optional fan that clips on the top of the heatsink behind the I/O panel to keep the air circulating inside your case.

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The spacing of the cooling hardware means that two of the heatpipes run very close to the nearest memory module and there are other worries as the memory retention latches could foul a hefty graphics card and the same graphics card will overlap some of the six SATA connectors. You can deal with these last two issues by installing the graphics card in the lower PCI-E slot, but it means that CrossFire might prove a touch awkward.

Apart from those minor concerns there are plenty of features that stand out on this motherboard. The I/O panel is packed with connectors, with one PS/2 for a keyboard, six USB 2.0 ports, dual Gigabit LAN, two eSATA ports and a full complement of audio connectors including optical and coaxial digital outputs. There are two more USB ports and a single Firewire on a bracket.

The final connector accepts a small antenna for the 802.11g module that converts your PC into a wireless access point. You may consider this to be useful but we're none too sure, unless you choose to use this gaming motherboard in a smart Media Centre PC in your living room and need to connect to your router for Internet access.

We came across some surprising test results when we used the P5K3 with a quad core QX6800 processor on a 1066MHz FSB, as the performance was on a par with what we'd expect from a dual core CPU. Both the BIOS and Windows showed all four cores were present and correct but it was clear that something was wrong. Luckily we had a QX6850 to hand which runs on the new 1333MHz FSB, and with this alternative CPU installed the Asus behaved perfectly.

We can't say that 1066MHz performance is fundamentally flawed as we didn't try a dual core processor, but it is clear that there is something amiss. Perhaps a BIOS revision will fix things but we hate to speculate about such matters.

Leaving aside the question that hangs over a quad-core processor running on the current 1066MHz FSB, we were very impressed by the form, fit and function of the P5K3 Deluxe Wi-Fi AP Edition. The price is rather high but Asus supplies a long list of hardware in return so that's fair enough. Although we'd like to recommend this P35 model to hardcore gamers we feel that the sensible approach is to wait until the X38 chipset debuts, as it promises proper PCI Express support, and that's just about the only part of the equation that's missing here.