It's come to our attention that Asus is working on a wide range of X38 based boards in its P5E series, more boards than we expected to be honest.

The most basic board, the P5E uses DDR2 memory, has two x16 PCIe slots, single Gigabit LAN, lacks eSATA and has aluminium heatsinks instead of copper ones. Oddly enough it also seems to lack the AI slot detector, the little light that tells you that you've plugged your graphics card in properly.

Moving up a level and we have the P5E3 which is a DDR3 board, it suppords DDR3 memory up to 1,800MHz by means of overclocking. It shares all of the features of the P5E, but adds eSATA, copper heatsinks and the AI slot detector.

Next up is the P5E3 Deluxe which gains a third x16 PCI Express slot, although it only has x4 bandwidth, a second Gigabit LAN port and dual eSATA.

The final version we've already written about and it's the P5E3 Deluxe/WIFI-AP@n. It adds 802.11n Wi-Fi and Asus' Express Gate mini operating system that allows you to access the internet and use Skype without starting Windows.

The Wi-Fi card is connected via USB just as with previous Wi-Fi boards from Asus, but this time you have to attach two antennas to gain the benefits of 802.11n. The small card that looked like a TurboMemory module from Asus' past is actually the storage module for the Express Gate software.

The P5E is priced at around €204, with the P5E3 coming in at around €214. The P5E3 Deluxe model should be available for about €259 and finally the Deluxe/WFI-AP@n can be found for €279, but most retailers charge even more for this board. 

It looks like Asus will have the biggest range of X38 boards on the market if you add their two Maximus R.O.G. boards and the P5E3 WS workstation board to this list.