Asus includes three useful utilities for updating and saving BIOS firmware and custom settings.

Asus EZ Flash 2 allows you to flash the BIOS from either a floppy or USB flash drive, without the hassle of creating "bootable media". While a variety of companies, including Asus, also allow flashing the BIOS from within windows, EZ Flash 2 significantly reduces the risk of a "bad flash".

Two boxes below the "path" bar allow drive selection on the left side and file selection on the right. USB drives appear as "HDD-1" on the left side.

Though Asus didn’t have any updates for the P5E Premium WiFi-AP @n Edition at press time, we checked the website for updates to another model to gauge the "user experience". We often find Asus’ Taiwan site to be more up-to-date than its U.S. version, but both sites are usually very slow, taking up to two minutes to refresh a page. Once you’ve navigated to your motherboard model (assuming your browser didn’t time out), clicking the "download" link in the upper-left corner takes you directly to the appropriate downloads page for the model you were viewing. The site is easy to use for anyone who has the patience of a tree sloth - analogue modem users limited to 33k or slower connections can once again feel good about the speed of their local service...

The next interesting BIOS add-in is the Asus O.C. profile, which allows users to save custom BIOS settings for retrieval following any required "CLR_CMOS" operation. Overclockers who find they’ve taken their systems too far can easily return to a previously-saved configuration. Two profiles can be saved onto the BIOS ROM itself, while additional profiles can be transferred to a floppy or USB flash drive.

The ability to save overclocking profiles to a flash drive is a blessing to anyone who would like to transfer custom settings to an identical system, or share them with friends.

Accessories

The P5E3 Premium WiFi-AP @n Edition includes every cable needed to reach a full internal drive configuration, two WiFi antennas for its 802.11n wireless adapter, and two supplemental chipset/VRM cooling fans. The chipset/VRM sinks normally rely on CPU air cooler draft to function properly, and the supplemental fans are meant to restore the missing airflow whenever the P5E3 Premium WiFi-AP @n Edition is used in a liquid-cooled system.

A full multi-language user’s manual and driver/application DVD are also provided. The latter includes utilities such as ASUS PC Probe II, ASUS Update, ASUS AI Suite, Corel Snapfire Plus SE and Norton Internet Security.