Extras galore
Asus has always provided plenty of extra goodies with its high-end boards, and these latest Deluxe models are no exception.

All three boards come with auxiliary blowers for their chipset and VRM coolers (the P5N32-SLI SE comes with two). These blowers are only supposed to be necessary in systems with limited internal airflow, such as those that are water cooled. The airflow created by standard CPU coolers and chassis exhaust fans should be sufficient otherwise.

For the P5B and P5W DH's wireless components, Asus also includes a collapsible antenna. Reception isn't stellar, but it works well enough as long as you're not trying to set any distance records.

Asus's most useful extra is actually the simplest. The boards come with little jumper blocks for their front panel, USB, and Firewire headers that allow you to connect individual pins outside the case before plugging the entire block into the onboard header. It's a lot easier than trying to plug individual pins directly into the board, especially when a system's already sitting inside an enclosure.

In addition to its more standard extras, Asus has also whipped up a couple of unique goodies for the P5W DH. The first of these is the MP3-In bracket, which can be used to play a portable audio player back through the PC's speakers even when the system is turned off. It's a neat trick, and one that the iPod generation might find particularly appealing.

If the MP3-In doesn't do it for you, perhaps the DH remote will. This tiny little IR remote plugs into one of the board's USB ports and gives users a decent array of buttons to control media playback, among other things.

The ability to manipulate other things is what makes the remote really useful, though. We've seen cheesy remotes bundled with all sorts of hardware, but few offer enough customization options to be truly useful outside one or two applications. Fortunately, the DH remote comes with a simple app that allows users to launch button mapping profiles for different applications. Users can arbitrarily remap six of the remote's buttons, as well, making the DH remote quite versatile.