If you decide to go with split/join and have quite a few strings to process, consider setting split's LIMIT parameter to 4 (since you're only interested in the first three resulting elements), as this can significantly speed up processing w/o compromising readability:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Benchmark qw/cmpthese/;

my $string = '1:13:1:6:5854:0x00E37F06:0x00D1314C';

sub _split {
    my $result = join( ':', ( split /:/, $string )[ 0 .. 2 ] );
}

sub _split_LIMIT {
    my $result = join( ':', ( split /:/, $string, 4 )[ 0 .. 2 ] );
}

cmpthese(
    -5,
    {
        _split       => sub { _split() },
        _split_LIMIT => sub { _split_LIMIT() }
    }
);
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Output (faster times are lower in the table):

                  Rate       _split _split_LIMIT
_split        938083/s           --         -25%
_split_LIMIT 1248002/s          33%           --
[download]