X-bit labs

DDR3 SDRAM: Revolution or Evolution? (page 3)

Category: Memory

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 07/09/2007 | 05:50 PM ]

Testbed Assembly

Mainboard: Asus P5K3 Deluxe

To test our systems with DDR3 SDRAM we needed to get a good mainboard. It would be ideal to find two similar solutions on Intel P35 chipset that would differ from one another only by the type of supported memory. Although there are also hybrid platforms in the market these days that support both, DDR2 and DDR3 SDRAM at the same time, such as Gigabyte P35C-DS3R (we are going to offer you a detailed review of this solution later), we decided not to use this mainboard in our today’s test session on purpose. To ensure support of both memory interfaces, they had to make certain BIOS modifications that had not the best effect on the platform performance.

Luckily, we had Asus P5K3 Deluxe mainboard that (together with Asus P5K Deluxe) met all the requirements for such a test session. It is very similar to Asus P5K Deluxe that we have already reviewed before. The only things different are the cooling system on the chipset and support of DDR3 SDRAM.

Another advantage of Asus P5K3 Deluxe was the opportunity to work with the complete list of dividers for memory frequency setting in the mainboard BIOS, independent of the processor bus speed (FSB Strap) selected. As a result, you can clock DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz with the FSB set to 333MHz, which is not one of the officially supported work modes for Intel P35 chipset.