ASUS P5E3 Premium Review Comment Thread

[SKYMTL]

3oh6's review of the ASUS P5E3 Premium has been posted and with the falling prices of DDR3, I am sure that there will be more than a few of you guys who are looking at this motherboard. While it may cost bundles of money (over $400 at most places) it seems to offer good performance even though there were a few hurdles to overcome during overclocking.

You can read the full review here: ASUS P5E3 Premium X48 Motherboard Review

Please use this thread to post you questions, comments, rants and raves.

ENJOY!!

[soapman72]

What an awesome review!

I have read nearly every review on this board that I can find, and at the risk of sounding like I am sucking up, I have to say that yours is without equal. I say this, because there are alot of reviews out there, where they barely mention the overclocking results, and even when they do, there is precious little mentioned about the settings used to get to their max overclock.

That said, I do have a couple of questions about your experiances with this board. I have had one of these boards for about 2 months, and have had more than my fair share of frustrating moments with it. First, I am using OCZ Platinum EB 1600mhz ram, rated for 7-6-6-24. I cannot run this ram at rated timings no mater what I try. I have tried every bios (I am testing the 0503 as I write this), RMD'd the memory twice, and even swapped out the board once, due to my problems. It is beginning to look like this board does not like this particular RAM.

I want to be clear that OCZ has been super with their tech support, both in their forums, and over the phone. I really can't believe how much time they have spent with me on this issue. I just think I must be missing something, or perhapse many of the retail boards don't clock the ram as well as the review samples that are sent out to various reviewers. I certainly may be wrong on that last point, but I have tried every tweak to get this memory to run, and followed all suggestions from tech support when they tried to help.

Needless to say, I was very impressed that you managed to get your 4gb G-Skill memory to over 1800mhz with 7-7-7-20 timings. Please let me know the model number for that ram in case I need to give up on my current kit.

I am also wondering if you guys needed to play with clock skews or adjust GTL values to achieve that speed. I have tried all that, with no success. I was also wondering if that memory speed required an extreme amount of VDIMM to stabilize the memory. Any additional pointers you guys can offer would be appreciated, and, as always, I know individual results can and will vary.

Perhapse some different memory will be a better match for this board, even If I cant quite reach 1800mhz, complete stability would be a big plus.

Thanks,

Sean

[SKYMTL]

Thanks for your comments Sean, we really appreciate you taking the time to post on the forums. And don't worry, it doesn't sound like you are sucking up since most of the time people with a single post write to bash or complain so you provided a refreshing change.

While I am sure 3oh6 will post in this thread shortly, I will field some of the questions to wet your appetite for more.

I really can't believe how much time they have spent with me on this issue. I just think I must be missing something, or perhapse many of the retail boards don't clock the ram as well as the review samples that are sent out to various reviewers.

I do not know about other reviewers but we make sure that our boards are not hand picked samples but rather come directly off the retail board line. I think the rumors of reviewers receiving one-off samples are a bit overstated since in my whole time reviewing I have seen a grand total of ONE hand-picked sample.

On the other hand what is considered "stable" can vary quite a bit from one review to another which is why we make sure we state exactly what we deem to be stable. Some reviews have higher numbers because their stability tests are geared more towards chort term benchmarking rather than stability overclocking.

Please let me know the model number for that ram in case I need to give up on my current kit.

I can't seem to remember but are you the one who requested we test with 4GB? If so I have to thank you for that since it was due to your email that we decided to move to 4GB testing. We listen to our readers so thanks again.

The ram he has in his board is the new G.Skill F3-12800CL7D-4GBPI kit which can be found here: DDR3

We will have a review of this memory in the coming weeks so stay tuned.

As for all the other questions, I will let 3oh6 field those.

[soapman72]

Thanks for the quick reply. It looks like you have at least one other reader who uses 4gb of memory, because that was not my email that you received. I do, however, appreciate the fact that you guys are moving toward the future and testing with 4gb on this motherboard. Like alot of users of this board, I have moved to Vista, and while making the move, I decided that enough of my hardware was supported under Vsta64 to go that route. I can honestly say, that I don't regret the move for a minute, but now, I can't see ever going back to 2gb.

Those who run 4gb know that setup can be a litle (or in my case alot) more challenging when running high speed memory. But the choices for memory at these speeds are becomming more numerous every week. I will be testing some 1800mhz OCZ Reapers in this board starting tonight, or tomorrow. Hopefully, they will be easier to run at their rated timings than my current kit. I have also recently discovered that my E8400 seems to be particularly sensitive to FSBT voltage, as raising the FSBT voltage from the stock 1.1v to 1.2v resulted in memtest errors, even at looser than stock 7-7-7-24 timings with my current memory.

I need to run soome more tests to be sure on that last point, but after reading your article, I decided to drop the FSBT and my errors went away. I still cannot run this ram at rated timings, but at least I am running error free at 7-7-7. I wonder if you could tell me if you tried the 400mhz strap with this board? I tried the 333mhz strap, and noticed that memory bandwidth scores dropped, in both Everest, and also while testing with memtest86. It is for that reason, that I have been using the 400mhz strap, but perhapse the board errors easier on that strap.

I have also noted that my board does not seem to want to post with a PL of 6 at 450mhz! This is why I made the comment about retail vs review boards. Perhapse my RAM has something to do with that. I will attempt to run PL6 when I get the 1800mhz kit. It is funny, but I also have difficulties with any divider other than the 2:1 divider on this and the other P5E3 Premium that I had. In other words, using the 400mhz strap, If I try to select a memory speed SLOWER than 1600mhz at 400mhz FSB, the board will not post. Strange......

Thanks again, and I will look forward to any additional comments.

Sean

[DK2]

What I would have liked to have seen is testing with 4 sticks of RAM, either 4x1GB or 4x2GB, not 2x1GB or 2x2GB.
X48 spec says you can't run 4 sticks @ 1600, and yet, some people have....

[3oh6]

First off, thank-you for your comments, glad you found the review useful. To address your question...

Originally Posted by soapman72

Needless to say, I was very impressed that you managed to get your 4gb G-Skill memory to over 1800mhz with 7-7-7-20 timings.

There has been a bit of confusion as I haven't had the 2x2GB kit running at 900MHz 7-7-7. If you look closely in the screenshot, it is only a 2x1GB kit of Corsair Dominator. I knew it should have been stated better what each setup was for each overclock, my apologies, we will be rectifying it if the situation comes up again. Normally we would just use one kit for all benchmarks and overclocking but there were enough people that wanted 2x2GB results so we threw them all in there.

I can report that I will have a full review of the 2x2GB G.Skill Pi kit used for the testing done in this review soon enough. So far, I have managed Dual 32M SPI 840MHz @ 7-6-6 so things are looking good so far but stability is going to be looked at more with the 2x2GB kits of memory than overclocking as stability at stock seems to be the thread topic of choice in the forums.

Again, thanks and I am sorry about the confusion.

Originally Posted by DK2

What I would have liked to have seen is testing with 4 sticks of RAM, either 4x1GB or 4x2GB, not 2x1GB or 2x2GB.
X48 spec says you can't run 4 sticks @ 1600, and yet, some people have....

Will do. i haven't honestly spent more than 5 minutes on 4x1GB DDR3 but I have been wanting to so I will put together a good matching 4x1GB kit and see what I can find on this motherboard. I was debating between the P5E3-Premium or the 790i but since you asked about this one, the ASUS it will be.

I have your user name saved and will let you know wherever that shows up and when, but it won't be for a couple weeks.

[Dutchman]

Originally Posted by DK2

What I would have liked to have seen is testing with 4 sticks of RAM, either 4x1GB or 4x2GB, not 2x1GB or 2x2GB.
X48 spec says you can't run 4 sticks @ 1600, and yet, some people have....

Hi everyone, I also do like this review great job done here
thanks for this great review.

I also have this motherboard at home now for 6 weeks with also a E8400 and 2 Sapphire HD3870 Toxic running at Crossfire mode.

The memory i use right now are the Corsair KIT TWIN3X2048-1600C7DHXIN G (2x 1G modules) these modules also have the XMP option at the bios.
timings are 7-7-7-20 1.8volt at 800mhz.
4G or 8d memory setup cost me to mutch money right now here at the netherlands a live.


I thougt that the most problems come in with this board when you try running 4 modules to a 8G memory setup.
I saw at the asus forum that running 4x 1g ram with Corsair modules are no problem at all to run stable.

[DK2]

Originally Posted by 3oh6

First off, thank-you for your comments, glad you found the review useful. To address your question...

There has been a bit of confusion as I haven't had the 2x2GB kit running at 900MHz 7-7-7. If you look closely in the screenshot, it is only a 2x1GB kit of Corsair Dominator. I knew it should have been stated better what each setup was for each overclock, my apologies, we will be rectifying it if the situation comes up again. Normally we would just use one kit for all benchmarks and overclocking but there were enough people that wanted 2x2GB results so we threw them all in there.

I can report that I will have a full review of the 2x2GB G.Skill Pi kit used for the testing done in this review soon enough. So far, I have managed Dual 32M SPI 840MHz @ 7-6-6 so things are looking good so far but stability is going to be looked at more with the 2x2GB kits of memory than overclocking as stability at stock seems to be the thread topic of choice in the forums.

Again, thanks and I am sorry about the confusion.


Will do. i haven't honestly spent more than 5 minutes on 4x1GB DDR3 but I have been wanting to so I will put together a good matching 4x1GB kit and see what I can find on this motherboard. I was debating between the P5E3-Premium or the 790i but since you asked about this one, the ASUS it will be.

I have your user name saved and will let you know wherever that shows up and when, but it won't be for a couple weeks.

Thanks 3oh6, if you are wondering why I ask, here is a link to a thread I started a while ago.
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...-x48-ddr3.html
There’s a few external links to what others have seen or tried, you might find interesting.
I proposed a theory, but that’s about it. Everyone was either stunned, or think I’m Mad!
I still haven’t seen a hard answer as to why? Even Intel won’t say, just the usual support bs. :rtfm:
I wish my company had dealings with Intel, I’d demand to talk to an engineer!

[soapman72]

Well, I got the 4gb OCZ Reaper kit in today. I popped themin, set the timings, and set the voltages to 1.9v VDIMM, 1.53v NB, 1.2v FSBT, 1.58v PLL, but I get a rounding error when running Prime95 after about an hour. Sometimes it is an hour, sometimes it is an hour and 15 minutes. Playing with the above values a bit did not help anything. I am running prime right now with a bit more FSBTvoltage (1.28v), and I'll see if that helps.

Any suggestions? I am running the 8.5 multiplyer and 450mhz fsb, so 3.825ghz. I am running the beta bios that you guys ran. Thanks!

[3oh6]

which kit Soapman? Link to the OCZ product page please, see what we can come up with.