ASUS P5E3 Premium X48 Motherboard Review

Memory Benchmarks

Everest Ultimate is the most useful tool for any and all bench markers or overclockers. With the ability to read most voltage, temperature, and fan sensors on almost every motherboard available, Everest provides the ability to customize the outputs in a number of forms for display on your desktop. In addition to this, the memory benchmarking provides a useful tool of measuring the changes to your memory sub-system when tweaking to measure the differences.

In reviews past, both motherboard and memory, the Everest results always show a large gap. With these two setups, they are very similar despite the differences in the CPU clocks. The reason being that CPU frequency plays very little role in Everest bandwidth numbers and the slight difference in memory frequencies is giving the result discrepancy. Because of the great performance of the system at BIOS defaults with the Corsair Dominator XMP memory, there really isn't much difference between 'stock' and our overclocked setup when your remove the CPU frequency from the equation.

This again holds true for the latency results with a slight drop in the overclocked setup is a result from the higher FSB and memory frequency. The drop is significant but nothing too crazy.

ScienceMark is an almost ancient benchmark utility at this point in time and hasn't seen an update in a long time. It is, however, still a favorite for accurately calculating bandwidth on even the newest chipsets.

Much like the playbill had laid out, the ScienceMark numbers back up what Everest found in the memory bandwidth department. What we have seen today is the evolution of memory binning. The rated frequencies and timings of DDR3 memory we can buy today are quite scary, and nothing more than clearing the CMOS and installing the sticks is required to get them running at those ratings. This all equates to not much headroom for the rest of the system since FSB on x48 platforms already needs to be at 450MHz in order to run memory at DDR3-1800 like this Corsair memory is rated for.