Overclocking

The P35 does provide new chipset straps which allows for even more painless overclocking without affecting the memory as much. A quick adjustment to 333MHz FSB in the BIOS gives us a 1333MHz CPU. With our Core 2 Extreme X6800, this meant we increased the core speed from 2.93GHz to 3.66GHz without any sort of voltage adjustment. Why invest in a new and (potentially) expensive E6x50 CPU?

At 385MHz FSB, and having left the memory at SPD, we were provided an interesting set of 6-6-6-15 timings at 462MHz memory bus, or 924MHz! At these speeds we were getting unbuffered memory bandwidth of 6450MB/s.

Unfortunately our experiences with the Asus C.P.R. proved a little unsuccessful, requiring a full power down at the PSU before it detects a failed overclock. Just hard resetting only repeats the same failed overclock and POST.

We topped out at 425MHz FSB post, with a 405MHz FSB stable. This offered us 6715MB/s unbuffered memory bandwidth, at 6-6-6-15 and a 485MHz memory bus (970MHz effective data rate). This is a far cry from the 450+MHz we were seeing on the P965 boards, but the BIOS has yet to mature and the memory overclock should go some way to make up for the loss of FSB even if you don't get the CPU MHz.

The thing is, the Core 2 architecture doesn't need excessive memory bandwidth though. AMD's Athlon 64 AM2 CPUs provide around 7000-8000MB/s on DDR2 with its integrated memory controller, compared to 5500MB/s with Intel P965/P35 and Intel's Core 2 commonly out performs the Athlon 64 on AM2. In the past, increasing the clock frequency has a far greater effect than additional memory bandwidth.

Stability

Stability was perfect, we had no issue after setting off our usual two lots of Prime95, IOMeter and FarCry looping for 24 hours and a day later the board was still working just fine. This is a testament to Asus' board and BIOS design, getting something working very well with such an immature technology such as DDR3.

Warranty

Asus offers a three year warranty on the motherboard, the first year of which should be returned to the (r)etailer and after that the board can be RMAed directly to Asus in the UK. Obviously more is better, but three years is a good median because it provides enough time to cover the cost of rapid hardware depreciation. Investing in a DDR3 board now is certainly future proofing, so to some three years might even be a touch short.

Power Consumption

For our power consumption measurements, our system was configured as follows:

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, 2GB OCZ FlexXLC PC9200, 2GB Corsair XMS3-1333 with DHX, Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX, Tagan 700W Easycon XL PSU, DVD Drive, Seagate 7200.9 200GB Hard Drive, USB mouse, PS2 keyboard, Ethernet connected, One CPU fan connected and all on-board hardware enabled.


As you can see, when comparing the virtually identical P5K and P5K3 boards, the DDR3 drops the wattage use down 3W, or about two percent. It's not much, but the use of DDR3 in low power and mobile computing, 3W will improve your battery life by a not insignificant amount. However on the desktop, by just turning off or unpluging unused components will save you more power. Even using an efficient power supply suited to the size of your hardware will help even more: an ideal 50-80 percent of total power rating being what you need.

Conclusion

The board is slower in almost every single test with "faster" DDR3. We're still waiting on AMD (drivers) and CrossFire as well, not that we'd recommend CrossFire through an x4 slot, however.

It's packed to the gills with features, more so than most other boards on the market; how many others include dual eSATA, dual Gigabit Ethernet, wireless LAN, three PCI slots and a Striker-esq heatpipe array? Sure, the WiFi could possibly be draft-n for a greater range and MIMO but considering the board is £160-£200, you're certainly paying enough already. It's great to have the option from Asus, but we can't see why you'd buy the P5K3 Deluxe over the P5K Deluxe, or even the Asus Commando/P5B Deluxe which are both far cheaper and perform arguably better at this moment in time.

Even though £160-£200 in a strange way feels worth it for the huge feature set and the on-board cooling, but very few people will use all of these features, so why pay for them? Asus also has its vanilla P5K but that's still £120 and you'll lose one Gigabit Ethernet, wireless LAN, one eSATA and the extreme heatpipe array.

DDR3 isn't the speed demon it's been pimped out to be even though the board has a 3W drop in power consumption with all other components being identical. At 1066MHz bus, the latency of 7-7-7-17 kills any performance increase, but due to its immaturity it needs at least a year or so for more performance orientated kits to arrive. It's only in the last year that we've seen such kits in DDR2 that are affordable.

In comparison, the Gigabyte PA-P35-DQ6 which is DDR2 based and a little less feature heavy, but has an equally crazy heatpipe array and can be found for £30 less than the DDR2 P5K Deluxe. If you absolutely must invest in a DDR3, and can afford to drop nearly £300 on 2GB of 1066MHz 7-7-7 memory (let alone the £350 1333MHz DHX DIMMs we featured here) then the Asus board is a solid investment to make (and one of very few DDR3-based boards currently available).

But honestly, why would you? 2GB of PC2-8500/low latency PC2-6400 Kingston, OCZ FlexXLC, Reaper or Corsair Dominator will save you a ton of money, as will the DDR2 P5K Deluxe, the mature Commando or any number of P965 we've previously looked at. Honestly, you'd have to be in a seriously competitive willy wangling frame of mind to buy DDR3 right now, because it makes absolutely no fiscal or performance sense.

Final Thoughts

Apart from the ton of features and excellent stability, the board doesn't offer any spectacular performance and is far more expensive than the competition, or even other Asus boards. You'd be far better off investing in anything DDR2, rather than forcing yourself down and extremely expensive upgrade path. It will allow some future proofing, but by that time in 12-18 months, you might as well upgrade the motherboard with a newer chipset which will undoubtedly support faster DDR3 modules and newer features as well.

It's a really weird situation because it's genuinely a really good board, but there's absolutely no reason to buy it. Get the P5K Deluxe or something P965 or nForce 680i (LT) SLI instead... oh and a ton of performance DDR2, a large monitor, a better graphics card and perhaps a new car or apartment as well. You know, the same kind of money you would have spent on the P5K3 Deluxe and DDR3.

It you're after CrossFire support to match a couple of Radeon HD 2900 XTs you've just bought (I'm assuming you run Vista here) and are dying for an updated chipset rather than the antique 975X, then you've either got to settle for the DFI LANParty UT ICFX3200 T2R/G, or wait until September for X38. However, X38 will also be DDR3, sooo I'd just buy the DFI...

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What do these scores mean?