Overclocking

Overclocking was good but not wonderful. In all we've had intermittent problems with the board even failing to boot at "auto" settings on occasion, giving a new definition to the phrase "a mind of its own." We'd then turn it off and leave it for a little while and it would be fine again. When we got an overclock out of it, we managed a healthy but not awesome 450MHz FSB from both our E6750 and our super E6400.

We'd roll into Windows just fine at 450MHz, then anything else up from that would go very suddenly over the edge into instability and no POST. There was also a FSB hole between 390MHz and 425MHz but attempts to circumvent such at hole at over 450MHz proved fruitless. We even clocked the memory down to make sure it had been taken out of the equation.

The problem might partly be from the fact the BIOS adjustments just aren't that small - for example, you jump in 0.15V increments on the northbridge voltage from 1.4 to 1.55 to 1.7V and a similarly large 0.1V on the FSB termination voltage. To fine tune things it would be better to get some finer options, but then why grab this board and not the Blitz Extreme if you're into overclocking? We're not sure why, either... however, Asus is still advertising overclocking as a key feature on the box.

In fact, that "guaranteed" 1,500MHz for the memory on the board is cutting it a bit fine in our experience: overclocking the memory above this in the slightest found Orthos failed within just few minutes. If Asus guarantees 1,500MHz, surely we'd be looking for some headroom at least?

Stability

Firstly we reset the board to its "auto" native state to make sure our personal settings had no influence on the result. Unfortunately it seems either the JMB363 chipset or Vista doesn't like our IDE hard drive, so we couldn't run IOMeter, however we did run two instances of Prime95 torture test and looped the 3DMark06 demo (without the CPU tests). We found that the video driver had crashed and subsequently 3DMark had failed, although both lots of Prime95 were still going strong. It's a partial victory for the CPU and memory subsystem which is still worthy of some recognition.

Warranty

The usual three year Asus warranty applies, which would be just fine for a motherboard but compared to the memory titans that offer lifetime warranties it seems a little weak. Couple in the fact that you're tied in so if a single one of those 32 memory chips dies you've got to send the whole board back. No living of just a single stick for a while or borrowing one from a mate, it's all or nothing. However come three years time 2GB of DDR3-1333MHz will look like the "640k of memory" Mr. Gates is so famous for commenting on...so, considering the depreciation, does it really matter?

Power Consumption

With everything integrated the power consumption is as expected, slightly less than the very similarly featured P5K Deluxe at both idle and load. It's still one of the highest power consuming P35 boards we've seen, but it's also one of the most feature packed.

Value

As we touched on above - depreciation will be massive for a board like this. You've got premium memory, but just 2GB of it included. And the chipset will be the best you can buy for only another few weeks until X38 arrives and a current mainstream product for only another year at most. That £550 will exceed the laws of physics and drop its value faster than gravity can pull it to the ground. It's not called Premium without reason.

The situation is made worse by the fact some companies, like Scan, are throwing in 2GB of 1,333MHz memory with the standard P5K3 Deluxe board and undercutting the P5K3 Premium's price by some £140. It's still expensive, but that's far more attractive than shelling out the wrong side of half a grand, and you can still upgrade in the future or drop in a few more gigabytes of memory if need be.

On its own, the P5K3 Deluxe is £148 and 2GB of equivalent 1,333Mhz 7-7-7-20 Memory is £300 on top of that. So, you're still saving £100, although we could only achieve a maximum overclock of 1,440MHz on that specific OCZ memory at 7-7-7-20. The problem is, DDR3 memory prices are all over the place at the moment which means that you can get some good deals but you really need to shop around. For 1,500MHz+ capable memory you're going to pay over the odds again... or then again how about some insane SuperTalent 1,866MHz memory for £376? We've actually tried testing these sticks and we've found no P35 is actually feasibly fast enough to use it to its fullest, so it's certainly future proof. £376 + £148 = £524, which is cheaper than the P5K3 Premium and you've also got one of the fastest sets of memory money can buy.

This is all even before we consider the difference between DDR2 and DDR3, which we've previously shown is negligible at best and compared to grabbing some Kingston PC2-9600 or OCZ PC2-6400 SLI Ready Edition and any DDR2 P35 board like the Asus P5K Deluxe, Abit IP35 Pro, Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6, MSI P35 Platinum, DFI LANPartyUT P35... (the list goes on), then you should have a hard time justifying the investment.

In addition, with X38 Intel is bringing out its Extreme Memory and Extreme Tuning Utility, but that will be exclusively for DDR3 on both P35 and X38. Is that enough to sway you to DDR3? Or can we rely (and hope) on Asus' ingenuity to hack it for DDR2?

Final Thoughts

The performance in 2D testing favours slightly better in the way of the Premium, and even at 1,500MHz it doesn't really extend the lead that much. Also, it's not like you can't just buy some 1,500MHz memory and drop it in a Deluxe, however it seems to be tailored more to preferring lower latency memory like the 1,066MHz DDR3 at 6-6-6-15 instead of 1,333MHz at 7-7-7-20.

Overclocking is not outright superb, although it is certainly capable and stability is much the same story. In all it feels like a very average board for Asus and one just not worthy of the price tag: it can be had for £140 more than an already expensive product combination, it only comes with a three year warranty on the memory and if just one of the 32 chips go the whole board has to be returned. Hats off for the innovation and having the balls to make a product like this, but I wonder if Asus will actually sell enough to recoup at least the development costs? I think this should be chalked down to "nice effort, but stick to what you're good at".

• Performance
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• 7/10

• Features
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• -
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• 8/10

• Value
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• 2/10

• Overall
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• 5/10

What do these scores mean?