If you happened to miss it, we published a number of reports on the performance of ASUS P5E3 Deluxe this weekend, based on Intel’s upcoming X38 chipset. During the last few days the board has served us a couple of rather pleasant surprises. Except from offering exceptional CPU overclocking, the performance is truly top-notch, two things that rarely go hand in hand. This board is an exception, which makes it even harder to keep your hands of it. Besides the P5E3 Deluxe we also have Corsair’s new DDR3 Dominator memory and it is working flawlessly at 2,000 MHz with 7-6-5-15 1T timings. With some assistance from the cold Swedish Autumn night and an extreme airflow, we managed to push Intel’s QX6850 to 4,470 MHz and reach a memory bandwidth read speed of 13,425 MB/s, a new record.
This has to be considered quite impressive as the clock frequency of the CPU affects the bandwidth considerably and previous records have been achieved with much more extreme cooling. The voltages used were 1.610 V for the processor and 2.16 V for the memory. We should mention that the memory is capable of higher frequencies than we were using at this time. It’s the CPU that can’t handle higher frequencies during these conditions.
While the memory bandwidth is impressive, the question is what X38 can do with a CrossFire setup. Unfortunately, the placement of the PCI-E ports doesn’t allow us to run Crossfire with P5E3 Deluxe, at least not with the [extreme] cooling we want. Don’t worry though, we have a ASUS R.O.G. Maximus Extreme coming, and it has the right layout to show what Radeon HD 2900XT Crossfire can do with two native 16X PCI-E 2.0 slots.
