Published in Reviews

ASUS P5E3 X38 has improved VRM

by on06 December 2007

Index



BIOS:
ASUS stuck with an AMI BIOS 1MB version. This BIOS does show you the SPD readings of your memory and some default timing values outside the SPD shown in order of the BIOS settings, which helps while overclocking. The most annoying feature of the ASUS BIOS is that while overclocked the CPU will not receive idle voltages. The CPU multiplicator is reduced but the VCore remains, and there is no override or setting for VCore idle.

FSB-Overclocking:
The P5E3 did very well. It's the first board to reach the 489MHz FSB our CPU could endure and this was quite a surprise for a "standard" board. We don't know if this is done by the design or by the X38 chipset, but we were satisfied, anyway.

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CPU-overclocking:
The drawback came with the maximum frequency. While this board was able to boot with 3730MHz, it was not able to run in the long term, because the temperatures were far too high. We needed 0.05V more VCore than with the DFI LANparty UT P35-T2R, so the core temperatures exceeded 70°C and stable operation was out of the question.

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Memory-overclocking:
Some days ago we received our first PC3-14400 modules from Kingston, which will run at 900MHz (1800MHz). We feared we won't be able to run them on this board, because it's "standard," not "Deluxe" or "Maximus." Suprisingly, it was not a problem. You see the board runs them with 1T, so we let the board decide how to configure, we only set the main latencies to 8-8-8-24.

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FSB BIOS clocking:
We have to state that we always recalculate the bench results to nominal frequencies. Most vendors do an overclock to their products, maybe to get more bench points, but we nullify such attempts. The P5E3 is overclocked with 266/333MHz, underclocked with 366MHz and on target with 320/400MHz:

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Last modified on 07 December 2007
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