ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe: An Early Preview of P45 Express Performance
by Kris Boughton on May 13, 2008 2:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Just a Taste of Early Overclocking Results
Because our ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe motherboard was built using early P45 silicon (revision A2), we believe it to be entirely appropriate to reserve final judgment of the board's overclockability until such time as retail products are ready for release. With that being said, we also want to bring you an early look at our first attempts at overclocking the P5Q3 Deluxe.
Achieving 4.0GHz with a dual-core Core2 E8500 was breeze thanks to our ASUS P5Q3 Deluxe.
Lavalys EVEREST had trouble identifying our motherboard, but the results are 100% accurate.
Using an E8500 we were able to push to 500FSB, albeit with more vMCH than we expected - nearly 1.5V was needed for sustained stability. This is precisely one of the reasons that we would like to withhold our final opinions on the overclocking merits of this board. We know there is a new P45 silicon spin in the works (revision A3) and thermal and power characteristics generally improve as each new product's process improves. In the meantime, our results at least offer us hope that P45 has the potential to outshine even P35, which has proven to be an amazingly overclockable chipset.
Our maximum FSB overclock with a tRD (Static Read Delay) of 7 using our QX9650 was great considering our relative inexperience working with P45.
We decide to see how far we could push the board at a tRD of 7 (about 465FSB). Going any higher required a switch to a tRD of 8, leaving valuable memory performance on the table whilst only giving us a couple more megahertz before our quad-core CPU ran out of steam. We are more than happy with this result though as 465FSB is still the sweet spot for a lot of boards when using anything with more than two cores.
Latencies around 50ns and read scores well above 10GB/s are a real treat when playing with a quad-core CPU.
Our preferred operating point, 10x400, is looking good with P45. Given this, it might be hard to justify the extra expense of an X48 board if all we plan on doing is light gaming with the best CPU we can afford. Later, if we decide we need more 3D graphics power, we can always drop in another GPU as long as we're smart about it and start with a CrossFire-ready graphics card.
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dingetje - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
a p45 shootout article would be awesome.i won't buy asus anymore because of their EPU scam, but am very interested in the gigabyte and msi p45 offerings
Hxx - Wednesday, May 14, 2008 - link
Asus = EPU scam, Gigabyte = dynamic energy saver scam. Unless your running your system at stock speeds, these features are useless, which brings out the following question? why are these 2 embedded in high end motherboards?Hulk - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
I've written this before but a lot of people (like myself) might be considering this board as a big upgrade from an older board, like my current P5B Deluxe rig. Please include some "legacy" benchmarks so we can see if the performance improvements are worth the dimes.hansmuff - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
Certainly the P35 is mature by now and will be eclipsed, but I'd like to see a consideration of performance/$.A good P35 board is $120, 4GB of name brand DDR2-800 with an 8GB option (2x2GB) is $85. I can't even buy this P45 for those two combined, so DDR3 cost really comes into play.
Frumious1 - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
Well, you can't even buy any P45 boards right now, so it's a bit premature to discuss retail prices. This particular board is DDR3, so for budget-conscious buyers it would probably be a poor choice. ASUS will have a DDR2 model as well, and so will other companies. How much will those boards cost and how will they perform relative to, say, X38 DDR2 boards? Or P965, 975X, and P35 DDR2 boards? Those are all things we will hopefully examine in a future article. (Not being the motherboard reviewer, I can't make any promises. :))Hxx - Wednesday, May 14, 2008 - link
This board doesn't look "mainstream" to me for a 250 dollar board. I know that intel boards can go as high as 500 bucks a piece but a mainstream board is a stripped down of all the features such as dual ethernet, wireless build in, etc, and this board has it all, except maybe watercooling blocks. But anyway, just like the author stated, a major shift to a different socket type and processing power si drawing near, hopefully by the end of this year aka nehalem, which will pretty much make the x38/48 and p35/45 series become obsolete. So this board is definitely not futureproof. Having said that, most enthusiast/mainstream users will skip this product and look further ahead to the coming up nehalem processors. As for people looking to upgrade or building a new system, P35 can be had for less than $100 without sacrificing too much performance, or x38 for under 200 for crossfire purposes.P45 will only increase Intel's revenues without bringing anything new or worthy of attention to us, the consumers.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 14, 2008 - link
$249 as an estimated price prior to launch is not indicative of the market as a whole. I imagine we'll see P45 boards at much more reasonable prices - they should only carry a small premium over P35 boards really.You can also see updated results with P35 performance in the charts now, and from that it's quite clear that P45 isn't a major leap forward. We'll have to wait for further tests on stuff like CrossFire, as that might show more of an advantage, but unless P45 comes in at a price lower than X38 it won't really be a huge chipset launch. Luckily, I expect we will see $150 and lower priced P45 boards - just probably not from ASUS. ;-)
Hxx - Wednesday, May 14, 2008 - link
Wow, performance difference between p45 and p35 is so small it's scary. One might state that P45 is just a refresh of its older brother, which is not.Frumious1 - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
Edit: *they* will hopefully examine. Whatever. I know that's what I want to see benchmarked.goosemilk - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 - link
Does this board support Crossfire and SLi?