Introduction

DDR3 has now started to make its presence felt in the retail market and DDR3 modules for all the major players are starting to show up. DDR2 was criticised for its latency issues as well as its inability to beat DDR at clock for clock speeds. While this may be the case there is one thing to remember, DDR2-800 and DDR3-800 should perform almost identical due to the fact that they are running the same speed, just different technologies. DDR3 just has the ability to clock beyond that of DDR2 and that’s where we will see the performance increase.

Intel has been the big player to move to DDR3 with AMD still having no time for this new technology yet. Simply put, I don’t think AMD users will be happy with another socket change so soon since it has to change its CPU and motherboards in order to run different memory.

P35 using DDR3 has already shown us that it can be a big player, it’s able to run the memory clocks at 2000MHz without any problems; and now Intel has built further on this by bringing an enthusiast version to the desktop market, the X38.

We have already looked at the X38 in detail with our GIGABYTE X38-DQ6 board, however this board was only running DDR2 memory. Today we have been given our first DDR3 supporting X38 from ASUS, the P5E3. How does it fair compared to GIGABYTE’s X38 and P35T? Let’s have a look see.