ASUS P5K3 Premium Black Pearl Edition (Intel P35)

Overclocking

Overclocking

• FSB Settings: 200MHz to 800MHz
• DDR3 Settings: 800/833/1000/1066/1111/1333MHz
• PCIe Settings: 100MHz to 150MHz
• CPU Voltage Settings: 1.1000V to 1.7000V (in 0.0125V steps)
• Memory Voltage Settings: 1.50V to 2.25V (in 0.05V steps)
• CPU Voltage Reference Settings: 0.63x, 0.61x, 0.59x, 0.57x
• CPU PLL Voltage Settings: 1.50V to 1.80V (in 0.10V steps)
• FSB Termination Voltage Settings: 1.20V to 1.50V (in 0.10V steps)
• Clock Over-charging Mode: 0.70V to 1.0V (in 0.1V steps)
• NB Voltage Settings: 1.25V, 1.40V, 1.55V, 1.70V
• NB Voltage Reference: 0.67x, 0.61x
• SB Voltage Settings: 1.05V, 1.20V
• Multiplier Selection: Yes (unlocked CPUs only)

Normally with motherboard reviews, our only concern is the overclockability of the board itself. CPU and memory frequencies are lowered to ensure that there are no bottlenecks to FSB. For the P5K3 Premium, we took a different approach. Since the memory is now part of the board, we treated it as such and overclocked both memory and FSB in tandem. This was done to test how well ASUS managed to integrate and optimized the onboard memory as well as ASUS' claims for reaching DDR3-1500.

Till date, we've never had much success at FSB overclocking with DDR3 memory and the past few hybrid boards we've tested would refuse to overclock using DDR3, but would scream ahead with DDR2. The ASUS P5K3 Premium had no such problems or limitations. We managed to hit a maximum stable FSB overclock of 485MHz, which is similar to the capabilities of boards running on DDR2. Not only that, this was achieved with the DDR3 memory running at a blazing 1620MHz and tight 9-7-7-20 timings.

We only had to slightly tweak the voltage settings to 1.55V for the Northbridge and 1.90V for the memory to get everything running rock solid. The board handled overclocking extremely well and cooling was superb. During full load at our overclocked settings, both chipset and memory heatsinks only felt moderately warm.

We ran a quick PCMark05 benchmark to test the performance improvements to the available memory bandwidth and found that there was an over 6% boost to overall results compared to the board's DDR3-1333 timings.