Intel 'Penryn' Core 2 Extreme QX9770 and X48 chipset

Next up was the Asus P5K3 Deluxe with P35 chipset and DDR 3 memory support. Clock-for-clock the P35 yielded lower memory and graphics performance in PCMark05 than the X38 which was something of a surprise as the AMD ATI Radeon HD 3870 surely wasn’t restricted by the PCI Express (PCIe) bus. The X38 board has PCIe 2.0 while P35 is stuck with the original PCIe bus but both offer plenty of bandwidth and the P35 DDR 3 memory controller is surely very similar to the one on the X38.

PCMark05 Test - P35 Chipset

Longer bars are better

CPU performance at 3.20GHz in PCMark05 was identical on the P35, which was gratifying, and the time taken for DivX encoding was effectively identical but in iTunes the X38 had a significant edge.

iTunes AAC Conversion Test - P35 Chipset

Time in seconds to convert 150MB of MP3 files to AAC
Shorter bars are better

We had more options for overclocking with the Asus P35 Bios as we had clock multipliers that went up in 0.5x steps so we were able to run the multiplier at 10.5x for a clock speed of 4.20GHz. At this speed the DivX test wouldn’t run and we had a similar situation when we raised the FSB to 1800MHz with a multiplier of 9x to get a clock speed of 4.05GHz. CPU performance was great in both cases but system performance was uninspiring compared to the Gigabyte X38.

DivX 6.7 Recode Test - P35 Chipset

Time in seconds to recode a 350MB AVI file
Shorter bars are better