ASUS P5WD2 Memory Dividers Questions

[Apoptosis]

After reading the Anandtech article on the ASUS P5WD2 Premium motherboard I had high hopes for this Intel 955X chipset motherboard. ASUS was kind enough to send out the 0207 Beta BIOS and the 0408 Beta BIOS for the P5WD2 motherboard so Legit Reviews could do our benchmarking and memory articles.

Looking at Wesely Fink's scores something looked weird. I set up a similar test bench to confirm their results.

I ran an Intel 3.73GHz processor for my testing and everything else we kept the same.

Let me take a quick quote from Wesley Fink of Anandtech:

We were amazed to find that the Corsair CM2X512A-5400UL could reach DDR2-1066. This yielded a Sandra standard bandwidth of just over 6400 MB/sec. To put this in perspective, this is the first motherboard and memory that we have ever tested capable of running at DDR2-1066. Frankly, 1066 required slower 5-5-5-15 timings at the maximum 2.3V available on the Asus.

For starters we couldn't hit DDR2-1066, but could hit DDR2-1060 (close enough) and also found that the system was hardly stable just as Wesley noted over at Anandtech. Our scores were just a tad higher, but that is expected because of the faster clock speed of the processor being used. Here are our results at 265FSB with a 1:2 divider for DDR2-1060 5-5-5-15:



6700MB/sec is not a bad score, but a tad low don't you think? So did we... Legit Reviews loves to overclock so we went for the gold on our test system!

Take a look below at our test system running with the 3:5 divider at 315MHz FSB for some DDR2-1050 results (Validation)... We ran our timings tighter ( 5-3-3-8 at 1050MHz) this time because the Corsair 5400UL loves tight timings!

Sandra 2005 Buffered Results:


As you can tell our DDR2-1050 result was nearly 8100MB/Sec... minor dfference right? LOL Sure, the faster CPU will help a tad, but the memory is really running at over 1GHz now.

Sandra Un-buffered -- This is my Favorite! 5,000MB/Sec!!!!


Corsair's 5400UL was the first memory module we have had that scores above 5,000MB/Sec on Sandra 2005 unbuffered! Wesley Fink got unbuffered bandwidth of about 3300MB/s, which is a far cry from our unbuffered score of 5100MB/s.

Everest Read Results:


Corsair's PC2-5400UL memory is amazing as you can tell when run correctly!

[infinitevalence]

You know when i read that article i caught the same thing but at the time dissmissed it. Good to know that the scores really were low and it was not just my imagination.

[LVCapo]

I've been working on a review of this board. While it is a great board, and rock solid stability wise......the memory settings don't work at all. My board just kind of does whatever it wants....1:1 3:4.....it makes up its own mind what it wants to run.

[Zinn2b]

I love it when people see what I see. I know you want to O/C the 3.73EE before post your review but I would really like to see the CPU @ stock speed with those timings at 1060 perferablely 1066 .
I would really like to see these results because people really except only stock results. Also I want to see 533@ 3-2-2-8 1:1 & 667@3-2-2-8 1:1
I would also like to see 800 @(fastest timings you can get) Keep up the good work

[LVCapo]

Zinn, unfortuneatly I don't have the 3.73EE.....just the 3.2E 640 CPU. I always do my testing at stock speeds, then do an overclockinbg section, as time permits I'll have the article up sometime late this coming week.

[Osakr]

I recieved my asus p5wd2 with a 820d recently and I am not at all impressed, the packageing was piss poor and the motherboard had the worst feel to it out of any i've ever encountered, and i've had chaintech and soyo. I kept finding dissapointments at every turn with this board and in fact my package as a whole was lacking in every way, every box I opened revealed something missing or something of poor quality and I never knew what to expect. MY saphire x800 produce some of the worst quality I could imagine and was only adding to my frustration of dealing with my amazingly poorly laid out chenming. My antec psu undervolts and is incredibly noisy, add in the noisy cpu hsf and gpu hsf and you come out with an experience that can not even let you hear music being played. The entire bios needs rethinking as it is very poorly laid out and it then offers no user oriented way of overclocking. I haven't done much overclocking at all but the interaction i had was not good, even with 1.8 vcore and 2.5 dimm i couldnt even reach 3.2ghz. At least the temperatures are low when i go back to stock settings. At this point the only way this board could redeem its self is with some very impressive results and by impressive i mean 6+ ghz