Legit Reviews

I've got a Gigabyte P35 board with my Q9450. It uses DDR2 RAM and I've gotten OCZ Reaper DDR2-800 up to about the DDR2-1000 range with it. I see a used P5E3 Deluxe (X38 express chipset) in an auction ending today that uses DDR3-1600. Articles I've read indicate that I should possibly be able to get up to 450fsb with it. Is it even worth my while to try for this board just for the higher memory bandwidth and a little higher fsb on a 8x multiplier locked cpu? If so, what is the highest you would pay for the performance bump? Its not that I really need the extra, but if I'm keeping the Q9450 I'd like to max it out. I know I should have asked this sooner, but thanks in advance for your speedy input!

Not worth it unless you need more RAM since DDR3 is way cheaper. Otherwise the performance would be almost identical unless you're running synthetic benchmarks. The memory controller on the older C2Q is still on the northbridge controller so the gains would be almost nill.

Hmmm I didn't realize that the northbridge controller would bottleneck and give no performance gains by bumping from DDR2-800 up to DDR3-1600. That's a shame since DDR3-1600 is so cheap right now. I was going to swap this out in my general purpose upstairs rig that has a 555BE unlocked to 4 cores (w/DDR3-1600) that OC's up to 3.8Ghz but since I probably won't get much past 3.6Ghz (450fsb x 8 ) with the Q9450 it looks more like it would be just a sidegrade anyway. Thanks for the input!