Memory Performance:

The performance of the P5K3 Deluxe is better than the DDR2 P5K Deluxe, but the memory is running a whole 266MHz faster at 1066MHz. The vastly slower timings currently remove any sort of performance gain currently available from DDR3. Both boards featuring the newer P35 chipset are still slower than the older P965 chipset, however. The Commando offered a BIOS which could run DDR2-800 at 3-3-3-9 compared to the P5K's 3-4-4-9 and P5K3's 7-7-7-17.

Disk Performance:

The SATA read tests were conducted with a 74GB Western Digital Raptor using HD Tach 3.0.1.0's 8MB zone test. The USB 2.0 tests were done using an ATA133 160GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 hard drive (model number: 6L160PO) using the same 8MB zone test enclosed in an Icy Box USB 2.0 hard drive caddy. We recorded the average read speeds in all cases.





Peripheral and disk performance from top to bottom is almost identical, with only SATA performance dropping but the smallest of fractions.