Asus P5E3 Deluxe WiFi-AP @n

Testing Methods:

With the exception of SiSoft Sandra, all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world.

We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 torture test on all cores and expanding to a looping 3DMark06. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.

We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.

Test Setup:

Systems:

• Asus P5E3 Deluxe;
  
• MSI P35 Diamond;
  
• Asus P5K3 Deluxe;

The Asus P5E3 Deluxe WiFi-AP @n ran successfully at 7-7-7-20 at 1,333MHz, as did the P5K3 Deluxe, however the MSI P35 Diamond only achieved 8-8-8-20. The P5K3 Deluxe and P35 Diamond ran CrossFire at 16x4 whereas the P5E3 Deluxe WiFi-AP @n runs CrossFire at 16x16 making it a more balanced solution. Apart from a bit more memory voltage, all other settings were left default during testing.