Memory Performance:

The motherboard product managers we've previously talked to about X38 DDR2 performance didn't hold back when they said it was "very poor" - both the Gigabyte DS5 and Asus Maximus Formula are outperformed by the older P35-based Abit IP35 Pro. The Asus seems to suffer less according to Everest, with a better read bandwidth and lower latency, but Sandra shows things on a more even footing. Synthetic write speeds are more dependent on front side bus performance rather than latency, and here 800MHz DDR2 or 1,333MHz DDR3 perform almost exactly the same.