VR-Zone

As we were saying a bit earlier when exploring the BIOS, users can actually tune up Memory performance by switching Memory Performance Enhance from Normal to Fast and Turbo. So what kind of gain is there?

Above you see a Sisoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth benchmark comparision between the Normal Setting and Fast Setting. Only about a 2% boost, but this for some die-hard tweakers is icing on the cake. Free performance increase is always welcome, no matter how small. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the system to boot into the OS stably at the Turbo Settings so no result on that to share.

In terms of overclocking the Front Side Bus speed- a vital determiner when you have a low multiplier processor such as an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300- this board delivers without requiring too much work or experimentations. As incredible as it seems for a group of geeks used to "300+MHz FSB clocks", 471MHz FSB was achieved on this board without much of a sweat. It was done with an E6300, and was stable enough to run benchmarks. I would have been damn pleased with such an overclock by itself, but researching around reading through user experiences such as this and this made me feel kind of inadequate. Ah well, one needs to be contented at some point!

So we see that the DS3 is no softie when it comes to pushing the FSB clocks. But how about the CPU overall clock speed then? How does this board do? I took the Core 2 Duo E6700 @ 2.66GHz and pushed it to 3.87GHz stable with a simple watercooling setup on the CPU, to make sure heat is not holding any component back.

What do you think? What I think is that while this board does great when you want FSB and just plan on doing reasonable 3.5GHz air-cooling overclocks on the E6300, E6400 Allendales; this is probably not the board for pushing the CPU clock speeds to close in on 4GHz for Core 2 Duos, especially when you're on the 4MB Cache Conroes of E6600, E6700, X6800. The modest 3 phase power seems to be the limiting factor in this area. For such extravagant plans it's probably a safer bet to hit on it's 6 phase or 12 phase powered "elder brothers" of DS4 and DQ6.