Installation and Testing:

There isn't much to say in terms of difficulty or set up. The jumpers are a no brainer and should be an industry wide standard. There really isn't any reason to have to guess or consult the manual if you want to plug in your Front Panel wiring. Installing those wires before hand doesn't always work out and can easily be pulled out of place while configuring everything else in your case. That jump just makes plugging those wires at the very end of installation easy and error free.

The Test System

Once powered on, I took some time to browse the BIOS and its layout. After getting a bit more familiar with the P35 settings and options, there were a few things that caught my eye during configuration regarding memory timings. This is due partly to the memory modules and the motherboard at the same time. The memory timings of the Kingston KHX11000D3LLK2/2G Kit didn't quite report correctly, though not an entirely big deal. It's not all that surprising when a whole new memory module comes out intended to work flawlessly on every supporting motherboard. A few adjustments and the system was set.

	Main	Advanced
JumperFree Configuration	CPU Configuration	Chipset
Onboard Devices	Hardware Monitor	OC Profile

Testing was performed using the improved, integrated 7.1 Realtek HD Audio. The modules used to benchmark are Kingston PC2-8500 Value 2GB Kit and a more serious PC2-1100 Hyper X 2GB Kit both of which are supported. Stock standard and overclocked settings were used to give some real world results to compare to yours. Typically, I would use some water cooling to really max out the overclocking testing. Given the intricate heat pipes, that isn't an option. And to further demonstrate the amount of space in between the heat pipes surrounding the CPU socket, it seemed feasible to try something large like the ASUS Artic Square to get a better idea of how much space is needed.

Installing the drivers from the CD was a little lethargic. When you select to install the motherboard drivers, it goes through and installs each one, rebooting when necessary. The installation of each driver took considerably more time than the typical method of selecting the drivers on the CD. Personally, I don't like installation programs that do things this slowly nor like it when it assumes I want to install everything on the disc at once. I figure ASUS just wants to make it as easy as possible and remove the pain and doubt for new or inexperienced users. This isn't too big a deal because you can also explore the CD and install the drivers you want in particular. After a final reboot, the system was ready for some serious work.

CPU-Z

Mainboard

SPD

Memory Skewed in CPU-z

Note: CPU-z did not record correct memory timings in this case. Maybe they haven't caught up to all DDR3 just yet.

First up, were a series of Sisoft SANDRA and Cinebench benchmarks to see how well the system's processing power compares to previous tested Intel systems. For comparison, the Abit AB9 Quad GT was used to compare in terms of memory bandwidth performance. You can see below how the new P35 chipset seems to have an advantage over the P965 chipset.

P5K3 @ 5783

AB9 Quad GT @ 5721

Cinebench 9.5 revealed what the motherboard and processor can do teamed up together. Here you can see how the scores improve at each stage of the Front Side Bus being overclocked. Shoving any 8800 or X2900 series graphics card would undoubtedly score very high, but the processing power is what really increases. The nice thing about the whole process is the unwavering stability of the system test after test.

Cinebench 9.5
Stock	Overclock

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