ASUS P4P800S-E: Standing Out in the Crowd

ASUS P4P800S-E: Stress Testing

We performed stress tests on the ASUS P4P800S-E in these areas and configurations:

1. Chipset and motherboard stress testing, conducted by running the FSB at 262MHz.
2. Memory stress testing, conducted by running RAM at 400MHz with all three DIMM slots filled and at 500MHz with one DIMM slot filled, all at the lowest memory timings possible.

Front Side Bus Stress Test Results:

As standard practice, we ran a full range of stress tests and benchmarks to ensure that the ASUS P4P800S-E was absolutely stable at each overclocked FSB speed. These stress tests included Prime95 torture tests, which were run in the background for a total of 24 hours.

In addition, we ran several other tasks: data compression, various DX8 and DX9 games, and apps, like Word and Excel. Moreover, Prime95 was running in the background. Finally, we ran our benchmark suite, which includes ZD Winstone suite, Unreal Tournament 2003, SPECviewperf 7.0, and Gun Metal Benchmark 2. While we were able to boot and run some tests at speeds as high as 287MHz FSB and at default voltage on the P4P800S-E, 262MHz was the highest achievable overclock attainable without encountering any reliability issues.

Memory Stress Test Results:

Filling all three available memory banks is more strenuous on the memory subsystem than testing just one bank, which is why we’ve skipped our usual single bank testing with this review and went straight to this often asked about memory configured. Here were our results:

Stable DDR400 Timings (3/3 banks populated)
Clock Speed:	200MHz
Fast Command:	N/A
CAS Latency:	2.0
Bank Interleave:	N/A
RAS to CAS Delay:	3T
RAS Precharge:	5T
Precharge Delay:	2T
Command Rate:	N/A

Except for RAS to CAS delay, we see that the P4P800S-E is an exceptionally well-performing motherboard in terms of memory capability. CAS 2-3-2-5 with three banks filled is quite excellent, to say the least. Luckily, this isn’t a rare occurrence, but is worth mentioning because there have been far too many good motherboards that have been crippled due to poor main memory implementation.

This will be our first motherboard review where we stress test a motherboard to see how far out of spec main memory will run at. In this case, we’re testing to see how well the P4P800S-E operates at DDR500 using one 256MB OCZ PC3700 GOLD module. The FSB was set to 250MHz in this scenario.

Stable DDR500 Timings (1/3 banks populated)
Clock Speed:	250MHz
Fast Command:	N/A
CAS Latency:	2.5
Bank Interleave:	N/A
RAS to CAS Delay:	3T
RAS Precharge:	7T
Precharge Delay:	3T
Command Rate:	N/A

Normally, we wouldn’t say that CAS 2.5-3-3-7 memory timings are good, but at 500MHz DDR, it’s an unfortunate reality. These relaxed memory timings are absolutely necessary because of the incredibly out of spec DDR500 memory speed the P4P800S-E is operating at. DDR500’s performance usefulness is relatively limited when these types of high memory timings are necessary. However, DDR500 does hold a slight advantage over DDR400 operating at lower (faster) latencies. So for memory performance fanatics out there, the impressive results with the P4P800S-E is satisfying.

We were able to reach a memory speed of DDR525 with our OCZ PC4000 GOLD module, but our RAS to CAS delay had to be raised from 3T to 4T, which actually made DDR525 operation slower than DDR500 operation on the P4P800S-E.

We tested all these memory timings using several stress tests and general applications to guarantee stability. Prime95 torture tests were successfully run at the timings listed in the above charts. We also ran Sciencemark (memory tests only) and Super Pi. None of the three stress tests created stability problems for the ASUS P4P800S-E at these memory timings.