This will be the third and last overclocking article that we are going to publish using the ASUS P5N-E SLI as the test subject. The P5N-E SLI itself has never been reviewed here at Legion Hardware, despite having owned this motherboard for almost six months now. Rather, this motherboard has been the focal point of several articles written in the past six months. The P5N-E SLI was first used to overclock the Core 2 Duo E6400 from 2.13GHz all the way to 3.50GHz in just 3-steps. Then more recently the P5N-E SLI was used to push an E4400 processor from 2.0GHz to a comfortable 3.0GHz using nothing more than standard Intel cooling.

Now today we are going to show you how it is possible to run an Intel Pentium E2160 processor worth just $99 US, at 3.40GHz without having to use water-cooling. This 1600MHz overclock can again be achieved in just a few easy steps, which I will explain in this article. Furthermore because the ASUS P5N-E SLI motherboard uses the nForce 650i SLI chipset, memory speed is somewhat irrelevant when overclocking. Unlike Intel chipsets for example, these Nvidia versions can overclock the processor and memory independently of one another. This means while the Intel Pentium E2160 processor was using a 378MHz FSB to reach 3.40GHz, the memory was running on a 266MHz FSB using a 3x clock multiplier.

Essentially what this means is those wanting to overclock an Intel LGA775 processor on a motherboard such as the ASUS P5N-E SLI, need not worry about memory speeds. Rather than waste serious cash on high-speed memory, users can simply purchase DDR2-667 or DDR2-800 memory instead. The majority of DDR2-667 memory modules can easily operate at 800MHz, though these days the price difference between DDR2-667 and DDR2-800 memory is negligible anyway. To prove this point we decided to use 2GB of Transcend Jetram, which we purchased for $74 US.

In the past we have published DDR2 memory frequency and latency performance articles. The memory frequency article proved that DDR2-667 (CAS3-3-3-8-T1) is just as fast as DDR-1181 (CAS 5-5-5-15 T2) when using an overclocked Core 2 Duo processor (500MHz FSB x 7 = 3.50GHz). The latency performance article also proved that when operating at 800MHz CAS6-6-6-18 T2 timings are really no slower than CAS3-3-3-8 T1 timings. Therefore when building a budget system with the intention of carrying out some serious overclocking, do not lose sleep over what type of memory you are going to use with the P5N-E SLI.

Another point worth mentioning that has been raised with previous P5N-E SLI overclocking articles is that the board can be picky depending on which BIOS revision you use. For the sake of keeping things simple and consistent we use the 401 revision. Anything earlier than this makes the P5N-E SLI hopeless when it comes to overclocking. While we have not found the newer BIOS revision to hurt performance, readers have reported problems with the 0505, 0602 and 0604 revisions. So please keep this in mind when overclocking your Core 2 Duo processor. Also, for those that do not know, ASUS offers a program called “ASUS Update” that allows you to quickly and easily flash the BIOS in Windows.