Maxit Mag

 

There aren't going to be a lot of chipsets with a memory controller down the road, and yet Intel has decided to make the X48 as good as an external memory controller can be. Not only is this chipset selected for higher working frequencies, but also to reach them at lower latencies. What some motherboard makers are calling "Performance Level", is nothing more (or less) than the ability to modify the memory controller's Read Delay (tRD) values, something you can do directly and transparently with the ASUS Rampage Formula.

Below, you have the link for a long and illustrative article about this important parameter. It's too dense to summarize in a few words, but if you doubt about the influence of this BIOS setting on your CPU's performance, let's say that lowering it you may get bandwidth from 10,301 to 10,923 MB/s, keeping a QX6950 at 4 GHz (450 x 9) and reducing tRD from 7 to 5. The whole spectrum goes from 14 to 5, so a 400 MHz FSB also enjoys some spectacular gains.

The role of the tRD was first noticed with the P965 and it's "FSB straps", here you see it in all it's glory, promising that all these improvements in the memory subsystem will translate into a real world applications performance increase.

Link: AnandTech.