Intel DP35DP (P35) vs Asus P5E3 (X38)

Hi everyone,

I have a problem choosing the right motherboard and I have some quite specific requirements. I am not going to play games, no heavy graphics and I will not do any overclocking. Only heavy computational work requiring much CPU power, much bus bandwidth, quite a lot of memory while maintaining rock solid stability. I am planning to use 8GBs of RAM and about the fastest Intel Core2Quad CPU I can find.

The thing is, I am going to build a audio production workstation based on DSP accelerated soundcards from Creamware in combination with software DSP effects rendered by the CPU. The Creamware cards are quite old PCI cards that don't work very well with all setups but are generally considered to work well with genuine Intel motherboards & CPUs. The motherboard that has been recommended to me by several Creamware users is the Intel DP35DP, which isn't exactly the newest of motherboards (when was it released anyway?). The biggest concern is that this board only supports up to DDR2-800 and not DDR3 memory. However, it has 3 PCI slots and since I will use several Creamware cards in parallel that's a good thing.

Another motherboard that has been recommended by a friend of mine is the Asus P5E3. This is however a newer board that hasn't been very well tested together with Creamware cards so it's hard to tell how well this setup would perform. Thus, it's not as strongly recommended by the Creamware community. It does support DDR3 and has gotten good reviews as far as I can tell (please prove me wrong if you disagree). On the down side it only has 2 PCI slots, which is acceptable but 3 slots would be better.

(Can anyone name a motherboard supporting both DDR3 and that has 3 PCI slots at the same time?)

Now, could someone summarize the advantages of the Asus board in comparison to the Intel board? Of course, the Asus board has things like DDR3 and PCI Express 2.0 but how big performance gain do I get in practice from today's DDR3 memory modules (like DDR3-1333) in comparison to DDR2-800? I have heard that the big gains won't show up until DDR3-1600 or DDR3-2000. True/untrue? Also, since the Creamware cards are PCI I don't really care about PCI Express performance, I can live with PCI Express 1.0. The only thing I need in terms of bus performance, besides the FSB, is good PCI bandwidth. Does that differ between the cards?

I am only going to work with audio, no gaming, no heavy graphics, no overclocking. What I want is a stable machine that performs very well computationally, that has very good FSB and memory bandwidth as well as very good PCI bandwidth. So given that I'm not into games, graphics or OC, does the Asus board give me any real advantages in comparison to the Intel board? I have heard that the newer-generation boards mostly appeal to gamers, graphics people and overclockers. Any comments to this?

Any help is appreciated!

Thanks,
Tomas

hang on my bad i was thinking another board - the P5E, the P5E3 no idea never used one.

Thanks for all the input!

//Tomas