Does Chipset-to-GPU Matching Matter?

Test Setup

Corsair Dominator 8888 was chosen for its ability to run 1066 MHz at CAS4, in hopes that all three motherboards would support this speed. EPP allowed automatic timing and voltage optimization using the "Expert" setting at a 1066 MHz data rate on the nForce 680i SLI platform. Because the Intel and ATI chipset motherboards do not support EPP, these settings were manually copied to the P965 Express and Radeon Xpress 3200 motherboards for the closest performance match.

In a perfect world this all would have been well, but part of the MSI P965 Platinum’s "class leading" performance appears to be that the company secretly changes any CAS 4 setting to CAS 3, at least according to CPU-Z. Before anyone becomes enraged about this form of "cheating," I’d like to commend MSI on producing the only board I’ve used that’s actually stable using this lower latency with the majority of CAS 4.0 DDR2 800 modules. MSI did not likely predict the quick development of DDR2-1066 CAS 4, a speed at which the CAS 3 "cheat" couldn’t be 100% stable. The board was "penalized" by using the easiest fix, setting latency to 5-4-4-12 rather than 4-4-4-12, and CPU-Z reported it running as set.

The DFI ICFX3200-T2R/G also had trouble running DDR2-1066, but trial and error found an eventual solution by raising the Northbridge PLL and Core voltages. Many other users have either succeeded or failed in their attempts to make this board’s performance stable at this memory speed, so your results may vary.