Memory performance

The Biostar boards do well in Sandra's memory bandwidth tests, but those strong performances appear to come at the expense of memory latency. The D3, for example, achieves higher memory throughput than the DDR3-equipped Asus P5K3 Deluxe, but with higher access latencies. The finishes in the middle of the pack when it comes to bandwidth but near the back of the field in the latency test.

Motherboards don't always fare well when all four of their DIMM slots are populated, so we filled the boards up for another round of testing.

Running four DIMMs doesn't bother the Biostar boards. In fact, the D2's standing actually improves a little when all its memory slots are populated. Both boards again produce nice bandwidth numbers, but access latencies are still a little on the slow side.