Mainboards supporting two different memory types are pretty rare these days. It is evident that solutions like that may mostly be demanding only during the transitional time, when one type of memory is still pretty popular, while the other hasn’t yet managed to become a sales hit. The users are mostly pretty skeptical about combo mainboards like that, because these boards allegedly do not work well enough with either of the memory type, feature complex PCB layout, do not suit well for overclocking… However, there is hardly any convincing evidence for this negative attitude. Let’s get back in time for a second here.

The owners of systems with AMD processors have hardly felt the recent transition from DDR to DDR2 SDRAM. The company waited for DDR2 memory to become widely spread and then moved its processors to the new socket and new memory type all at once. As a result, no one really needed combo mainboards back then. With Intel processors the situation was completely different, there were quite a lot of mainboards on i915 chipset that could work with DDR or DDR2 SDRAM. However, the chipset was not very well suited for overclocking, so it was really hard to tell if these boards weren’t overclocking friendly because of the dual-memory type support or because of the chipset they were based on. Even earlier transition from SDRAM to DDR SDRAM has already sunk into oblivion. As far as we can tell they seem to have been a few successful mainboard solutions, for example, from Elitegroup, that were pretty popular. There even home-made BIOS versions written specifically for them, however, I doubt many of you remember those days. As for the transition from SIMM to DIMM, it looks like there were simply no computers in those days at all yet. :)

So, now that DDR3 SDRAM is already selling freely, but systems with DDR2 memory are still more widely spread in the market, we have a great opportunity to check out the viability of combo mainboards supporting both memory types. We already made the first step in this direction last year in our article called Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R Mainboard with Universal Memory Controller. Our detailed study of mainboard features, performance analysis in nominal work mode and after overclocking, even power consumption tests – everything revealed that it was impossible to give the board a 100% positive or 100% negative verdict. On the one hand, the board overclocked dual- as well as quad-core processors perfectly well, but during memory overclocking we discovered the whole bunch of problems. Moreover, it was falling behind its competitors during performance tests in overclocked mode.

Today we are going to continue our discussion of combo mainboards and their potential during CPU overclocking with DDR2 and DDR3 memory with the help of MSI P35 Platinum Combo solution.