Two things I noticed right off the bat after I powered up the computer post-installation:

1.The motherboard defaults the timings to 5-5-5-18-2T. I ran my first two sets of benchmarks with these default timings to account for those users who are not willing/able to modify their BIOS settings, but if you aren’t too nervous about going into your BIOS, you’ll want to make sure your timings at least match Crucial’s minimum timings of 5-5-5-15-2T.

2.The aforementioned EPP settings. ASUS does not include a very good explanation of how the EPPs work, but it turns out the Enhanced Performance Profiles were developed earlier this year by NVIDIA and memory manufacturer Corsair. The idea behind them is rather than letting the average user twist in the wind trying to figure out how to get the highest performance from their high-speed RAM, memory manufacturers could include profiles built into the memory modules that would overclock the RAM to certain preset performance specifications. NVIDIA included instructions for implementing the profiles in the nForce 5 chipset, slapped an SLI-ready sticker on the process and now motherboard manufactures can choose to implement the EPPs in their nForce 5 products.

Crucial included three EPP settings with the Ballistix RAM, along with the ability to generate additional performance by changing the memory divider and the clock multiplier through a setting called CPUOC, as required by the EPP standard. The whole thing is incredibly easy to use once you know what all of the settings mean, although some explanation of what the profiles (called “Optimal,” “High Performance” and “High Frequency”) actually did in the manual would have been very useful.