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  • baronzemo78 - Monday, December 18, 2006 - link

    I would like to thank Gary for all the hard work getting this preview out so fast. I am still very excited about this board. I'm waiting for the R600 anyway, so hopefully by then the stability and BIOS options of the board will have improved. I'm very curious to see if the R600 in crossfire will need more then the x8 pcie bandwith. I certainly hope it doesn't as an overclocked RD600 with a R600 sounds awesome to me. Anyway thanks again for the preview and keep up the good work.
  • Lord Evermore - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    First page says SB600 offers multiple LAN ports, but SB600 has no LAN support, and the Marvell controllers are off the PCIe links from the northbridge.

    It seems odd that ATI didn't design the SB600 with at least a couple of extra PCIe lanes. Right off the bat, this mainboard has zero upgradeability for PCIe devices, if you set up the intended dual graphics and physics cards. No hot new PCIe sound cards, TV tuners, SCSI cards.

    SB600 automatically becomes a nice competitor to Intel's chipsets, due to the included PATA support, so there's no need for an add in PCI IDE controller. ATI/AMD's overview page though is a bit misleading, as they claim the built-in SATA controllers support "all RAID levels".

    You're blaming DFI's board layout for large heatsinks not fitting into smaller cases? They had to put the socket somewhere, if that's the issue, and no matter where board makers put things, reviewers ALWAYS seem to find some complaint because of odd components not fitting or cabling not being perfect. And you didn't even mention those 90 degree angled SATA ports. I haven't seen that before. Might those not be an issue if you don't use a cable with a clip, since the downward pull of the cables is now going longways instead of across the width of the connector? (Same thing could apply to any SATA or IDE ports aligned perpendicular to the expansion slots really, but most boards don't have them that way that I've seen, possibly for that very reason.) Yeah I know, it might get mentioned in a more in-depth review, but that stands out more to me than 0.1% of the available heatsinks not fitting in a tiny case.

    Why would the third PCIe slot need to be "jumpered for PCI Express card operation"?

    That Promise RAID looks like crap. The single drive SB600 performance almost beats it. Why no benchmarks with the SB600 RAID, or the Intel or Nvidia RAID? It would be nice to know if ATI can beat the roughly 50% performance gain of the others.

    Too bad this might be the only board ever made with this chipset, and that there won't be a more value-oriented line. I can do without the CrossFire support or the physics slot (although having the option of a non-graphics x8 or x2 slot with x16 physical support would be nice), and I can do with a reduction in the amount of tweaking options, or the add-in Promise controller, or dual LAN and the better audio solution. And the color scheme could be done without. I'm tempted by Core2Duo chips, but none of the other chipsets or boards really looks that great to me in terms of features.
  • Gary Key - Tuesday, December 19, 2006 - link

    With the latest beta BIOS release -

    If you disable Promise and SB600 RAID you can use the second X16 slot (x8 electrical) for a RAID card, it will switch your first x16 slot from x16 to x8 operation.

    The physics slot (x2 electrical) works fine with our x1 Network or TV Tuner cards once you switch the jumper now. This is required to change the operation of the slot based upon the switching mechanism employed with the future Physics setup.

    I am not blaming DFI for large heatsinks not fitting in smaller cases. I was just pointing out the fact that it could be an issue for those that try it. I like the open space myself due to the offset but that creates another issue for some users. It is just information being provided.

    The SB600 can support LAN depending upon how they configure it. DFI that it would be best for dual Lan coming off the RD600 instead.

    The other RAID benchmarks are coming in our follow-up as stated in the article.

    The 90 degree angled SATA ports are being used in most of the new board designs now. Look at most of the 680i boards and you will find they are being used extensively now. We did not have any issues with the cables slipping out.
  • yyrkoon - Monday, December 18, 2006 - link

    quote:

    You're blaming DFI's board layout for large heatsinks not fitting into smaller cases? They had to put the socket somewhere, if that's the issue, and no matter where board makers put things, reviewers ALWAYS seem to find some complaint because of odd components not fitting or cabling not being perfect


    Thats why "we" just review the product, and not send them off to some salt mines, somewhere ;) This is after all, a review, everyone has an opinion, and if it doesn't bother you, simply disregard, and use common sense . . .
  • Sh0ckwave - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    Looks like a decentn my cramped case. board. I just need to know if my Infinity will fit on it i
  • cornfedone - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    From this initial review this mobo sure sounds temperamental and a shaky design if you see dramatic changes with BIOS settings and instability sometimes. The fact that it's performance changes radically with memory or CPU changes is not an indication of a stable mobo design.

    More BIOS adjustments does not necessarily make for a better mobo design if all the options do is make the mobo unstable or crash. This is a typical case of more is not better. The extra options are used as a rationale to jack the price and increase profits from consumers who lack the technical expertise to understand the motivation for such useless BIOS options.

    As far as the ATI/AMD labels go, I don't know why many in the online enthusiasts PC hardware segment make such a big deal out of AMD renaming the ATI products with AMD labels. Every company I know of that has bought another company, renames the products, so this ain't no big deal. If you don't like the product don't buy it. The name of the product has no impact on how it performs.
  • mino - Tuesday, December 19, 2006 - link

    Also on the maning "issue".

    Most sites "big deal out of AMD renaming the ATI products" not because ot the renaming - no problem there.
    The thing is, one of the best chipsets/if not THE best for Intel comming form AMD, well, that IS something.

    Also remember, AMD chipset ? That has not been in the consumer market for LONG time. At the same note, most average people have no idea that X200=X3200IE=RD600 and is from the RD480line... to those (aned there are many of them!) this is a big deal as they do not have to dig the info themselves.

    Also, at least to me, seeing it makes me smile usually...
  • mino - Tuesday, December 19, 2006 - link

    maning==naming
  • mino - Tuesday, December 19, 2006 - link

    Well, at first You should understand what "temperamental when messing with BIOS" and temaperamental at "stock" means.

    When the board is "temperamental" when messing with BIOS, ti means YOU are messing with something you have no idea what it is or what it does!

    If you do not understand what overclocking really means, do NOT overclock at all.

    Overclocking is about running things "one the edge" ... and to find that "edge" you NEED to be able to push the board over it.
    To be able to do so is a dream of an overclocker as it enables him to get most performance from any set of components.

    I love those dumbass "overclockers" who assemble a mid-range machine, install some ClockGen-like utility, overclock it until it becomes unstable and consider themselves "overclockers".

    To topic:
    !!! I LOVE THE IDEA OF THOSE UNDERVOLTING OPTIONS !!!

    More boards should offer those, it is far more usefull and safe than overvolt jet most boards do not offer it... ;-(
  • mino - Tuesday, December 19, 2006 - link

    sry for the typpos :)
  • SilthDraeth - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    I had USB Keyboard problems on DFI ATI motherboard for A64. It seems it is a semi common problem on DFI Boards, or maybe it is just unique to my board and this new one.
  • JKing76 - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    On power draw alone this chipset wins with me. And the serious undervolting potential.
  • phusg - Monday, December 18, 2006 - link

    Definitely! Although not a popular topic. The VCore is seriously undervoltable (to 0.44V), but what about the other settings? I still holding on to Athlon XPs at the moment so I'm that familiar with the rest. DDR2 is already 1.5V at stock isn't it?
  • yyrkoon - Saturday, December 16, 2006 - link

    Would have been nice to have seen ALL of the capabilities of this board/chipsets, instead of something that plays out more like a TV commercial.

    To be honest, I have no desire buy any of DFI's products, I'm more interested in this so called "NIC Teaming" implementation on the RD600 chipset. Yeah, anyhow, guess I'll have to look elsewhere for my information . .right ?
  • Gary Key - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    quote:

    Would have been nice to have seen ALL of the capabilities of this board/chipsets, instead of something that plays out more like a TV commercial.


    I did not think TV commercials discussed product issues? ;-> We are sorry you feel this way but the article was a performance preview. We will expand the coverage on the follow-up as stated one too many times in the article. :)
  • yyrkoon - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    Just label me cranky, Ill get over it, would still like to know about the actual teaming support :(
  • Gary Key - Monday, December 18, 2006 - link

    I am still working on the Teaming capability. I was provided with a new utility from Marvell that allowed a seamless setup. Hopefully, I can get the standard test run tonight on it.
  • yyrkoon - Tuesday, December 19, 2006 - link

    Oh, and if what I've read comes into fruition, PCI-E 2.0 PCI-E to PCI-E communications is still 3 quaters off, then YEEEHAAAW, 5Gbit/s, asynchronous multi-link connections !
  • yyrkoon - Tuesday, December 19, 2006 - link

    Sweet, don't suppose we could get a sneak preview here of the results ? ;)

    My motivation concerning this is simple: I've been doing a lot of experimentation with iSCSI, and for people like me, who can not afford FC networking, or 10GbE, it would be really awesome for "us" to have some form of TCP/IP implemented networking that allowed for greater than 128MB/s. I already have serious plans for iSCSI, and having a technology like this, that actually worked in its favor would be a very good thing (the only thing for that matter).
  • Griswold - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    Read the full article from start to end before jumping to conclusions.
  • lplatypus - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    umm isn't that why the article was called a "quick performance preview"?
  • yyrkoon - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    quote:

    DFI LANParty UT ICFX3200-T2R: ATI's, err, AMD's RD600 finally arrives


    Perhaps you should look again.
  • lplatypus - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    I was referring to the description of the article on the anandtech.com front page:
    quote:

    We provide a quick performance preview of DFI's latest LANParty motherboard and wonder what will become of the RD600...
  • Goty - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    Perhaps you should read the article again and realize that they're going to do a few follow-up articles. There's also the fact that the last section is called "Initial Thoughts".
  • Avalon - Saturday, December 16, 2006 - link

    511FSB max for $229 doesn't sound that impressive to me. I can get a $110 Biostar 965PT to do that. Hopefully a newer BIOS will allow much higher FSB clocks. Nevertheless, I don't think this board will be for me anymore.
  • Goty - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    That is possibly the most shortsighted comment I've heard in the past week. You aren't buying this motherboard just for the stated maximum FSB, you're buying it for the amazing feature set, you're buying it for the memory clock that's not coupled to the FSP, you buy it for the fact that it performs about the same as the other high-end chipsets (not the midrange P965), and you buy it for the incredible tweaking possibilities. The Biostar board is that cheap because it has NONE of these things going for it.
  • Avalon - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    You are full of crap. Just because a board has more features than another doesn't make it the best out there. The networking features I won't use, and a decoupled memory clock doesn't seem to do squat for REAL WORLD performance. At the end of the day, it's all about the CPU clocks, and this board AT THIS TIME (note I said I'd be looking forward to future BIOS releases, please try reading my posts before exploding into DFI ass kiss mode) does not seem to offer any significant advantages over other good boards.

    So again, I ask why I should spend $229 for this board when I can get similar CPU overclocking performance for $110-$115? Sorry, but memory and FSB tweaks that account for a few percent in benchmarks are not going to sway me from the $100+ savings. Not worth it IMO. This board will not be for me, but for the benchmark enthusiast.
  • Goty - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    Oh, and another thing, I'm interested in finding out how you can say the decoupling the memory clock from the FSB seems to provide no performance gain when benchmarking of different memory speeds at a constant FSB hasn't even been done yet.
  • Goty - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    Not once did I say that this board was the best out there, I said it had the best feature set. You're telling me the board isn't worth the money because you can buy a cheaper board that overclocks similarly. I say that there are people out there who genuinely want the features of this chipset (me being one of them) and people who will use them. Just because you won't use the features doesn't mean that the board is not worth the money, it's just not worth it to you.
  • Avalon - Monday, December 18, 2006 - link

    Funny, I don't remember telling YOU that YOUR opinion should be the board isn't worth the money. I said it isn't worth it to ME. Way to restate what I said.
  • Goty - Monday, December 18, 2006 - link

    Well, as long as we're both doing it, then I guess we're even, eh?
  • cmdrdredd - Saturday, December 16, 2006 - link

    Who says 511 is max? Also who said it wasn't a limitation of the CPU or other components not being able to do that type of FSB?
  • cmdrdredd - Saturday, December 16, 2006 - link

    this board is not retail yet...511 is max for this beta/pre-release perhaps...but I bet the final will allow much higher. Plus, you see p965 boards allow you to select 550fsb and can't do it so it seems dumb to base a buying decision on what the bios allows you to choose but won't boot.
  • Gary Key - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    The clockgen limits the FSB to 511 and memory to 658. The board is maxed out at these settings. As we stated in the article, the AMD System Manager lets you soft overclock but we could never get above 518FSB without locking the system up. DFI did hit 535+ in their labs with the soft clock routine but that was on a early BIOS release.
  • RichUK - Saturday, December 16, 2006 - link

    If the chipset requires high voltage then fair enough. But at least allow us to upgrade the heatsink on the chipset. Due to the design, I don’t quite see any other aftermarket heatsink that will fit its profile. I would have wished they used a design similar to the way Asus fix their heatsink assembly to the board.

    Or they could have just used an active cooling solution!

    With all that put aside, I’ll still be purchasing this board as soon as I can!

    Hopefully DFI won’t take long in releasing a BIOS that allows upwards of 500+ FSB from the BIOS. I want to get the max performance from my E6300!

    I also don’t understand why they’re having so many issues with the BIOS coding :S
  • Griswold - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    Active cooling? Been to the official DFI forums lately? People dont want active chipset cooling if it can be avoided.
  • RichUK - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    quote:

    Active cooling? Been to the official DFI forums lately? People dont want active chipset cooling if it can be avoided.


    Neither do I.

    However, if you’re required to further cool the chipset when under high voltage to obtain a higher FSB. Then maybe a better solution could have been implemented in the first place.

    I thought I made that quite clear.
  • Lord Evermore - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    Why increase cost for everyone, and add more complexity and provide an opportunity for a higher failure rate, to add a feature that many people might not want or need, and which likely will be a detraction from the quality of the board to many people? People don't like fans on chipsets, period. There was a phase of those for a few years being used on every board, even if the chipset didn't particularly need it, and all that happened is people complained about fans failing, whiny noisy fans, dust collection, etc.
  • Goty - Sunday, December 17, 2006 - link

    I think a good solution to this would be to include an <i>optional</i> fan for cooling the NB.
  • Lord Evermore - Monday, December 18, 2006 - link

    That'd make the price even higher, since they'd be including a heatsink designed to work well on its own, as well as either a fan alone, or a heatsink fan assembly if the standard heatsink isn't designed for airflow with attached, or with no way to attach it.

    The solution is for people to screw a fan on the chipset if they want extra cooling beyond what is actually quite a high overclock with the standard heatsink.

    However DFI could still have used a more standard and easily replaced retention mechanism. Of course there's always still thermal tape, epoxy or zip ties.
  • RichUK - Monday, December 18, 2006 - link

    You seem to have missed the focus point of my initial comment. I didn’t insist DFI implement an active cooling solution, rather a more adequate solution.

    Atleast you somewhat agree with my original immediate argument:

    quote:

    However DFI could still have used a more standard and easily replaced retention mechanism. Of course there's always still thermal tape, epoxy or zip ties.


    I never wanted an active cooling solution, never. However, I had hoped DFI would implement a solution that would exceed the requirements for cooling this chipset. Hopefully this point will be moot when I receive my board, and when I receive my board I won’t have to do any sort of cooling modding.
  • yacoub - Saturday, December 16, 2006 - link

    Actually most folks will be extremely pleased to see DFI finally move away from the godawful mobo chipset mini-fans. Those dinky fans are noisy and generally die very young . They cause more trouble than they're worth (hence why you see the vast majority of motherboards today have moved to passive cooling / heatpipe setups). Not only is a heatpipe setup quieter, it's also much lower maintenance.

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