got this board and e8400 hoping to reach 4.0 like in review but cant get it stable with same settings so im reaching for 3.6 butt cant figure out right settings ive only got to 3.3 on stock settings while increasing fsb to 375 after that it locks up even adding more vcore tried settings from stock up to 1.3 whith 400 fsb memory at 4-4-4-12 and tried 5-5-5-15 anyone have any idea what i can try next
I have recently had 3 top of the line Asus motherboard that has gone into an failed state. Two of this boards "work" a little bit and is based on intel 975x chipsett. The last and most recent board was the p5n32e-SLI. This board worked great with my q6600@3.4ghz and one 8800gt. But when i got the last 8800gt to run SLI it only survived two cod 4 games before i got the bsod and after that it wont work anymore at all. After reading about all the 680i problems i was allmost ready to give up SLI and get my self a god board based on the intel x38 chipsett.
But then i read this article. I've only had one Asrock board before and it work well enuff. Since i did not want to wait for the rma of the other board i needed a cheap substitute. So i ordered this board, it looks good enuff, but there is several severe problems i have noticed over the last two days:
1. The volt regulators at the base of the mobo is whining like the old modems we had before when they connected. This is going on all the time, and the high pitch is driving me crazy.
2. This board really sucks regarding to overclocking my q6600, the old p5n32e-SLI could do 425 fsb stable, this board can do 425 with lower fsb, but fails when the cpu is pushed over 2.7ghz. This is the same with higher multi and the same cpy frequenzy. I have now wather cooled both gpus and chipset and temps are very low. Like 45 degree celsius with a lot of chipset volt. Even tried setting all volts on mobo to max just to try. Did not give me more stable speed.
3. Slow poster, after i upgraded to bios 1.3 it got a lot slower to get over post screen.
4. Problems using my to extra sata disks when raid is enabled.
So my rating is very low...it works but so does allmost every normal 650i card at the same price range. And the extra cpu support is the only real charming ting for me as for now, and the fact that sli is stable. But sli on a quad at only 2.4 ghz is waste. It gives me a 4000-5000 point lower score in 3dmark06 then i had with 680i and the same cpu@3.4ghz. So with loosy overclocking this is realy holding me back...if it was not so cheap i would return it instantly.
I have recently had 3 top of the line Asus motherboard that has gone into an failed state. Two of this boards "work" a little bit and is based on intel 975x chipsett. The last and most recent board was the p5n32e-SLI. This board worked great with my q6600@3.4ghz and one 8800gt. But when i got the last 8800gt to run SLI it only survived two cod 4 games before i got the bsod and after that it wont work anymore at all. After reading about all the 680i problems i was allmost ready to give up SLI and get my self a god board based on the intel x38 chipsett.
But then i read this article. I've only had one Asrock board before and it work well enuff. Since i did not want to wait for the rma of the other board i needed a cheap substitute. So i ordered this board, it looks good enuff, but there is several severe problems i have noticed over the last two days:
1. The volt regulators at the base of the mobo is whining like the old modems we had before when they connected. This is going on all the time, and the high pitch is driving me crazy.
2. This board really sucks regarding to overclocking my q6600, the old p5n32e-SLI could do 425 fsb stable, this board can do 425 with lower fsb, but fails when the cpu is pushed over 2.7ghz. This is the same with higher multi and the same cpy frequenzy. I have now wather cooled both gpus and chipset and temps are very low. Like 45 degree celsius with a lot of chipset volt. Even tried setting all volts on mobo to max just to try. Did not give me more stable speed.
3. Slow poster, after i upgraded to bios 1.3 it got a lot slower to get over post screen.
4. Problems using my to extra sata disks when raid is enabled.
So my rating is very low...it works but so does allmost every normal 650i card at the same price range. And the extra cpu support is the only real charming ting for me as for now, and the fact that sli is stable. But sli on a quad at only 2.4 ghz is waste. It gives me a 4000-5000 point lower score in 3dmark06 then i had with 680i and the same cpu@3.4ghz. So with loosy overclocking this is realy holding me back...if it was not so cheap i would return it instantly.
Hi guys! I just got one of those with a e8200 and 2x2gb ddr2 800 5-5-5-15. I'm having some difficulty overclocking, since it's my first time at it. I started to increase the FSB, but @2.8, 3.0 mhz, the pc freezes. I thought it might have been the fact that the ram speed also increases and cant handle the clock speed, but again, i'm new at this. I also cant find the memory ratio on the bios (its updated to the last version). Should i look at other things such as increasing or lowering voltages or messing with the memory timmings? I even tried lowering the memory speed to 667 so that it remained at 800 with the increased FSB, but no success. Pc freeze @2.8 and above.
(got a thermaltake typhoon cooler, cpu temp aroung 30º)
all those of you who just comment... how many boards have you ever used?well i've used quite a few from every posible brand.tha bigest problems that i have ever come across with whwre with asus boards.regarding asrock and ecs they have always been proved stable and reliable.nowdays prices tend to closely much so my advice to you is to bye what you get more for the same price.YES i ve become an Asrock fan
I think, the asrock penryn1600sli-110dB looks very interesting. I’m considering to buy this board, but now I read, that asrock is going to launch a nforce 680i mainboard with Tripe-SLi, Penryn and FSB 1600 Support.
It states "Get to the numbers aleady" instead of "Get to the numbers already". This displays on the link at the bottom of page 2 and on the drop-down menu.
Don't know why anandtech are so surprised about Penryn support on the 650 - there are other boards such as the ASUS P5N-E SLI that support it. On the other hand, whether the ASUS board is actually better than this AsRock is debatable....
Crysis is not the ugly game but it is the preferred benchmark to proof that your setup wasn't prime stable.
I'm usually a SIS fanboy and I hope that ASRock will release new boards when SIS has new phenom chipsets.
Too bad that all mainboard manufacturers sticked to the SIS761 in the past instead of advancing to the SIS771.
In short, my systems MUST be as stable as possible, and I have not experienced stability past 3-5 day uptimes with any Asrock motherboard. Granted I did not exactly go out, and buy every single model from them and try each individual one. Instead, I bought one last year on recommendations from web sites(and I am thinking your site was one). Some of the staff here may remember some of the things I said about the board here, and probably also remember who my motherboard OEM of choice is.
other considerations included system overclockability, support, and hassle free setup. The Asrock board I chose would not clock as high as my preferred brand motherboard would(yes, with the same CPU, and memory . . .two different CPUs in fact). I tried, and tried, but to no avail. The hassle free setup issue mainly involved setting up booting from SATA HDDs. I had to jump through hoops, call tech support, and in the end I found myself figuring it all out myself, because I seemingly knew more about the board than the tech rep I spoke to on the phone. I did document my findings on the web(ubuntu.org forums I think), so the problem should at least be google-able for a fix now. Software support for the board was non existant. NO BIOS updates, and no driver updates(drivers I can understand since it was an nVidia board, with ACL 888 audio).
In the end, I could have saved myself the cost of the board, by paying $20 more for the preferred brand. Being all for saving money, I dont really care whose brand I use, so long as that brand is reliable, and in my book, Asrock failed me on many fronts.
IF you are the type who does not care if your hardware crashes your system every 3-5 days, then my problem is not your problem.
My AsRock 939 Dual SATA II has run 24/7 for two and a half years now 24/7 mostly under full load, and not a single crash. So, AsRock boards can be good... But yes in general I do agree that you get what you pay for. I don't buy AsRock these days, they are too close in price to the other big name manufacturers.
Yeah, there are three parts I do not skimp on any more.
1) motherboards
2) memory
3) Power supply
Once in a while I TRY to use a lesser brand part in place of one of these three components, but I usually am disappointed. My post above was the most recent disappointment I have had. This however would be for my own personal systems. I have used cheap ECS branded(among other brands) motherboards for replacing the occasional system board for a customer, but I always tell them how I feel about these low cost parts, and let them make the choice. Some even work out well for a long period of time. I will not however play Russian roulette with my own system in such a fashion . . . at least, not without a backup system, and/or plan ; )
All that and you didn't mention abit once!? You've come a long way, yyrkoon! ;)
(As an aside, I loved the first three abit boards I bought, but then the company seemed to tank hard. Many other abit boards were not nearly as reliable, so I stopped buying them. IP35 seems like it may have regained some of their glory days, but I'm not in the market right now.)
Right now I own 3 ABIT boards(4 if you include the KT7A-RAID100 board that finally took a nose dive after 6-7 years. There are pictures of it on ABITs forums . . .) NF7-S2G, NF-M2 nView, and an IP35-E. All these boards have been reliable, but the original NF7-S2G I owned died prematurly due to a faulty keyboard connector(10 year old compaq presario keyboard I just hated getting rid of).
Out of all of them, I think I would have to agree with you about the IP35 series boards. 100% rock solid, and EVERYTHING works. The NF-M2 nView board was very reliable(which replaced the Asrock board), but not everything worked. The board will lock up half he time during POST if you have a USB HDD powered on and connected, and the other half of the time, it would lock up on booting into WinXP with the USB HDD connected.
I almost wish Asus could ship a board into our area without it showing up at the shop DoA, but unfortunately, that has not been the case, and we do not sell their boards any longer. I have been wanting to give Gigabyte a go, but you know how brand preference gets when you have been using the same brand for many years, and you have become accustomed to how that brand behaves/does things. We also have many Intel boards around here, as well as a few very old IWILL, MSI, DFI, and Tyan boards. Oh, and one dual PIII CPU Supermicro that serves duty as a web, ftp, and general purpose server( Debian ).
Same here, I had my 939dual-sata2 running solidly for over a year, handling a 40% OC on a Venice Athlon 64. It also had both AGP/PCI-E, both used fine ;) and an optional riser card for AM2 CPUs + DDR2, which I haven't used but was benchmarked and found to work fine.
Using an AliveXFire now, some decent overclocks this time round too.
Only problem is CPU voltage maxed out at +0.05v for some reason, and RAM voltage only goes to 2.05v, which is lame and means I can't get much of a ram OC.
quote: We did use either x8 slot in single graphics card mode and they worked fine, in fact, more than fine as benchmark scores indicated a variation of less than 2% in gaming compared to the x16 slot with our 8800GTS-512.
Is it possible for AT to probe this matter deeper in future article? Like,
And how each configuration effects actual performance. Candidates on chipset parts would be 975X, X38, 680i/650i, 780i, etc. On GPU side AMD PCIe 1.0 GPU and PCIe 2.0 GPU, NV PCIe 1.0 GPU and PCIe 2.0 GPU. It's still a confusing matter and we haven't gotten a definite answer yet. I noticed almost ~10% performance drop from going to x8 on Bad Axe 2 with a HD 3850. I don't know if it's due to the bandwidth on the board, or HD 3850 being a PCIe 2.0 card.
Excellent review as always. Interesting that the board has such a small vdrop. (did they hire a pre-DFI emploee)
So this board has 1600 in its name and claims to be "Compatible with all FSB1600/1333/1066/800MHz CPUs" on its website, but is not 100% stable with quad core CPU at 1600FSB?
1) Why the sudden urge to name a motherboard after the S/N ratio of the sound codec? Intel and (real) Asus boards with Soundmax codec chips, and pretty much anything with 24-bit audio processing capability can lay claim to supporting that high of a S/N ratio, yet only Asrock uses it in the model name.
2) Having the ATX connector behind the CPU is SO 1999 and/or SO Epox. Just picture the ATX cable running to that location if you have a case with a bottom-mounted PSU (Such as the Antec P180/182). Do Do you drape the cable over the CPU cooler, or run it underneath? If you run it underneath, doesn't it push down on the video card? Lame.
3) Why do only Asrock and ECS feel the need to silkscreen words on the PCB. Oh look, we have "Gigabit lan" support. Oh wow, it's "DDR2" memory slots. Every 650i motherboard has dual core support, but only Asrock needs to brag about it through motherboard labels.
Nothing against the board (with the exception of the ATX connector). Just saw the picture of it, and the thoughts of every ECS board I've ever used came back :)
....And yet you have no problem with silly names like Asus' "Maximus Formula" or "StrikerII Formula"? Or Abit's "QuadGT"? I mean what kind of weird name is QuadGT? Is that a car? Or Abit Fatal1ty" Or Asus' use of "Republic of Gamers"?
With the memory prices being what they are I've been putting a lot of thought to a 4x2GB RAM configuration. Overclocking and compatibility fears has stayed my hand though. Can I expect to see more about a 8GB memory configuration in future articles?
We will be incorporating both 4GB/8GB testing with the 2GB modules in our upcoming reviews. You are right, the current pricing is attractive, with 2x2 modules for 4GB becoming the wiser choice for performance oriented Vista 64 systems.
Having overclocked my Q9450 on a MSI P7N Diamond Deluxe to 3.6Ghz stable. Now I'm using the same board listed in the article. Here are my findings thus far.
On two sets of memory I have around it does not seem to detect the memory voltage or frequency correctly, it does at least detect timings correctly. Setting those manually in the BIOS reduced memory faults to a miniscule amount, leaving it at auto produced up to 50 faults per second in heavy programs.
Chipset voltage had to be bumped up a notch or two in order to get Windows to boot. This scares me since my previous board died from pushing the NB voltage over 1.4v. However the NB temp is much more stable than my previous board so it may not be an issue.
The VTT had to be bumped to stabalize Windows. Note that you should never push the VTT over your processors maximum rated voltage, doing so will damage the processor (though the damage may not be noticeable at first).
I hit a FSB hole at 390-410Mhz. Any frequencies in that range failed to POST, but going over it with the same voltages for 380Mhz worked with random haults inside of Windows (need to tweak the voltages a bit).
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29 Comments
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assassin8rr - Tuesday, July 22, 2008 - link
got this board and e8400 hoping to reach 4.0 like in review but cant get it stable with same settings so im reaching for 3.6 butt cant figure out right settings ive only got to 3.3 on stock settings while increasing fsb to 375 after that it locks up even adding more vcore tried settings from stock up to 1.3 whith 400 fsb memory at 4-4-4-12 and tried 5-5-5-15 anyone have any idea what i can try nextArnejoh - Tuesday, April 1, 2008 - link
I have recently had 3 top of the line Asus motherboard that has gone into an failed state. Two of this boards "work" a little bit and is based on intel 975x chipsett. The last and most recent board was the p5n32e-SLI. This board worked great with my q6600@3.4ghz and one 8800gt. But when i got the last 8800gt to run SLI it only survived two cod 4 games before i got the bsod and after that it wont work anymore at all. After reading about all the 680i problems i was allmost ready to give up SLI and get my self a god board based on the intel x38 chipsett.But then i read this article. I've only had one Asrock board before and it work well enuff. Since i did not want to wait for the rma of the other board i needed a cheap substitute. So i ordered this board, it looks good enuff, but there is several severe problems i have noticed over the last two days:
1. The volt regulators at the base of the mobo is whining like the old modems we had before when they connected. This is going on all the time, and the high pitch is driving me crazy.
2. This board really sucks regarding to overclocking my q6600, the old p5n32e-SLI could do 425 fsb stable, this board can do 425 with lower fsb, but fails when the cpu is pushed over 2.7ghz. This is the same with higher multi and the same cpy frequenzy. I have now wather cooled both gpus and chipset and temps are very low. Like 45 degree celsius with a lot of chipset volt. Even tried setting all volts on mobo to max just to try. Did not give me more stable speed.
3. Slow poster, after i upgraded to bios 1.3 it got a lot slower to get over post screen.
4. Problems using my to extra sata disks when raid is enabled.
So my rating is very low...it works but so does allmost every normal 650i card at the same price range. And the extra cpu support is the only real charming ting for me as for now, and the fact that sli is stable. But sli on a quad at only 2.4 ghz is waste. It gives me a 4000-5000 point lower score in 3dmark06 then i had with 680i and the same cpu@3.4ghz. So with loosy overclocking this is realy holding me back...if it was not so cheap i would return it instantly.
Arnejoh - Tuesday, April 1, 2008 - link
I have recently had 3 top of the line Asus motherboard that has gone into an failed state. Two of this boards "work" a little bit and is based on intel 975x chipsett. The last and most recent board was the p5n32e-SLI. This board worked great with my q6600@3.4ghz and one 8800gt. But when i got the last 8800gt to run SLI it only survived two cod 4 games before i got the bsod and after that it wont work anymore at all. After reading about all the 680i problems i was allmost ready to give up SLI and get my self a god board based on the intel x38 chipsett.But then i read this article. I've only had one Asrock board before and it work well enuff. Since i did not want to wait for the rma of the other board i needed a cheap substitute. So i ordered this board, it looks good enuff, but there is several severe problems i have noticed over the last two days:
1. The volt regulators at the base of the mobo is whining like the old modems we had before when they connected. This is going on all the time, and the high pitch is driving me crazy.
2. This board really sucks regarding to overclocking my q6600, the old p5n32e-SLI could do 425 fsb stable, this board can do 425 with lower fsb, but fails when the cpu is pushed over 2.7ghz. This is the same with higher multi and the same cpy frequenzy. I have now wather cooled both gpus and chipset and temps are very low. Like 45 degree celsius with a lot of chipset volt. Even tried setting all volts on mobo to max just to try. Did not give me more stable speed.
3. Slow poster, after i upgraded to bios 1.3 it got a lot slower to get over post screen.
4. Problems using my to extra sata disks when raid is enabled.
So my rating is very low...it works but so does allmost every normal 650i card at the same price range. And the extra cpu support is the only real charming ting for me as for now, and the fact that sli is stable. But sli on a quad at only 2.4 ghz is waste. It gives me a 4000-5000 point lower score in 3dmark06 then i had with 680i and the same cpu@3.4ghz. So with loosy overclocking this is realy holding me back...if it was not so cheap i would return it instantly.
miklaszewski - Wednesday, March 26, 2008 - link
Hi guys! I just got one of those with a e8200 and 2x2gb ddr2 800 5-5-5-15. I'm having some difficulty overclocking, since it's my first time at it. I started to increase the FSB, but @2.8, 3.0 mhz, the pc freezes. I thought it might have been the fact that the ram speed also increases and cant handle the clock speed, but again, i'm new at this. I also cant find the memory ratio on the bios (its updated to the last version). Should i look at other things such as increasing or lowering voltages or messing with the memory timmings? I even tried lowering the memory speed to 667 so that it remained at 800 with the increased FSB, but no success. Pc freeze @2.8 and above.(got a thermaltake typhoon cooler, cpu temp aroung 30º)
Thanks a lot, hope you can help.
petran - Friday, March 14, 2008 - link
all those of you who just comment... how many boards have you ever used?well i've used quite a few from every posible brand.tha bigest problems that i have ever come across with whwre with asus boards.regarding asrock and ecs they have always been proved stable and reliable.nowdays prices tend to closely much so my advice to you is to bye what you get more for the same price.YES i ve become an Asrock fanLoghic - Sunday, February 24, 2008 - link
I think, the asrock penryn1600sli-110dB looks very interesting. I’m considering to buy this board, but now I read, that asrock is going to launch a nforce 680i mainboard with Tripe-SLi, Penryn and FSB 1600 Support.http://www.pc-treiber.net/thread.php?threadid=8130">http://www.pc-treiber.net/thread.php?threadid=8130
ap90033 - Friday, February 22, 2008 - link
Great news but where in the world can I get a good SLI board like thsi???rudolphna - Monday, February 18, 2008 - link
Has a very clean layout and look to it. too bad its an ASrock board. i dont trust them. imo they are cheap ripoffs of ASUSEnder868 - Tuesday, February 19, 2008 - link
You are aware that Asrock is a division of ASUS correct?kalrith - Monday, February 18, 2008 - link
It states "Get to the numbers aleady" instead of "Get to the numbers already". This displays on the link at the bottom of page 2 and on the drop-down menu.Tuvoc - Sunday, February 17, 2008 - link
Don't know why anandtech are so surprised about Penryn support on the 650 - there are other boards such as the ASUS P5N-E SLI that support it. On the other hand, whether the ASUS board is actually better than this AsRock is debatable....Schugy - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
Crysis is not the ugly game but it is the preferred benchmark to proof that your setup wasn't prime stable.I'm usually a SIS fanboy and I hope that ASRock will release new boards when SIS has new phenom chipsets.
Too bad that all mainboard manufacturers sticked to the SIS761 in the past instead of advancing to the SIS771.
yyrkoon - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
In short, my systems MUST be as stable as possible, and I have not experienced stability past 3-5 day uptimes with any Asrock motherboard. Granted I did not exactly go out, and buy every single model from them and try each individual one. Instead, I bought one last year on recommendations from web sites(and I am thinking your site was one). Some of the staff here may remember some of the things I said about the board here, and probably also remember who my motherboard OEM of choice is.other considerations included system overclockability, support, and hassle free setup. The Asrock board I chose would not clock as high as my preferred brand motherboard would(yes, with the same CPU, and memory . . .two different CPUs in fact). I tried, and tried, but to no avail. The hassle free setup issue mainly involved setting up booting from SATA HDDs. I had to jump through hoops, call tech support, and in the end I found myself figuring it all out myself, because I seemingly knew more about the board than the tech rep I spoke to on the phone. I did document my findings on the web(ubuntu.org forums I think), so the problem should at least be google-able for a fix now. Software support for the board was non existant. NO BIOS updates, and no driver updates(drivers I can understand since it was an nVidia board, with ACL 888 audio).
In the end, I could have saved myself the cost of the board, by paying $20 more for the preferred brand. Being all for saving money, I dont really care whose brand I use, so long as that brand is reliable, and in my book, Asrock failed me on many fronts.
IF you are the type who does not care if your hardware crashes your system every 3-5 days, then my problem is not your problem.
Tuvoc - Sunday, February 17, 2008 - link
My AsRock 939 Dual SATA II has run 24/7 for two and a half years now 24/7 mostly under full load, and not a single crash. So, AsRock boards can be good... But yes in general I do agree that you get what you pay for. I don't buy AsRock these days, they are too close in price to the other big name manufacturers.yyrkoon - Monday, February 18, 2008 - link
Yeah, there are three parts I do not skimp on any more.1) motherboards
2) memory
3) Power supply
Once in a while I TRY to use a lesser brand part in place of one of these three components, but I usually am disappointed. My post above was the most recent disappointment I have had. This however would be for my own personal systems. I have used cheap ECS branded(among other brands) motherboards for replacing the occasional system board for a customer, but I always tell them how I feel about these low cost parts, and let them make the choice. Some even work out well for a long period of time. I will not however play Russian roulette with my own system in such a fashion . . . at least, not without a backup system, and/or plan ; )
JarredWalton - Monday, February 18, 2008 - link
All that and you didn't mention abit once!? You've come a long way, yyrkoon! ;)(As an aside, I loved the first three abit boards I bought, but then the company seemed to tank hard. Many other abit boards were not nearly as reliable, so I stopped buying them. IP35 seems like it may have regained some of their glory days, but I'm not in the market right now.)
yyrkoon - Tuesday, February 19, 2008 - link
Right now I own 3 ABIT boards(4 if you include the KT7A-RAID100 board that finally took a nose dive after 6-7 years. There are pictures of it on ABITs forums . . .) NF7-S2G, NF-M2 nView, and an IP35-E. All these boards have been reliable, but the original NF7-S2G I owned died prematurly due to a faulty keyboard connector(10 year old compaq presario keyboard I just hated getting rid of).Out of all of them, I think I would have to agree with you about the IP35 series boards. 100% rock solid, and EVERYTHING works. The NF-M2 nView board was very reliable(which replaced the Asrock board), but not everything worked. The board will lock up half he time during POST if you have a USB HDD powered on and connected, and the other half of the time, it would lock up on booting into WinXP with the USB HDD connected.
I almost wish Asus could ship a board into our area without it showing up at the shop DoA, but unfortunately, that has not been the case, and we do not sell their boards any longer. I have been wanting to give Gigabyte a go, but you know how brand preference gets when you have been using the same brand for many years, and you have become accustomed to how that brand behaves/does things. We also have many Intel boards around here, as well as a few very old IWILL, MSI, DFI, and Tyan boards. Oh, and one dual PIII CPU Supermicro that serves duty as a web, ftp, and general purpose server( Debian ).
Paracelsus - Sunday, February 17, 2008 - link
Same here, I had my 939dual-sata2 running solidly for over a year, handling a 40% OC on a Venice Athlon 64. It also had both AGP/PCI-E, both used fine ;) and an optional riser card for AM2 CPUs + DDR2, which I haven't used but was benchmarked and found to work fine.Using an AliveXFire now, some decent overclocks this time round too.
Only problem is CPU voltage maxed out at +0.05v for some reason, and RAM voltage only goes to 2.05v, which is lame and means I can't get much of a ram OC.
But hey, both were £40/60 euro..
lopri - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
Is it possible for AT to probe this matter deeper in future article? Like,
PCIe 1.0 @x16
PCIe 1.0 @x8
PCIe 2.0 @x16
PCIe 2.0 @x8
And how each configuration effects actual performance. Candidates on chipset parts would be 975X, X38, 680i/650i, 780i, etc. On GPU side AMD PCIe 1.0 GPU and PCIe 2.0 GPU, NV PCIe 1.0 GPU and PCIe 2.0 GPU. It's still a confusing matter and we haven't gotten a definite answer yet. I noticed almost ~10% performance drop from going to x8 on Bad Axe 2 with a HD 3850. I don't know if it's due to the bandwidth on the board, or HD 3850 being a PCIe 2.0 card.
Excellent review as always. Interesting that the board has such a small vdrop. (did they hire a pre-DFI emploee)
ssiu - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
So this board has 1600 in its name and claims to be "Compatible with all FSB1600/1333/1066/800MHz CPUs" on its website, but is not 100% stable with quad core CPU at 1600FSB?Odeen - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
1) Why the sudden urge to name a motherboard after the S/N ratio of the sound codec? Intel and (real) Asus boards with Soundmax codec chips, and pretty much anything with 24-bit audio processing capability can lay claim to supporting that high of a S/N ratio, yet only Asrock uses it in the model name.2) Having the ATX connector behind the CPU is SO 1999 and/or SO Epox. Just picture the ATX cable running to that location if you have a case with a bottom-mounted PSU (Such as the Antec P180/182). Do Do you drape the cable over the CPU cooler, or run it underneath? If you run it underneath, doesn't it push down on the video card? Lame.
3) Why do only Asrock and ECS feel the need to silkscreen words on the PCB. Oh look, we have "Gigabit lan" support. Oh wow, it's "DDR2" memory slots. Every 650i motherboard has dual core support, but only Asrock needs to brag about it through motherboard labels.
Nothing against the board (with the exception of the ATX connector). Just saw the picture of it, and the thoughts of every ECS board I've ever used came back :)
chrnochime - Monday, February 18, 2008 - link
....And yet you have no problem with silly names like Asus' "Maximus Formula" or "StrikerII Formula"? Or Abit's "QuadGT"? I mean what kind of weird name is QuadGT? Is that a car? Or Abit Fatal1ty" Or Asus' use of "Republic of Gamers"?Sheesh...
Jjoshua2 - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
I'm glad the 110db isn't the sound level of a 5000+rpm fan on the chipset.JEDIYoda - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
seems to me as if you have issues with ASRock and ECS.....Personally again what are your issues in regards to this areticle??
imaheadcase - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
The ATX conneceter is fine, it just hooks to the PS, most just drape the remaing cable on backside of motherboard or on top of the PS.Its not a big deal with modular PS.
Heidfirst - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
It's not the only 650i SLI claiming Penryn support ...Mr Alpha - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
With the memory prices being what they are I've been putting a lot of thought to a 4x2GB RAM configuration. Overclocking and compatibility fears has stayed my hand though. Can I expect to see more about a 8GB memory configuration in future articles?Rajinder Gill - Saturday, February 16, 2008 - link
We will be incorporating both 4GB/8GB testing with the 2GB modules in our upcoming reviews. You are right, the current pricing is attractive, with 2x2 modules for 4GB becoming the wiser choice for performance oriented Vista 64 systems.regards
Raja
defaultex - Sunday, June 23, 2013 - link
Having overclocked my Q9450 on a MSI P7N Diamond Deluxe to 3.6Ghz stable. Now I'm using the same board listed in the article. Here are my findings thus far.On two sets of memory I have around it does not seem to detect the memory voltage or frequency correctly, it does at least detect timings correctly. Setting those manually in the BIOS reduced memory faults to a miniscule amount, leaving it at auto produced up to 50 faults per second in heavy programs.
Chipset voltage had to be bumped up a notch or two in order to get Windows to boot. This scares me since my previous board died from pushing the NB voltage over 1.4v. However the NB temp is much more stable than my previous board so it may not be an issue.
The VTT had to be bumped to stabalize Windows. Note that you should never push the VTT over your processors maximum rated voltage, doing so will damage the processor (though the damage may not be noticeable at first).
I hit a FSB hole at 390-410Mhz. Any frequencies in that range failed to POST, but going over it with the same voltages for 380Mhz worked with random haults inside of Windows (need to tweak the voltages a bit).