Some of you may remember how excited I was to enter the 64-bit i7 world (http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/what-happens-vegas/138334-any-core-i7-users-yet-26.html#post1456619). That motherboard was an absolute nightmare. It had constant problems so after talking to EVGA several times, they convinced me to do a "step-up" to the 132-BL-E758-TR board. I paid the difference and confirmed it was the retail version and waited 3 weeks while they shipped the upgrade. No cross-ship available on step-ups. Oh and I had to pay to ship the defective board back too. The step-up board arrived, I opened the box and they had sent a refurbished board with no drivers, or accessories. I emailed them and about 3 days later they responded by saying the accessories were in the mail. A week and a half later they arrived but they sent me the accessories for the original MB, no drivers, and no manual. Frustrated but tired of dealing with them I let it go. Right away the board had all sorts of issues. AHCI would not work on ports 7-9, it read my 1333 ram as 1066, and the 5th ram slot didn't work half the time so my system read as 10gig instead of 12gig. Then I got the dreaded "FF" code on the post LCD which EVGA claims is a problem with your memory or CPU not the board. After spending an hour on the phone with tech support we manually re-timed the ram and made some other bios changes and everything was fine. I loved windows 7 and the core i7 cpu especially with 12 gig of ram. This thing was a beast. About once a month the "FF" code would rear it's ugly head but I could usually get around it after shutting power off to the system for awhile and rebooting. When I called EVGA tech about it they blamed the PSU. Then last night the FF happened again with no work around. After spending 2 hrs on the phone with tech support and tearing down my entire sytem, resetting CMOS many times and pulling the CMOS battery, we finally got it to reset with everything disconnected. I then proceeded to reinstall each connection (as recommended by the tech guy) one at a time doing a post test to make sure everything was great. Fast forward 4 hrs later, everything is just about installed, except external speakers, o/s HDD, and ethernet cable. I connect the ethernet cable and boot everything is fine and then "FF". So I call the tech support back and after waiting for 20 minutes I get a tech who starts telling me to do everything I did this morning. I ask him to pull my support history and after reviewing it another 5minutes of me just waiting, he says, "Hmmm. Looks like you have a defective board. Now what you need to do is go online and request an RMA." Computer won't post and he can't issue RMA and he wants me to go online??? Luckily I still have my core 2 quad system so I requested the RMA and now I have to pay another $30 to ship my board in (with insurance) and wait 2-3 weeks for them to ship the replacement. EVGA has lost this customer for sure.

So tonight I am placing an order for a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Motherboard (http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5648696). I have heard good things about this but I wanted to share my EVGA experience with you guys and see if anyone had insight into this board. I am more familiar with Asus boards but the model I am interested in is too expensive this round. I have 9 SATA HDD and 1 SATA BD-re drive and need to be able to support as much of that as possible on MB as I have 2 PCI-e sata cards but they only have 3 interal connectors. This MB also supports USB 3.0, SATA 6, and is compliant with the new i7 12 core and down the road I am thinking of updating to that processor.

I am actually considering building a system using that gigabyte mb and i7 920. Let us know how it works out. Also getting corsair 750W power, coolermaster cosmos 1000 Case, gtx 480, 12 gb ram, blu ray burner, and 2 1TB 6 GBs hds.

In case in you are interested, here is the new box I built last weekend. Easily overclocked it to to 3.85Ghz, and it is running stable on Windows 7 Pro with low temps:

Case: Antec 1200: $149.00
Power Supply: BFG 1200 watts: $149.00
Processor: Core i7 930: $199.00
Mobo: Gigabyte: EX58 UD-5: $268.00
HD: Four (4) WD Caviar Black 1 TB 64mb cache: $312.00
Optical: Lite-On DVD/CD Drive (dual layer): $27.00
Ram: Corsair 12 GB DDR3 PC3-12800 1600Mhz: $390.00
Video: Zotac nVidia GTX 285: $390.00
Cooling: Noctua NH D14: $79.00

Total parts cost: $1,963.00

It will be dual boot / dual OS. Basically, a 1 TB drive for each OS, with a little left over.

I just installed CS5 Premiere Pro and I am very happy with the performance.

Thanks Bill and Kyle. The Motherboard just arrived so now it is time to get to work on swapping it out.

anxiously waiting to hear how the new MB worked out!

UPDATE: Added Snow Leopard via Kakewalk. The installation went without a hitch. Everything works. OSX on 1 drive, Windows 7 on another drive. I set it up so the box boots to MAC by default. During boot, Chameleon asks you if you want to boot to another drive. Hit any key to say "Yes" ... a list of your drives comes up ... scroll to the Windows drive ... hit enter ... bingo - bango ... say hello to Bill Gates.

Well Kyle, to answer your question, not well. Apparently gigabyte boards are very finicky and I am having to manually set many of the advanced features that normally I would let the bios run in auto. I am working with a tech on the tweaktown forum to try and get it set but I am less than thrilled. Don't get me wrong the features and layout of the board are great it is the bios that are less than friendly. I am giving it to the end of next week and if I am not having better luck by then it is going back to Tiger to swap for an Asus board.

Hate to hear you are having such a time. I recently read some reviews that sound like what you are running into with the gigabyte motherboard. It makes me a little cautious about doing this build on my own. I am fairly computer literate, but the bios is an area where I haven't ever fiddled much. Hope you can get your situation worked out soon!

Kyle,

Use an ASUS P6T based board. I am running the P6T Deluxe V2. It is an easy board to work with and it flat out works well. I have my i7 920 running stable @ 4.2GHZ on mine.

Well Kyle, to answer your question, not well. Apparently gigabyte boards are very finicky and I am having to manually set many of the advanced features that normally I would let the bios run in auto. I am working with a tech on the tweaktown forum to try and get it set but I am less than thrilled. Don't get me wrong the features and layout of the board are great it is the bios that are less than friendly. I am giving it to the end of next week and if I am not having better luck by then it is going back to Tiger to swap for an Asus board.

I also initially ran into a similar issue where I had to hunt for the settings in the Gigabyte motherboard's BIOS. But once I tracked the correct settings down, it's fairly easy to configure. Nonetheless, it's still not as easy to configure as an Asus or an Intel motherboard, whose BIOS menu styles are very similar to one another.

Not to get into too lengthy a discussion on the specifics but if you want to go with this board you may want to check out this forum GIGABYTE forum at Tweaktown (http://forums.tweaktown.com/f69/) and if you want to know specifics about the issues I am facing, you can follow along on my thread located here GA-X58A-UD3R Ver 1.0 Issues... (http://forums.tweaktown.com/f69/ga-x58a-ud3r-ver-1-0-issues-boot-loop-restarts-itself-bios-resets-own-39847/) (user name "Video Pro".)

I am underwhelmed with this board for sure. Though my scenario is most likely different since I am not starting with a clean install rather replacing a dead EVGA with the new Gigabyte board. I would consider myself an advanced user having built several systems from the ground up and modding many others before that but this one is really for expert users. Especially if you end up (like me) needing to manually override bios settings to make it all work. I will keep you guys posted on the progress.

Another thing I would recommend is using components exclusively from Gigabyte's list of compatible hardware. Both Tiger and corsair say my ram is recommended for this board but the gigabyte site does not include it in their list... etc etc.

I guess I got lucky with my Gigabyte mobo. No problems whatsoever ... even overclocking it was simple. (Of course I prefer to go in and diddle around with whatever I can ... there was even a semi-automatic overclocking template/program, but I preferred to adjust everything manually based upon several OC recipes that I had found.) Oh, if you are considering OC your board, let me know and I will point you in the direction of a great tutorial written by a Gigabyte factory engineer that goes into detail about the specifics using an i7 920 and a EX58 UD5 Extreme (the principles are the same it would give you a good starting point).

I guess I got lucky with my Gigabyte mobo. No problems whatsoever ...

...Mobo: Gigabyte: EX58 UD-5:..
I probably should mention here that we are using 2 different models the GA-EX58-UD5 (rev. 1.0) (http://www.gigabyte.us/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2961) you are using and the GA-X58A-UD3R (rev. 1.0) (http://www.gigabyte.us/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=3317) are very different models and yours (from what I have read) has a better stability track record.

They are both in the same family but from what I have read there are enough differences that yours appears to be more proven. I went with this one because of the 10 SATA headers, USB 3.0, and SATA-III connections and the slots were in the configuration that suited my needs but I probably should have read more about the 2 before ordering.

Yes. They are different boards. Actually, my board is getting hard to find ... I believe it is being replaced by the EX58A-UD5. I almost got the 58A by mistake (automatically thinking since it was new, it was better). After a bit research, I learned that the 58A had more issues-w-OS X, so I looked around until I found an "old" EX58-UD5. FWIW, it works quite well with Snow Leopard, since there are a lot kexts already in place for use with it. And, I have no complaints with it using Windows 7 Pro. It is the first Gigabyte board that I have used. (Always used Asus in the past.) Hopefully, you will sort out the issues you are having. I know it can be frustrating. Good luck.

I have given it a couple weeks and many hours of my time with all the issues, I am going back to ASUS. I always had good luck with them in the past. The i7 boards they offered did not match my needs in layout or number of connections but at this point I would rather go for stability and reliability and use expansion cards to get the connections needed if necessary. I would like to get your thoughts. I am on the fence about which model to go with.

I am debating these 2

P6X58D-E
P6X58D-Premium

Are any of you using a build based on this board? If so, what are your thoughts. Have you been happy? Any major issues?

Thanks!

I believe a couple of DVInfoers are using the premium board. Based on their posts I've just ordered one.

Tomorrow is the 30 day deadline for RMA and this board is still limping along so last night I called and set-up the RMA. Today I ordered an ASUS Rampage III Extreme. It was a little bit more expensive but I think it is going to be worth it.

Lessons learned:
1. Trust the manufacturer's compatibility list. I have often been told that when it comes to Ram to check the compatibility list on the ram manufacturer site. According to corsair, the ram I have is recommended for both the EVGA and Gigabyte boards. According to EVGA, Gigabyte, and TigerDirect; this ram is not supported by the motherboard. A fact the tech support reminded me of. This makes sense, the ram manufacturer wants you to buy their product, the motherboard company has no horse in that race.

2. When you try a different company than you are used to, don't expect it to work the way it has in the past. Each motherboard is different and some standards do not apply across the board.

3. My favorite Mythbusters quote, "Failure is always an option." Sometimes it isn't worth making a computer limp along to be stable. What is the point in having hyperthreading, fast ram, machine virtualization, speed boost technology, and all the other stuff that made you excited about i7s and X58 motherboards if you have to disable most of it to make them stable? It is like giving you a Ferrari on spare tires, yes it can go 235 mph but the tires can only go 40 mph. yes your processor supports this but the motherboard won't work if you enable it...

The Rampage III Extreme arrives Tuesday so hopefully I will have more to report then...

Good luck with that expensive Asus motherboard. You're actually paying more for extra features that benefit die-hard PC gamers but do little to improve stability for video editing.

Thanks Randall. I am looking forward to it. I also would not be so sure about that assessment, I think system stability benefits every user from the casual to the advanced. The difference in cost between the Asus and the Gigabyte isn't that great, and to swap out the ram chips to the version the Gigabyte people recommend would actually cost $20 more than the R3E motherboard and leave me with 12gig of ram just sitting around. This way I minimize my cost and don't end up with any hardware sitting idle.

Also, the slot and sata configuration on the Rampage III match my needs better than the P6X58D-Premium since I run 9 HDD and 1 BD-re drive. The compatibility list of components on the Rampage board is much larger and matches my components better than the other boards as well. It does have many features that I won't need such as all the overclocking tweaks and such but my decision has a lot more to do with compatibility and stability than any thing else.

Of course I also expected each of the other 2 boards to meet my needs too, so the proof will be in the testing.

The Asus motherboard arrived last Thursday. I spent the better part of Thursday evening, backing up all current projects on and off site and then backing up my personal data. I gathered all my activation codes (or so I thought) and deactivated Adobe and other software installations. Friday, I did a complete teardown of the system removing everything but the PSU and case fans and then repacked the Gigabyte board for shipping RMA.

I installed the Asus motherboard and then started doing a staged build to test components as I went. Late Friday night I had everything in, Win 7 64 Ult installed and I began installing software. Everything has worked perfectly. The 4gig of ram that the EVGA and Gigabyte board identified as bad are working perfectly and I am running at the full 12 GB of ram again. The only hiccups so far have been an old PCi-e sata card that has been intermittent (replacement on the way), and the New Blue FX Sampler that came with my Vegas Pro 9.0 upgrade needs a code that I don't have anywhere (help ticket to Sony Creative.)

This board has been really great so far, and I would recommend it over any of the EVGA x58 series, or the Gigabyte X58A-UD3R board.

The Asus motherboard arrived last Thursday. I spent the better part of Thursday evening, backing up all current projects on and off site and then backing up my personal data. I gathered all my activation codes (or so I thought) and deactivated Adobe and other software installations. Friday, I did a complete teardown of the system removing everything but the PSU and case fans and then repacked the Gigabyte board for shipping RMA.

I installed the Asus motherboard and then started doing a staged build to test components as I went. Late Friday night I had everything in, Win 7 64 Ult installed and I began installing software. Everything has worked perfectly. The 4gig of ram that the EVGA and Gigabyte board identified as bad are working perfectly and I am running at the full 12 GB of ram again. The only hiccups so far have been an old PCi-e sata card that has been intermittent (replacement on the way), and the New Blue FX Sampler that came with my Vegas Pro 9.0 upgrade needs a code that I don't have anywhere (help ticket to Sony Creative.)

This board has been really great so far, and I would recommend it over any of the EVGA x58 series, or the Gigabyte X58A-UD3R board.

Right now I'm still on the Gigabyte motherboard. But after reading on the Web all of the issues of that mobo, I'm currently debating on whether I shall continue using that board or going back to my Intel DX58SO board. I cannot afford to spend $350 just on a new motherboard right now. And it is just over one month since I got the Gigabyte board. The issues with the Intel board including buggy recent BIOS releases and recent BIOS versions that default the BCLK to 135MHz instead of the stock 133MHz led me to stray from Intel boards in recent months.

My last Asus motherboard thus far was a lower-end P35-based P5K (for a Core 2 processor). That board has serious compatibility issues with SATA optical drives: During Windows setup, portions of the procedure hung for a much longer than expected time, resulting in the Windows setup taking more than twice as long as the same procedure took on systems with other motherboards.

For the record, I had my system run stably at 3.8GHz (with the memory running at DDR3-1600 speed and the BCLK set at 200MHz) with the Intel board before I switched to the UD3R board. But after switching to the Gigabyte board, I could not get my system to run reliably past 3.73GHz (Windows 7 crashed on boot with either the CPU at 3.8GHz or the BCLK past 180MHz.)

For the record, I had my system run stably at 3.8GHz (with the memory running at DDR3-1600 speed and the BCLK set at 200MHz) with the Intel board before I switched to the UD3R board. But after switching to the Gigabyte board, I could not get my system to run reliably past 3.73GHz (Windows 7 crashed on boot with either the CPU at 3.8GHz or the BCLK past 180MHz.)

I investigated further, and found that the stock CPU voltage settings differed between the two boards. The biggest reason why I had the Intel DX58SO stable at 3.8 GHz with a CPU core voltage of 1.3V because the default stock CPU core voltage of that board was only 1.15V. While at the same time I had trouble above 3.73 GHz on the Gigabyte because its default core voltage was a relatively high 1.28125V. And there is a fair amount of VDroop on both mobos (for example, I had to set 1.36250V on the Gigabyte to get a true 1.34V).

I did still further investigation on the Gigabyte, and also found the auto-detected Uncore speed quite a bit too high for the selected overclock! For a memory speed of 1520 MHz (3.80/3.99 GHz on the CPU clock speed), I needed to manually set the Uncore speed to 3040 or 3230 MHz. But the default Auto setting wants to set the Uncore speed equal to the CPU core speed! No wonder why I get instability at even moderately overclocked settings with the X58A-UD3R.

Lastly, with a full load of six double-ranked 2GB modules, my CPU's memory controller does not like running at the memory's full DDR3-1600 speed. In fact, I had to keep the memory speed below DDR3-1440 in order to run stably with such a full load.

I will keep playing with the settings until I get the maximum stable combination.

The bottom line for ANY LGA1366 i7 motherboard is: If you for some reason cannot (or are afraid to) tweak the voltages and Uncore and memory speeds and timings manually, you might as well not overclock at all.

Bryan I really wish I saw this thread sooner! I was reading all your troubles with your EVGA board, and then you mentioned Gigabyte and my reaction was "NOOOOOOO!" lol. I always stick with ASUS and Intel. Glad the new board is working out for you. My recent history lesson was don't switch from ATI to NVIDEA.

JS

I always stick with ASUS and Intel.

ASUS I can live with. Intel's only X58 motherboard, on the other hand, is limited in memory expansion capability: It has only four DIMM slots despite triple-channel support. As a result, you're effectively limited to a maximum of 12GB with that board (16GB would force a mixed triple/single-channel memory controller mode, also known as the "Flex" memory controller mode) - rather low when 24GB of RAM still works significantly better than 12GB with Premiere Pro CS5. (In turn, 12GB works significantly better than 6GB in CS5 based on my testing - but even 6GB is acceptable for some tasks in CS5.)

My recent history lesson was don't switch from ATI to NVIDEA.

In my experience, switching from ATi to NVIDIA requires a full reformat and reinstall of Windows. That's not the case when switching from NVIDIA to ATi.

By the way, I think I finally found my system's maximum stable overclock with the Gigabyte board - a speed of just above 3.6GHz (using the 21x turbo multiplier) with a BCLK speed of 175MHz and memory running at DDR3-1400 speed (2:8 memory divider using six 2GB sticks of RAM for a total of 12GB). 178 and 180 MHz BCLK overclocks were Prime95 stable, but crashed once I encoded using AME. At 182MHz BCLK, the system crashed (bluescreened) during Prime95 even with the memory multiplier set at 2:6 (DDR3-1092). I did attempt a 4.0GHz (200MHz BCLK) overclock, but the core temperature nearly got to the thermal overload point within one minute after starting Prime95. In other words, I had gotten a hold of a "mediocre" CPU (as far as the maximum overclock capability is concerned) with a relatively weak IMC (Integrated Memory Controller) since I have experienced this very same behavior with this same motherboard and CPU combo regardless of the amount of RAM installed and the brand or speed of memory used.