EVGA X58 motherboard is a disaster!

[Adam Gold]

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

[Bryan Daugherty]

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...

[Randall Leong]

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.

[Bryan Daugherty]

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.

[Bryan Daugherty]

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.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Bryan Daugherty

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.)

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Randall Leong

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.

[John Stakes]

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

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by John Stakes

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.)

Originally Posted by John Stakes

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.