Greetings fellow members of the build it and fixit club. Yesterday I received an email from the EVGA folks inviting me to register for a two week test drive of their new X58 special ops mobo. Honestly, I missed this one so I drove in web to see what gives. What really grabbed me was MSRP of $450+. Whoa, I though that seems pricey since there's a lot of really nice X58 mobos selling at the $300 price point. I'd really like to here fellow club members thoughts on this one,is EVGA and ASUS in $400+ dreamland.
I've been nursing my 2+ year old Q6600/NF680i w/8GB along awaiting Chipzilla to release the 32nm Nehelem or better yet the 6 core Clarksfield. As an avid multimedia and multi-tasker I often keeping my Q6600 at 80-90% for hours at a time encoding and transcoding several video at once, while keeping busy with other jobs. Currently my HDD's go to P: and the baby is 500GB, yes 4 drive RAID for XP64, and my ODD's are XYZ my Xclio A380 is bursting at he seams. My two pet dash's love my PC since it's a nice 570 watt, with P3 line monitor, space heater. Like said on TOOL TIME "what this tool needs is MORE POWER" and I hope the 32nm cores will do that. So have any of club members hear what the release dates are? I'm worried that Chipzilla's lagging sales might put the brakes on new releases.
BTW, I've been fixing computers since 1965, starting out on a Burrough's B5500 and was nicknamed "Handy Dan" by the computer operators. During nightly PM's I had a IBM 3070 all to myself before retiring and have zip tolerance for slow computers and even less for resource hogging software, are you listening BG. Bye for now GEEK1945
You've kept a 680i board going for two years? Good job man, that's no mean feat. 32nm will probably be a while yet, at least until the Summer, possibly longer. Even so, for video encodes, an i7 will eat even an overclocked Q6600 for breakfast.
I'm not going to take credit for the entire two years, because EVGA had to RMA 4 boards. Of course replacement labor is NOT COVERED and a rework is twice the work! After board number 3 I had a lengthy call with EVGA's head service tech. I mentioned that who tests these RMA'd boards must be blind since one of the posting displays had bad segments. He got the point after that and must have personally verified the replacement. I was being to believe their testing was done by someone who had just graduated from 'Would you like fries with that?'
On two of the boards the Northbridge was going south due to overheating, likely due to the excellent terminal properties of Nvidia's cheapo heatsink tape. It was easy to spot with the cool air from a hair dryer. I ran out of my supply of freeze-it years ago when it was R-12, I bet I did my part eating up the ozone layer.
On the last RMA I took off all the 680i's heatsinks and "did the job right" and haven't had any problems since. BTW I have an idea that the new EVGA black ops board likely has the same cheapo heatsink tape. It gives a new meaning to 'if you have a bad idea stick with it and hope it goes away'. I told Nvidia about it but likely my email was deleted and hoping I'd go away.
I've seen this before most engineers refuse to admit their mistakes and try to razzel dazzel you with their mathematical calculation. I reply; ok smart axx I've done integral calculus too but this overheating component isn't impressed with either of us so let's do some out of the box engineering and get it fixed! Usually, they return to their office and brag about showing an ET how things are done right.
Over the years I have found that most electronics are just like the humans who designed them when it comes to temperature. If you're too hot you output decreases and finally die, and if you're too cold you work harder to stay warm or freeze solid. Gee whiz wonder if that's in some circuit design book?
Sorry for the delayed reply but my spouse thinks I'm the HELP BUTTON
since I built her a PC. She calls me every time a dialog pops up on her screen and promptly forgets it and I know better than saying 'start reading what is said' after 40 years. 10-4 from Geek1945
Haha, 4 RMAed boards, that's a bit more like it! I don't know much about EVGA's support, but their boards don't inspire me with confidence, and on top of that, the nforce 6 is just a really terrible chipset.
The thermal paste is an issue with most boards out there realy, Asus are particularly bad for it.
Intel plans to start producing their 32nm processors later this year. The first ones will be 2 core and for mainstream systems. The 6 core processors wont be out until sometime in 2010.
If I am gonna pay $200 for a mainboard, I expect at least 6 slots...preferably 7. No way I would pay more than twice than for a board with only 5 slots!
...For that matter, I could get a nice server board with 6-7 slots, 2 sockets, and 12 dimm slots for less than $450...and the PCI slots will be PCI-X!
Also, they do not seem to know their own specs...here is a quote:
"PCIE Slot 4 x PCIe x8/x16, 1 x PCIe x1, 1 x PCI" - However, the board only has 4 PCIe slots, no 1x PCIe slot.
The 9-sata raid is a nice touch, but it is just software raid; not worth the insane price.
