Robilar

Cleaning the Asus TIM was a PITA but I do it with every board I buy (including the Rampage Formula and my EVGA 790i Ultra) so its no more annoying than any other board.

The optional sinks literally take about 10 seconds to switch out. two screws for each, clean the TIM, apply AS5 and you are good to go (clean the TIM is the only time consuming part).

Robilar

Got the new ram.

System booted up on first shot.

I have to flash to bios 0403.

One issue I am having is with my Ideazon merc keyboard. The system will not boot with it plugged it (it works once windows has loaded). I'll figure it out though

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zlojack

Hmmm this is going to be fun!

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Canadian OCN Club
3DMark05 - 34956
3DMark06 - 26295
3DMark Vantage - P23208

Robilar

OK got the keyboard working from boot. Had to reconfigure the USB options in the bios to get it working. The system would hang booting when initializing usb controllers.

I believe its because my ideazon merc stealth keyboard has a built in usb hub.

The attached bios screen is what works. This may be necessary to change with an external usb hub that is left plugged into the system

Also SATA ports 1 and 2 are for speeding hard drive. apparently its a higher speed Raid 0 set of ports. If you plug a single drive into it, it works but is not detected normally in the bios. It also does not see the DVD drive. Moving both my hard drive and dvd to the next set of ports (as I don't have a raid setup) resolved it completely.

One really neat thing about hard drive speeding (assuming it works) is that it looks like you can overclock the sata ports (I'll take a pic to demonstrate). Don't know if this would speed up hard drive access times in raid or not.

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Robilar

Here is an hour of orthos on the new board.

Couple of things to note:

My ambient were between 23-25C inside the case. My cpu temps for each core hovered between 37-38C after an hour of orthos! Thats actually slightly lower than with the rampage formula. It may be that I seated the TRUE slightly better. This is with new TIM as well.

Second, my NB temp is frankly amazing.

It ran between 36-38C for the entire hour. The new aircooling module included is obviously very effective combined with the updated heatpipe system over the rampage formula.

I am running the ram at 1333 mhz for now (7-7-7-20 timings at 1.8V). I also did an hour of memtest before orthos without a single error.

Next step is to test it at 1600mhz. The ram is rated at up to 1.95v. Not sure if it will need it or not.

Next up is to see how high I can get on air with the chip.

I will be creating a thread later about my ideas for water cooling the system and will be hoping for some constructive feedback.

Asus scores again with an excellent board.

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Robilar

0501 bios came out today. Apparently fixes an LLC error (which i don't use). I am downloading and testing.

As this board has dual bios chips, you can actually load a different bios version into each chip and upon booting choose which one to boot from (or you can have two different oc profiles for example)


I also found a download on the website called Sound Blaster X-FI Utility. No idea what its for.

Monst3r

canadacomputers.com

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Robilar

Duh!

The sound Blaster X-FI Utility is the drivers for the sound card included.

Looks like the Asus Rampage Extreme sound card daughter board is an actual Creative Labs X-FI card. Pretty nice for "onboard" sound. Also noticed (and didn't realize why until now) that the optical out had been moved to the daughter board. On the rampage formula, the optical port was where the keyboard out was. On this board, its a discrete separate sound card.

Robilar

?

They don't have it listed yet.

Infonec is selling though.

zlojack

Robilar, I'd love to know a bit more about the included sound card.

If I go for this board, I might sell my current sound card along with my board to help offest the costs, but I'm curious as to the performance of the included card.

__________________
Canadian OCN Club
3DMark05 - 34956
3DMark06 - 26295
3DMark Vantage - P23208