Ideal i7 Motherboard for these componants...

[rjk]

if you have to ask what motherboard to get...

then the rampage extreme 3 and UD7 are not for you

my suggestion would be to go for something like the P6X58D-E

a feature rich motherboard with all the latest jazz attatched to it.

i recently got a 980X to 4.8GHz on watercooling using this board. alongside 2000MHz Dominator GT and 3 GTX 480 Graphics cards.

edit*
my bad, i see you got a UD3R

a fine choice and a good alternative to my suggestion.
i handle 50+ of these boards a week and they are really good workhorses. the failure rate on them is minimal and they all overclock fairly well too

 

[TheMightyDude]

Let us know how you get on with the MB TheMightyDude, i see theres a lot having problems with the memory on that board and plzz inform us which bios you get on the board before if u decide to flash to the lastest bios.

Ok, its all arived this morning took me most of the morning backing up stuff.
Had to re organize all the cabling in the case to suit this motherboard, I took my time doing this so I wouldn't make a mistake.

Please make sure you done have any extra motherboard copper fixing risers on the case that is not needed, this will short out your board and may or in most cases will kill your board.
I was luck I noticed that I had an extra mounting screw left over and after removing the board I noticed the extra riser , Now how lucky was I

Was a bit of a pain to setup Windows 7 64bit it just stopped just before the first dialog pops up and all that was dispayed was the pretty background, strange thing was it wasn't locked up or anything due to the mouse pointer was moving, it just wouldn't continue , but that seemed to be down to either using the optimal BIOS settings or where I connected my two Optical drives (DVD Burner, Bluray drive) to Gigabytes SATA2 connections GSATA2_8 and GSATA2_9, moved them to SATA2_2 and SATA2_3 and loaded failsafe settings and all was fine.

My two WD 640 drives are connected to Marvell connectors GSATA3_6 and GSATA3_7 and is using RAID 1 (Mirror).

I have a Hitachi 500GB drive (To be used as a data drive) connected to connections SATA2_0.

The new memory along with my original memory all fitted fine and windows detected them as 12GB total.
I had to use the XMP feature in the bios to detect the correct timings and speed, and it now detects it as it should 8-8-8-24 (1600MHz).

The motherboard came with Bios version F3 and there is version F5 on Gigabytes site.

TBH I havent really noticed any HDD speed increase 5.9 in Windows Experience which i this it was before.

The Coolermaster V8 CPU cooler is more easier to fit on this board, however I still cannot have my side fan fitted to my Antec 1200 case due to it hist the top on the CPU HSF, shame would have liked to have the side fan to pump fresh air onto my Gainward NVidia 295 GTX card.

Overall I think its a rather nice board once its all setup and Windows is installed.

Anyway its now time to install all my applications

Let me know if you need any more information.

 

[up2nogooduk]

Ok, its all arived this morning took me most of the morning backing up stuff.
Had to re organize all the cabling in the case to suit this motherboard, I took my time doing this so I wouldn't make a mistake.

Please make sure you done have any extra motherboard copper fixing risers on the case that is not needed, this will short out your board and may or in most cases will kill your board.
I was luck I noticed that I had an extra mounting screw left over and after removing the board I noticed the extra riser , Now how lucky was I

Was a bit of a pain to setup Windows 7 64bit it just stopped just before the first dialog pops up and all that was dispayed was the pretty background, strange thing was it wasn't locked up or anything due to the mouse pointer was moving, it just wouldn't continue , but that seemed to be down to either using the optimal BIOS settings or where I connected my two Optical drives (DVD Burner, Bluray drive) to Gigabytes SATA2 connections GSATA2_8 and GSATA2_9, moved them to SATA2_2 and SATA2_3 and loaded failsafe settings and all was fine.

My two WD 640 drives are connected to Marvell connectors GSATA3_6 and GSATA3_7 and is using RAID 1 (Mirror).

I have a Hitachi 500GB drive (To be used as a data drive) connected to connections SATA2_0.

The new memory along with my original memory all fitted fine and windows detected them as 12GB total.
I had to use the XMP feature in the bios to detect the correct timings and speed, and it now detects it as it should 8-8-8-24 (1600MHz).

The motherboard came with Bios version F3 and there is version F5 on Gigabytes site.

TBH I havent really noticed any HDD speed increase 5.9 in Windows Experience which i this it was before.

The Coolermaster V8 CPU cooler is more easier to fit on this board, however I still cannot have my side fan fitted to my Antec 1200 case due to it hist the top on the CPU HSF, shame would have liked to have the side fan to pump fresh air onto my Gainward NVidia 295 GTX card.

Overall I think its a rather nice board once its all setup and Windows is installed.

Anyway its now time to install all my applications

Let me know if you need any more information.

Hi mate, how you getting on with this board.. i'm thinking of getting one.. has nice reviews

 

[TheMightyDude]

Hi mate, how you getting on with this board.. i'm thinking of getting one.. has nice reviews

Well I haven't had much time using it as yet due to i am still installing all the software I had on before.

I was hoping to get some speed boost on the drives due to using 2x6Gb/s drives as RAID1, i chose RAID1 so that if one drive dies I dont loos anything.

Word of note its not worth buying 6Gb/s hard drives, you dont get the speed that you pay for, TBH I Companys that make these drives and say they transfer 6Gb per second should get a slapping because its a complete lie.
Your better off buying standard drives or if you wanted to use the 6Gb ports use SSD (Solid State Device)

I have read posts and some reviews where peoples had issues with their hardware and this board, I guess I was lucky I guess.

With all my above hardware I have had no issues so far X Crosses fingers X

What hardware are you going to use?

 

[up2nogooduk]

Well I haven't had much time using it as yet due to i am still installing all the software I had on before.

I was hoping to get some speed boost on the drives due to using 2x6Gb/s drives as RAID1, i chose RAID1 so that if one drive dies I dont loos anything.

Word of note its not worth buying 6Gb/s hard drives, you dont get the speed that you pay for, TBH I Companys that make these drives and say they transfer 6Gb per second should get a slapping because its a complete lie.
Your better off buying standard drives or if you wanted to use the 6Gb ports use SSD (Solid State Device)

I have read posts and some reviews where peoples had issues with their hardware and this board, I guess I was lucky I guess.

With all my above hardware I have had no issues so far X Crosses fingers X

What hardware are you going to use?

i7 920, Corsair XMS3 6GB, Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB SATA-II 32MB,
All in a antec 1200

can you run the 2nd card in pci-e in slot 3 for xfire ?
I was going to get the either of these 2 Asus.
P6X58D-E, Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5.

but for me, the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R kind of won me over. price etc.

Hope she clocks well

 

[redknight333]

I keep finding problems with this board all over place with high-pitch electrical buzzing, memory issues not seeing the full amount you installed, slow speeds on sata3, oh and the south bridge get very hot or was the north bridge anyway its one or the other, and usb3 slowes down crossfire and sli makes your second pci express slot run at 8x because its stealing the band width from the pci express lanes, and thats down to intel not releasing a proper usb3 and sata3 chipset.

 

[up2nogooduk]

I keep finding problems with this board all over place with high-pitch electrical buzzing, memory issues not seeing the full amount you installed, slow speeds on sata3, oh and the south bridge get very hot or was the north bridge anyway its one or the other, and usb3 slowes down crossfire and sli makes your second pci express slot run at 8x because its stealing the band width from the pci express lanes, and thats down to intel not releasing a proper usb3 and sata3 chipset.

Hmmm, you're putting me off lol shall i go P6X58D-E ???
I hate choosing lol

 

[TheMightyDude]

i7 920, Corsair XMS3 6GB, Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB SATA-II 32MB,
All in a antec 1200

can you run the 2nd card in pci-e in slot 3 for xfire ?
I was going to get the either of these 2 Asus.
P6X58D-E, Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5.

but for me, the Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R kind of won me over. price etc.

Hope she clocks well

Well my i7 920 runs fine and runs @ 31°C to 37°C when idle, not checked at full load as yet.
I don't know if there are any issues with the Corsair Mem and the board, what speed are the mem?
Not tried Samsung hard drives before I norm use Hitachi (first time ive used Western Didital drives)
As for the case well my room is freezing now I have this case its a shame I cannot have my side fan fitted

OK, this what the manual says for CrossFire/SLI graphics cards...

(To set up a 2-Way configuration, we recomend installing the graphics cards on the PCIEX16_1 and PCIEX16_2 slots)

You need to then fit the CrossFire/SLI bridge connectors, then plug the display cable into the graphics card on the PCIEX16_1 slot.

So you will have a PCIEX8 on the board between the two slots.
I havent got CrossFire or SLI on this system I only have a dual GPU (Not SLI)

 

[TheMightyDude]

I keep finding problems with this board all over place with high-pitch electrical buzzing, memory issues not seeing the full amount you installed, slow speeds on sata3, oh and the south bridge get very hot or was the north bridge anyway its one or the other, and usb3 slowes down crossfire and sli makes your second pci express slot run at 8x because its stealing the band width from the pci express lanes, and thats down to intel not releasing a proper usb3 and sata3 chipset.

Well this board is very quiet and i don't hear no buzzing or any high pitch noise.
Also remeber this board only uses 9 Motherboard mountings to fit the board to the case where some others use 10, I was lucky and noticed this when I had a screw left over, maybe this is what caused the high pitch buzzing noise they had?

The heat issues are mostly down to being put in an old case with not enough air flow due to not enough fans and cables getting in the way, all my temps are in the lower end of the 30°C apart from one of the cores.
And the Intel® X58 chipset and the Intel® ICH10R chips are rather cool.

Most of the posts with the momory not showing all amount was down to a faulty stick, the other few posts was down to a bent pin on the CPU socket (may of been caused by the users when they fitted the CPU).

However I must agree that my 2 WD 6Gb/s drives in RAID1 are slower that exspected the write speed is slower than my Hitachi 500GB 3Gb/s drives however the reading is a lot faster than them at least twice their speed.
I am sure they will resove this SATA3 issue in a future SATA3 firmware update.

As for the second slot running in x8 it is a x8 slot, read the manual.
Or are you refering to PCIEX16_2 being run at x8 speed?

I haven't noticed any issues with USB3 yet, mindyou I only have my KB and Mouse fitted to them (I know its a waste of a port).

I am using Bios F3 and apart from the SATA3 issue I am having no other issues at all.

Also remember this board has only had 5 bios versions and maybe future updates will fix the sata3 issue.

Also take a look how many people that have had issues with the new ASUS Rampage III board, if you do a search you will find out loads have, and oh look they have had memory issues as well, different to the issue ppl say have had on GB boards but still an issue.
These boards are new and will have issues but these normally get resolved in bios updates.

I am not saying this board is the nuts, I have had better and also had worse, this board does what I brought it to do so I am happy.

Maybe I am just lucky?

 

[redknight333]

Got to be lucky, anyway so this board comes with bios F3, if i go with this board in the near future, i was hoping to use a i7 930, but that cpu needs at least bios F4 to work, so the system won't boot up or will it, not sure how the systems work now days in the lastest boards, is there away to get around the bios update without installing a i7 920 just to get at the bios?

 

[TheMightyDude]

Got to be lucky, anyway so this board comes with bios F3, if i go with this board in the near future, i was hoping to use a i7 930, but that cpu needs at least bios F4 to work, so the system won't boot up or will it, not sure how the systems work now days in the lastest boards, is there away to get around the bios update without installing a i7 920 just to get at the bios?

Not too sure, have you checked on Gigabytes site?

 

[redknight333]

I can't find much about it, but i think the i7 930 will run at a slower speed i think, untill flash new bios, can any confirm this? Anyway hows the new system running, anything that shouldn't be happening like not seeing all your memory in bios and win 7 64bit, BSOD, lockups and so on?

 

[lanzarobbie]

this got some good reviews and a good price its on this week special

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-235-GI

 

[TheMightyDude]

Just letting you know that I am having huge issues with this board, I have never had a board do this before.

It was all working fine but I seem to be having issues shutting down.
When ever I tell Windows to shutdown it would shutdown fine and then after say 3 or so seconds it would just power up again, and when I press the power button to turn it off it goes off fine apart from when I turn it on next and it moans about shutting down wrong or something and says that I am over clocking the voltages when I am not.
I am not the only ones that are having this issues, google these boards with shutting down issues.

I never had this issue whe I raided the drives as Raid1 but then again I didn't use any boot drivers when installing Windows 7 Pro then.
But I did when I re-installed with Raid0 drives.

I may try a few things and start doing some checkings to locate where its going wrong.

I may also of been a bios update issue, as far as i can remember it may of been fine before I flashed the BIOS (was thinking of changing the CPU which needs F4 and above), I even flashed back to F3 that came on my board. but it still does it.

I may also try the Reset CMOS button on the back of the board (not sure when I should press this due to there is no mention of the button in the manual as far as I can see)

They say things happen in threes, Windows wouldn't activate, Diskeeper wouldn't activate and now this.

Anyway as I have said I will try different combination of installing windows to see what is causing this.

 

[TheMightyDude]

I can't find much about it, but i think the i7 930 will run at a slower speed i think, untill flash new bios, can any confirm this? Anyway hows the new system running, anything that shouldn't be happening like not seeing all your memory in bios and win 7 64bit, BSOD, lockups and so on?

Nope Windows sees all my memory, no Blue screens and no lockups.

Only issue that I am having atm is it just won't shut down, loads of people say its a harddrive controller which seems to fit with some event logs that I seem to be getting about degration or something on my hard drives, but i am not too sure its a driver problem, but I could be wrong.

I will get back to you when I have done some more re-installs of windows.

 

[redknight333]

Well this ain't good, i have to say i was hoping for better things from the last we heard from your post, but now, this mobo is like a hot potato. I had a very bad feeling from all the posts i've been reading. And i wouldn't have activated win 7 yet anyway, i always leave that to the last or so day, so to be sure theres nothing wrong with the install. Let us know how you get on.

 

[TheMightyDude]

Well this ain't good, i have to say i was hoping for better things from the last we heard from your post, but now, this mobo is like a hot potato. I had a very bad feeling from all the posts i've been reading. And i wouldn't have activated win 7 yet anyway, i always leave that to the last or so day, so to be sure theres nothing wrong with the install. Let us know how you get on.

Well I normally wait to activate as long as I can, but where I was trying to get this shutdown issue fixed by changing stuff in the BIOS Windows threw a fit and said I wasn't using a Genuine Windows 7 copy which I lost all my 30 days of trial, so I tried to activate so i could continue but it failed, I then read some posts from microsoft showing steps how to reset the hardware changes to the system and that resolved the Genuine issue giving me my 30 days back.

Don't get me wrong this board is fast and great, just this shutdown issue, I have also noticed its not just Gigabyte that are having this issue but some ASUS and one or two others, something todo with the SATA controller drivers or something.

Don't forget these boards are new and will have some teething issues at the start.
They will resolve this issue, well I hope they do, I dont want to return this board and memory have to go back to my Intel DX58SO crappy but stable board with cruddy 6GB of ram where my CPU HSF hits the side of my case

As I have said I will be trying different ways to see which ones cause this shutdown issue and I will post on here the results.

First try of something will be to press that button of the MB (CMOS reset) to see what that does

*** Update ***
Good news so far
After shutting down windows and then pressed the power button for 4 seconds the force off the PC.
I then pressed the clear CMOS button at the back of the case for say 4 seconds (I was very paranoid about doing this due to some people have startup issues after doing this).
Anyway I crossed me fingers and then turned on me PC, went into my bios and had to set my CPU's multiplier back to x20 to give me my 2.667GHz CPU, I als left my memory to use only SPD (NOT XMP) so it was running my 1600MHz mem at only 1066MHz or 1067MHz.

I then enabled all SATA's Intels SATA to RAID (duno why i set it to this), Marvell 6G SATA to AHCI (for advance SATA, NCQ etc), Gigabytes SATA to AHCI (i think), also turned off the onbard audio, I then saved the bios and booted into windows, logged in and then told Windows to shut down and it shutdown which I then crossed my fingers again and it stayed off.

I have just changed the memory to run it at it correct speed of 1600MHz and booted into windows to post this.

I will update this text to report the results.

Alls looking good so far

*** Update ***
Above changes was ok.

Just disabled the Full Screen LOGO Show (I like to see my post screen )
Just disabled Gigabytes SATA Controller (Had nothing connected to it)

I will get back when I have tried these changes.
Oh btw I have all 4 SATA Controllers drivers installed (Intel, Marvel, Gigabyte and JMicron for eSATA), once I have got the BIOS as I want it I will start to remove the Drivers for the the disabled devices and get back to report the results.

*** Update ***
Ok I have just changed Intels Controller to AHCI and shutdown a few times and all seems to work fine.

Soooo, I think this may of been a coruption in the CMOS when I updated the BIOS.
So I think every time you flash the BIOS you should turn off the PC and then clear the CMOS (make sure it has the blue light on, not too sure if it needs to be lit, but mine was and it cleared fine)
Ok, now to uninstall all the non needed drivers etc.

 

[TheMightyDude]

Ok, everything seems fine now I have my systems back as it was before.
I still have this powersaving thing on my CPU where it runs it at a lower speed untill it needs it, I guess this isn't that bad I guess, will even make my CPU last longer

Anyway here are 2 images of the performance of my 2 Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB SATA 6Gbs 64MB Cache (WD6402AAEX) in RAID0, I am not too sure if this is as good as they should be, but it seems that I am getting less than the 3Gb/s it seems that I am getting appox 1.7Gb/s, now it could be down to an issue with Marvells 6Gb SATA controller or just a limit on the drives due to the mechanical limitations of Mechanical Drives, but then again I have seen bench test result that dont even get that far past the 3Gb barrier, the most that I have seen is approx 4.1 Gb/s and the cost around £500 ish.

Anyway my dive results...
[ATTO] and [HT Tune]

Anyhow I still think that I made a great choice in this board.

 

[TheMightyDude]

Ok, I am just letting you all know that I have had this board for a bout a month now and it's still working like a charm and have had no issues.

Well apart from the system not shutting down which was caused by currupt cmos setting and was sorted by doing a clr cmos (button at back) while turned off.

Only issue that I have is my CoolerMaster V8 HSF being too big for my Antec 1200 case (have to remove the side fan) apart from that, no problems what so ever very happy indeed