790i Mobo, which one is best, and which DDR3 module is best too?

skippo

skippo

skippo

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Hi,

This is following off from another post in which I explain that my POS Striker II Formula has finally died – probably for the best! :D

I am thinking that if I want a decent, reliable, quick, SLI, QX9650 CPU supporting motherboard, then I need to consider the 790i chipset mobos.
I have my eye on the Striker II Extreme.
Are there any owners out there that can advise me of my choice?

Also what memory is compatible with this, because I know it will pretty much accept any DDR3 module, but I know that some modules work better than others? I am looking for 2GB at this time due to the mental price of 4GB.

Finally I am aware of the outrageous price and the SATA corruption issues; the latter is going to be fixed apparently.

thanks,
 
I have not come accross the SATA corruption (yet).
It did, with a fresh windows on it, go decidely odd with the SATA dvd, seemingly it was taking the OS about 5 mins to activate it, and hassling it, prior to that, attracted the BSOD.But once I worked out that a fresh windows was not running any better than my old one, I put that back on, and the DVD issue went away.

Had a bit of a time overclocking my 6600 with it, seems to be a bit of an FSB no-go-zone between 350 and 400 or so.

Apart from that it's been good as gold with Corsair DDR3 1600 2x1GB.

However, if you look on the overclocking and cooling forum, for my post about OCing it, you will see that another chap is still have tremendous bother getting it to play nice.
 
thegoonden said:
Had a bit of a time overclocking my 6600 with it, seems to be a bit of an FSB no-go-zone between 350 and 400 or so.

Apart from that it's been good as gold with Corsair DDR3 1600 2x1GB.

However, if you look on the overclocking and cooling forum, for my post about OCing it, you will see that another chap is still have tremendous bother getting it to play nice.
Click to expand...

This doesn't sound too good.

I have been getting all sorts of trouble with BSOD with my S2F, and overclocking - haha - can't even go there are these BSOD occur about 100000% more often.

Are these BSOD and overclocking troubles mainly down to Asus though, or is it the nForce chipsets?
 
Running what it calls 1666, but is really, 416.5 or something, multi 8. Ram is corsait 1600, so I have it in "sync" mode.
I'm having no issues at all with it at the moment, except a rather positive one......
I decided to take the speed down to 1600, because the chip was happier with less power there, and I was happier with less heat blowing at me from the Antec's "rotorblade". So I set it to 1600 and started dropping and dropping and dropping vcore. I have it now at what cpuz calls 2.8v and it's rock solid and cool. The weird bit is, I stuck it back to 1700 for 3.4GHz and it worked, despite not even booting with the same voltage settings previously. A strange one, but I'm not complaining. Settled on 1666 for 3.33GHz in the end, and may even try dropping vcore further to see how cool I can get it.

Worth noting that mine was shipped with bios 0402, which apparently HAS the sata corrution issue, but I've not seen it (yet). I'm not touching the bios until there is a consensus on a definitive official version. There is much conflicting "this one rules, that one sux" nonsense on asus's forums, so I'm sitting tight.

Franco, the other geezer on the "stuck at 3GHz" thread, is still having a bloody hard time with it, using a chip which is a known quantity to him, and despite copying all bar my RAM settings. He is using BIOS 05nn
 
It's a brand new chipset and therefore bound to have teething troubles, a lot of them seemed solved with 601 on the Striker and P04's getting rave reviews on the evga. Following the excellent work the chaps on XS are doing I don't doubt the issues will get resolved soon, I'm itching to get the evga myself but all my cash is going elsewhere at the moment unfortunately...
 
Well if you wanna know if the chipset is worth it....
I beat the highest quad core, single gpu crysis vista score by 2.5 FPS, with just my q6600 and an 8800 GTX OC2 at default clocks.

Don't think the list has been updated yet though.
 
interesting remarks - it appears people are having more luck with this board than people running the Striker II Formula.

Has anyone had any trouble running any of the Creative Audio cards with this - as with my S2F and vista, i get popping when listening to any sound at random times, and also the crysis sound goes mentally crazy!? Maybe the latter problem was my Vista/crysis build though I don't know??

Would anyone out there know how this board runs with a QX9650 (45nm cpus), both at stock and OC'd. Couldn't OC my QX9650 at all with my S2F - just BSOD all the time no matter what I did in the BIOS setup.

thanks again for everyone's comments.
 
Onboard audio here (very good it is though, hell even cubase was willing to use it....right up until it spotted the M-Audio Delta).
The only popping is a pretty unacceptable wallop during reboots, gives my speakers bass reflexes something to do anyway.
 
interesting again...
sounds like i should give this board a shot then!

btw what kind of memory bandwidth are you achieving with your corsair sticks? Also how is 2GB with vista, as I had 4GB (or 3GB), and this I thought was the right size required.
 
What's best to test with and I'll post results later.
Tested it with Sandra and it went off the scale ;)

2GB OK with VIsta actually.

I plan to add another 2 obviously when the price is less crippling.

One thing I noticed on my previous AMD/Asus box, was that going from 2 to 4 GB slowed the machine's response time a little, just lost a little snappiness. Of course the payback was games running much better.
 
don't worry with the bandwidth thing - usually not that indicative of performance anyways. If its off the scale in sandra - :D:D:D

When you say that it's OK, can you tell when playing games like crysis for instance, you are running out of physical memory, and then using the painfully crippling page file??
 
Crysis benching uses around 1200-1300MB, vista will not leave the hard disc alone in general (more likely the indexing service or somehting, I've done nothing at all in terms of tweaking), but yeah there is some big paging for Crysis. However, Vista seems to understand what to swap out better than XP (tell anyone I said a good thing about Vista and I'll deny it), in that running Crysis goes....HUGE THRASH....load game...More thrashing....settle down, play without stalling at all, and no big paging operations....exit, massive thrash.

Crysis is more playable in XP, think the DX10 stuff is a little much for this rig.
It's not lumpy or anyhing in vista, just a bit sluggish.
 
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