Expensive is NOT always better

timmothy

timmothy

timmothy

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27 Sep 2008
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Thought i better post this to get it off my mind as its got me pretty wound up. Had to RMA my MSI Nforce680i based on nvidias reference board just with a MSI seriel number. Now with that board with its original bios i had my E6600 running at 3400ghz, bios was awesome and had no problems until the dreaded C1 error. Now i got a replacement board being the Asus Striker Extreme 680i, which i thought would be significantly better as the cost was £80 more than my board when new, but the board seems rubbish! with all the fiddling and advice i have seen on here i can not get my cpu stable above 3000ghz, bios is a pain, i mean you need a calculater just to work out what speed your CPU will clock at! NB gets about 10-20 degrees hotter than my old board and does not play nicely with my RAM! all this when the board is supposed to be better, just shows priciest is not always best, if anyone really is still dumb enough to go for 680i board please go for a reference board and dont pay the premium. Never will i buy or take as a replacement an extreme board again, shame on you Asus i always held you in great esteem. Venting over for now:)
 
i know the nforce chipset is awful but what i am saying is Asus charged people a massive price for a board that was inferior to Nvidias reference design!
 
Its both Asus and the nForce chipset thats the problem... Asus's build quality is horrendous of late...

... waits for someone to come along and claim user error...
 
Ya i agree with you mate. Seems like they put this board together with a whole lot of extras without even seeing if it was any better than the competition.
As for the user error, well it could be but i have used all the settings recommended on this site and various other sites, upgraded the bios and still no luck:mad: maybe i just got a duff board but i do highly doubt it as eveyone seems to only have bad things to say about this board. And to all the people that seem to think the newer boards are any better, well look back to two years ago and this forum was raving on about the 680i chipset how well it overclocked and all that rubbish, its the reason i bought one.
 
very very rarely does a significantly more expensive board overclock better. more expensive never means better, it usually means prettier, more blingy and often worse cooling on the board, more slots, sockets and crap that 99% of us don't use and more expensive colours, more brackets with headers on in the box, more cables that are just spares for ones you already have, thicker manuals, bigger boxes, rarely anything actually better though.

the overclocks that 99% of this forum does can easily be done on the cheapest motherboards, same chipset, is the same chipset. Mostly the extra power regulation is simply overkill.

Intel don't really care if Nvidia chipsets are good as they have plenty of their own and Nvidia ones are just extra money for them, while AMD, a long time ago, were reliant on Nvidia for their motherboards, and Via aswell, so it was in their interest to work hard with both Nvidia and Via to get them to make the best chipsets they possible can. With Intel, they simply don't care about Nvidia, no need to make them competitive, cheap, cool or better, leave them to it. SiS, when they were around, made better INtel chipsets than Nvidia do, i think it was the SIS 755 or something spanked Intel for a few months till they finally bought out the 865/875.
 
Drunkenmaster i totally agree with you 100% all i seem to have got for my 'upgrade' is a flashy lcd placed in a pathetic spot(behind the pc on I/O sield) some blingy blue lights and a cooling solution that looks the business but cant compare to nvidias reference board, only decent thing was the seperate soundcard which i do have to admit is nice. As for SIS boards i was secretly a fan of those as none of my mates held them in any esteem, even though my board clocked better than their MSI for half the price:p...as for the post above if your sig is correct than it cant be the same board, this one can go above 330 just dont go much higher or you going to run into problems.From now on i will buy the cheapest model of a chipset as long as it is not Asrock.
 
drunkenmaster said:
very very rarely does a significantly more expensive board overclock better. more expensive never means better, it usually means prettier, more blingy and often worse cooling on the board, more slots, sockets and crap that 99% of us don't use and more expensive colours, more brackets with headers on in the box, more cables that are just spares for ones you already have, thicker manuals, bigger boxes, rarely anything actually better though.



Yep, the law of dminishing returns. Very apparent in motherboards. The more you spend the less you get.
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Well I recall building someone a PC a little while back (few months) and £50 on a mid-range Gigabyte P35 motherboard was sufficient. In fact, the heatsink arrangement was over-the-top and got in the way of processor cooling. So larger heatsinks =! better.
 
skirkham said:
does that work the other way around ?

the less you spend the more you get ? :)
Click to expand...

yes :p

Maybe not,

the fact is the performance or a board comes from the chipset, frankly the chipsets tend to be capable of whatever FSB it is +/- 5% across all those chipsets, however 99.99999% of the time the sweet spot of fsb/ratio's/mem speed/cpu speed comes no where near the fsb limit. Infact, its hard to really push the fsb limit of any board without LN2.

Past the chipset performance, PWM's get prettier sinks but were always designed to work at twice the temperature they get to anyway, the colour of your memory/pci-e slots does not affect their performance. Your cpu overclock is limited 99% by the CPU and 1% by the board, the memory, gpu, and anything else is the same situation.

The only problem I see is the more expensive the boards get, the more crap they put on that you don't need, the more stuff their is to fail.

I had that stupid Gigabyte DQ6 board, the p35 one i think though I forget, fail and is it largely down to the huge, but ultimately useless heatsink ,maybe, it was just poorly designed and I got it because I had store credit from something else and it fit in price wise and nothing else I wanted. The only thing that fitted the price when that died was the Abit IX38 quad gt, fancy, pointless everything and its failing.

The more expensive boards seem to have newer, less tested features, like fancy new PWM regulation that tends to fail more often than the cheaper boards.

Working at a comp delivery place in the past, Gigabytes top end Dual boards a few years back, with the DPS power regulation daughter board, dual bios and dual everything else, needlessly expensive and failed ridiculously often. Half the boards that failed would work when the daughter board was removed and it worked with just the standard power regulation circuitry.

Not only does expensive rarely offer better overclocking, it never offers more performance clock for clock and then tend to fail more frequently, almost every range we would get more rma's on the high end parts while we sold far more of the cheaper boards.
 
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