That's fair enough, Core 2 is getting quite long in the tooth now, your troubles with asus really sucks, I've been asus for a while + haven't had any problems, definitely a +1 for the UD7 though, looks like a fantastic board.
LOL I guess all mobo's are a draw of luck & I always get unlucky with asus boards
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The store I bought the asus board from confirmed it as being dead so I wasn't wrong
so got it switched for the msi p67a-gd65 & it is awesome
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I'm not certain but I think intel advise not to go above 1.5v on the ram & think I found out why, when I did put my ram up to 1.6v it also increased the cpu volts from 1.17v to 2.05v.
My ram is 2x2gb ocz platinum 1600mhz 6,8,6,24 1.65v so not rated for these new sandy bridge rigs & I'm running it as 1600mhz 7,8,7,24 1.6v but holy sheet this memory wipes the floor with my previous 900mhz ddr2 big time more than double fast & with good low latency too.
I'm yet to overclock this rig, just been getting things sorted before I go there but I'd be really happy to achieve 4.5ghz on this & with the temps I'm getting on this I see no reason not to get to 4.5 or higher
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Ran some bench marks with my overclocked q9650 & ddr2 so when I've benched this new rig on stock settings & overclocked I'll post my findings comparing the 2
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I'm super impressed with the msi board being rock solid & for having a reset cmos switch that totally works the second it's pressed so now I see gigabyte & msi in the same light, heck msi might be my new favourite as it had 2 extra sata ports & the cost was good & affordable which is a nice bonus so while msi are probably under selling themselves while their name rises to greatness, gigabyte is ramping up the price because of it's already situated good rep I think the winner of these new boards is msi in the premium low end
and asus pffft
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