**The Official J&W JW-X48D2-Extreme Thread**
- Thread starter WJA96
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I should probably point out that at the moment I am working in Milton Keynes, Sheffield and Valencia in Spain, but the PCs are in Thetford in Norfolk, so I only really get to play at the weekends, and not all weekend at that as I don't get home until late, and when I do the wife and cat seem to think they deserve attention for some reason.
On top of that, I have had the 4850's this weekend, and the 4870's next weekend, and I have another DDR3 Intel motherboard that I'm testing for someone at the moment, so the X48's are a bit 'yesterday' in my house. I've totally missed out on P45, so I'm certain it's a great board, but if you want a good all-rounder at the moment, I'd buy either the DFI or J&W X48's simply because of the extra bandwidth on the graphics slots and the fact that it does look like 2 x 4850 in CrossFireX will beat one X4870 on it's own.
Bottom line - if you want a specific benchmark run on the J&W, or you want to know how it compares back to back with the LT DFI or the X48-DQ6, then I'm quite happy to help out, but I'm not interested in going to the outer limits on hardware testing. I want to sell some of this stuff on after I've played with it, and no-one's going to buy it if it's degraded by high voltages.
Sorry.
And just to re-iterate - there were no issues with the ICH9 on the P35 after the V1.3b BIOS. There are no issues with the ICH9R on the X48 as far as I can tell, and I've had the retail board running folding@home 24/7 since I got it.
On top of that, I have had the 4850's this weekend, and the 4870's next weekend, and I have another DDR3 Intel motherboard that I'm testing for someone at the moment, so the X48's are a bit 'yesterday' in my house. I've totally missed out on P45, so I'm certain it's a great board, but if you want a good all-rounder at the moment, I'd buy either the DFI or J&W X48's simply because of the extra bandwidth on the graphics slots and the fact that it does look like 2 x 4850 in CrossFireX will beat one X4870 on it's own.
Bottom line - if you want a specific benchmark run on the J&W, or you want to know how it compares back to back with the LT DFI or the X48-DQ6, then I'm quite happy to help out, but I'm not interested in going to the outer limits on hardware testing. I want to sell some of this stuff on after I've played with it, and no-one's going to buy it if it's degraded by high voltages.
Sorry.
And just to re-iterate - there were no issues with the ICH9 on the P35 after the V1.3b BIOS. There are no issues with the ICH9R on the X48 as far as I can tell, and I've had the retail board running folding@home 24/7 since I got it.
So, what you're saying is my feedback isn't honest? Or reliable? You won't be at all surprised to hear that I take great exception to that.
In theory, it should be as simple as setting the strap to 400MHz, set the CPU Clock to Manual, and key in [400]. The 400MHz strap should set everything else required to run the CPU at 400MHz comfortably. Depending on your current CPU voltage, you might need to tweak it up a touch, and the RAM, if that doesn't run at 1.85V by default.
You can turn off speedstep, but with such a small overclock, you'll probably find you don't need to, unless your E6750 is especially volt-hungry.
If it sits inside the square box surrounding the CPU socket, then it will fit, and probably be quite a good choice with the horizontal loop cooler on the northbridge. The stock Intel fan is 80mm with another 1cm on each side for the lugs. I think it should fit fine.
The RMA is with OcUK, as the agents for J&W. I had to RMA my P35 board and the replacement came back within a week.
There has already been one BIOS update, but if you look at the P35 thread you will see that they reacted within a week to the initial criticism, so I think the answer to that is that BIOS updates come out very quicly after issues are raised. J&W are represented on here by Ken Wong (kenofstephen) who is their Product Marketing Manager, and he has direct access to the Techies and if you ask him a question you usually get an answer back very quickly indeed. As far as I know, none of the other motherboard manufacturers offer the kind of support Ken does on here, and if they do have a representative, they're not dedicated to the UK market in the way that Ken is.
As regards updates, the board will boot from a USB stick formatted as a DOS drive a la Abit, or they offer a windows or DOS based flash utility. The board features a very neat dual BIOS where, if you mess up the BIOS flash, you move a jumper on the board and the system boots from the previous BIOS, which is then automatically flashed across to the original BIOS chip, allowing you to try again. The primary BIOS chip is also socketed, rather than soldered.
The external CMOS reset switch is also much neater than the DFI's hold down the reset, then hold down the reset and power together, then release the reset button method of resetting the CMOS.
I can't talk about the Rampage, as I haven't got one, but I do have an LT X48-T2R and it's a fabulous board, but the extra options in the BIOS actually make it quite harder to overclock safely. Some of the options in there will quite happily fry a 45nm CPU if the user doesn't know what (s)he's doing. J&W have colour coded their BIOS options red/yellow/green for dangerous/risky/safe. That may or may not be something that concerns you, but for novice overclockers with 45nm CPUs, I think it's useful. The other issue with the DFI is the heat generated by the Northbridge. Although DFI supply a 'Thermalright designed' northbridge cooler, the Northbridge and PWM run very hot indeed. I actually have mine water-cooled to get it stable at big overclocks. The design of the chipset cooling on the J&W looks daft, I'll grant you, but it's much more effective than the DFI cooler.
One year, I believe, and I don't think it would be transferable, no. But someone from the store would have to confirm that.
Yes. Bit of a design flaw there...
OcUK should give 5% of the profit to you
Oh, I get much more than that.
And people have to buy some boards for me to get a cut of the profits so BUY NOW!
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9/10 because the Northbridge cooler blocks the first PCIe slot, and stops the use of bigger heatpipe coolers in certain orientations. It loses a mark in my book simply because it's £160.
As we are both aware, people like us make or break these motherboards. If we say it's a good board, the resale will be high. If we say it's duff, the resale will be shocking. That's why no-one buys MSI, even though it's a well known brand, the performance isn't good, so the resale is poor.
On this board, the performance is good, so the recommendations will be good, and hence so will the resale.
It's quite low - I measured 0.02V from idle to full load with a Q6600 at 1.55V in the BIOS. There is no loadline calibration, but it doesn't really need it. ASUS only released that feature because it had such a disastrous time with it's NForce 650i and P965 boards - so the P35 boards had this dynamic vDroop correction.
I'm running a Q9450, ballistix (at the moment) and two HD4850's with 4870's in boxes ready to be installed for testing. I have AC passive coolers on my graphics cards and they're fine.
Water cooled I'm afraid. I usually use a Thermalright HR-01 for my initial out-of-case testing, and that 'just' fits.
The Ninja is 110mm wide if my google-skills are any good, and the HR-01 is also 110mm wide, but the Ninja is that wide from much lower down, so I would have to guess no, it won't fit a Ninja.
Sorry.
Resident J&W nut job is what he should be made.
Noted as a potential trouble maker....
Or maybe a Don, both are fine by me.
You may not actually realise this, but Don's actually have to work. They have to tidy up threads, track down RTM posts, delete SPAM posts etc. The fun bit (wielding the ban-hammer and hanging out in the Don's Lounge forum laughing at the things people are asking for in the Product Suggestions forum) is only a tiny part of it. As I am far too busy avoiding doing any real work, spending too much on hardware, posting SPAM untidily and RTMing anything posted by Easyrider
p) I couldn't possibly be a Don, even if I wanted to. Which I don't. Thanks for the sentiment though. It's nice to be appreciated.
They are the standard Intel ones that everyone is using on the X48 boards, so they are as good or bad as everyone elses. I haven't had a lot of issues, but the install routine for the Viista drivers isn't automated like some other manufacturers. That's actually quite a good thing though, in my opinion.
If you're going to get a GTX280 (and I think you'd be off your head if you did), then a P45 board is a lot cheaper. The one real trick of the X38 and X48 boards is the dual PCIe 2.0 16x slots. So they're the ones to go for with Crossfire.
All the X48 boards are pretty similar, what you get with J&W is proper customer service from kenofstephen, a fast response to issues raised and lots of friendly banter in the official thread. It's quite a small club, but we're actively recruiting.
For RAM, G.Skill PC8000 works well with no voltage adjustment at all, and it'll take even the Q9550 well over 4GHz without being out of specification. I would definitely get 8Gb if you can stretch to it as it is the faster set-up with the 64-bit OS and there don't seem to be any drawbacks to running 4 sticks vs. running 2 sticks.
It will, but be aware that overclocked Quad-cores run quite hot, and it'll be running 100% most of the time, at which point it's not the quietest cooler in the world. If you're not overclocking hard, then it'll be nice and quiet. Coolers that blow down on the board as great with this board eg. TT Big Typhoon.
It has 2 16x PCIe 2.0 slots and it has the highest specification Intel X48 chipset.
Are you the guy who was expecting the OcUK Sub Zero to be a Tec cooler for £120? It's a name that OcUK have given the board.
The real name of the board is the J&W JW-X48D2-Extreme. Instead of just calling the board what everyone else in the world calls it, OcUK appear to have given people who are easily confused another opportunity to give themselves a headache. Imagine Ferrari have never sold cars in the UK before, and they sell them only through OcUK, and OcUK label them as OcUK Value Supercars. It's a bit like that. Actually, it's exactly like that.
If you tell me which 'budget' board you have in mind as a comparison, I'll try and explain why it's cheaper. Much of the cost is in the chipset though.
There are about 4 settings that could be turning this off - manually setting the multiplier will always lock it out I think, and also turning off C1E can have an effect. Turning off speedstep (obviously). There are two places you can fix the multiplier (In the CPU settings and the JustWoot!) so check it's not been forced on by mistake.
Have you adjusted anything else at all?
On the RAM, set the timings as tight as possible, and you want the performance level as low as is stable. What kind of Dominator is it?
Have you adjusted anything else at all?
On the RAM, set the timings as tight as possible, and you want the performance level as low as is stable. What kind of Dominator is it?