Greg King said:
I don't know if I could personally justify shelling out almost 200 dollars for an AMD board but it does look like a good mobo.
It's true, $200 is a lot to ask for when the CPU costs about the same, or less. But, it is filled to the brim with features, so for those who <em>want</em> AMD, it's a great choice.
Tharic-Nar said:
SATA3 is purely for SSD's and high speed HDD cache.
Agreed, and even then the difference is going to be hard to see, except with synthetic benchmarks. I think we're reaching a point there where an SSD is "too fast"... where we can't tell the difference between 300MB/s and 600MB/s. Of course, that will change once SSD's replace HDD's for storage purposes, at which point the higher speeds <em>would</em> be noticeable, given we'd be copying files all over the place.
Anon said:
You needed 1.6v to reach 3.9GHz?!? This says nothing about the chip or the board, just that this reviewer knows nothing about overclocking. Terrible!
There's a difference between my 3.9GHz and another site's 4.2GHz... mine is stable. I am willing to bet that the majority of 4.0GHz+ overclocks out there are -not- LinX stable, and whether I'm right about using it or not, that's all I care about. If a CPU craps out during a LinX run, which is about as hardcore as it gets, then I don't consider it stable. I -could- have reached a clock higher than 4.0GHz, but what's the point when it you might BSOD during a game or something else?
I'm still willing to believe that our sample is less-than-stellar, so I might hit up AMD for a fresher one. The problem with engineering samples is that they sometimes aren't entirely on par with retail chips. I saw that even with the Core i7-980X, where many people are going well beyond 4.0GHz, our max stable was 4.05GHz.
Greg King said:
Issuing a blanket statement like yours, that the reviewer knows nothing about overclocking, isn't quite fair.
It might not be fair, but what would you expect from someone who's likely never visited the site before, nor read the words around the overclocking screenshot that explained the situation?
If all people want to see are unstable overclocking reports, they're going to have to go elsewhere. I firmly believe that stable is what matters, and if we can't achieve a stable overclock at over 4.0GHz, then we're not going to pretend that we did.