Good review...
I have been using this board for about a week now and so far so good... after I replaced 4 sticks (8 GB) of GSkill RAM with Kingston. I probably needed to increase the voltage to make the GSkill RAM stable but I wanted everything to run stock... this is going to be my main workstation for development, running VMs, video editing, playing games, etc., so I want it to be ultra reliable. With an i860 installed, I was able to transcode a 1.2GB mpeg 2 HD file into a 350KB mp4 in 445 seconds compared to 952 seconds on my old rig powered by a Q6600.
The CPU socket is Foxconn but the retention bracket is LOTES. I don't expect any issues with this build as I do not intend to overclock. For those considering this board, I would recommend checking out the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus HSF. The new version has a better fan attachment system which uses a plastic snap-on instead of wire clips. It makes it much easier to mount the fan... it also enables one to easily slide the fan a little higher to clear the top of a RAM with a tall heatsink.
The only thing negative about this board from my perspective is the lack of any LED indicator that it is powered on when in Windows' Sleep (S3) mode.
I have been using this board for about a week now and so far so good... after I replaced 4 sticks (8 GB) of GSkill RAM with Kingston. I probably needed to increase the voltage to make the GSkill RAM stable but I wanted everything to run stock... this is going to be my main workstation for development, running VMs, video editing, playing games, etc., so I want it to be ultra reliable. With an i860 installed, I was able to transcode a 1.2GB mpeg 2 HD file into a 350KB mp4 in 445 seconds compared to 952 seconds on my old rig powered by a Q6600.
The CPU socket is Foxconn but the retention bracket is LOTES. I don't expect any issues with this build as I do not intend to overclock. For those considering this board, I would recommend checking out the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus HSF. The new version has a better fan attachment system which uses a plastic snap-on instead of wire clips. It makes it much easier to mount the fan... it also enables one to easily slide the fan a little higher to clear the top of a RAM with a tall heatsink.
The only thing negative about this board from my perspective is the lack of any LED indicator that it is powered on when in Windows' Sleep (S3) mode.