Hey All, this is a small attempt at a review since not many people have a retail board and might be interested in buying it but is not sure if its worth the money.
First of all, everything in my sig is retail parts bought from online stores (mostly newegg).
Lets get on with the little review.
Installing the board is just like any other board really, the main concern people have is the 8pin power connector under the heat pipe, its actually really easy to connect, only takes a couple more seconds then if the heat pipe wasnt there. The way screen shots was posted it looked horrable to install, but its really not, the heatpipe is slightly over the socket, but its not dramatic.
The board was a dream for phase change, theres is so much clean room around the cpu socket, you wont need to cut the foam around all the caps. like you normally do, which was nice for once.
The boards default memory voltage is 1.85 (1.88 overvolted) which was not enough for my G.Skill, so be aware of that, swapping a generic stick in and adjusting voltage solved the problem. But i had to disable the cpu fan monitoring to get it to save the voltage change (since im not using a cpu fan)
This board gets very hot, very. When checking stability later, i kept raising voltages to make it stable, turns out it was heat not making it stable, and dropping voltages helped alot, also for any serious overclocking, you will NEED fans, the heatpipes are fine up to about 450FSB or so, after that you need to put some fans over the heat pipes to get stability, i used a 120mm fan blowing over the northbridge, and a 80mm over the PVM area, if your using air cooling you may not have this issue as you would have air movement coming from your CPU fan. Also the board comes with a optional blower type fan that i used over the northbridge, and i used the one that came with my P5WDH and placed it over the heatsink closest to the I/O plate.
This board overvolts every voltage except cpu voltage which is undervolts, most voltages are overvolted .03, example 1.45nb will read 1.48 in bios and windows, but it undervolts cpu by alot, .1 actually, 1.60 set in bios = 1.5 actual, and then it will vdroop another .03 with load on it, so 1.47. Adjusting the voltages didnt have much effect for me, moving them up a slight helped, but moving them up alot made things much worse. Be careful about your voltages and heat buildup.
500 FSB was easy, but more then that takes quite a bit of work messing with voltages and dividers, 1T is also easy to do, but takes a slight bump in memory voltage to get stable.
SLI worked perfect, Ntune allows you to adjust a couple things, but not much, was easier to adjust everything in bios.
The board does do the shutdown thing, but only once, if you go from stock to 349FSB it never does the shutdown thing, once you go over 350 it shutsdown and saves, then after that it will never do it again, however, on a failed overclock, instead of it defaulting to stock settings, it defaults to 350 FSB, and it will also keep your memory voltage the same, so you dont have to keep swapping sticks in and out. Also on a failed overclock, almost always it will hang after you have saved the new bios settings, if you just push the reset button on the board, or your case, it will boot fine and will default to either stock settings or 350 FSB depending on if you had booted before with a FSB over 350. I never had to clear the CMOS, just a reboot.
Also under the CPU socket is clean, theres no parts there to smush. And the asus probe II software was very accurate for all readings which was nice, including cpu temps, almost exactly matching coretemp readings.
SS of 500 FSB
SS of 1T timings
Since i only have a pair of 7800's theres no point in posting 3d mark scores, as they are not as impressive the 8800's
My super pi times for 1M was always in the 11.5s - 12.5s range depending on what i was setting my memory at, which seems about right.
For now, i settled on 4.2ghz @ 1.52v as my 24/7 stable
i played with memory settings for about 3 days, and oddly enough, the best choice was default settings, 4-4-4-5 @DDR 1000, going more would change the divider giving less performace, upping it into the 1200+ range i had to lossen the timings which killed the bandwidth, at 3-3-3-5 1T @ 800 its almost exactly the same bandwidth as 4-4-4-4-5@ 1000 but it required more voltage to make it stable. After finals when i have more time ill mess with memory more and cpu clock speed.
Also, this might be worth mentioning, at one point i had set the 1.2vht voltage to 1.5 (1.55 overvolted) and the computer hated that, both of the ethernet ports stopped working all together, i messed with them for 2 hours but it seemed i killed them, i installed a pci nic card, and soon as i rebooted, they worked again, im guessing it was a IRQ conflict, even though windows said that there was no conflicts. Anyways, they work again now.
So there you go, some info on the board from just a normal person like yourself, for me, it was worth the 400 bucks, you will need to decide if its worth it for you, and i hope this info helps.
Hehe this post was suppose to be about the board, but since everyone is sending me PM's on the CPU, heres the info on the box.
L630A983 10/23/06 pack date..........got it from Newegg last week, shipped from CA
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testing. I hope DFI can make my dreams come true!
what week is that CPU? 
Originally Posted by Venom-Crusher
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