Am I the only one out there waiting to start seeing X58 motherboard reviews here on Bit-Tech? I absolutely love their in-depth analysis and base a lot of my decisions on their expert opinions. I am currently waiting to see what kind of performance improvements are to be had on the RIIE over the P6T Deluxe before making a purchase, unless of course something else entirely offers more in the way of performance and overclocking.... Is it just me or did Christmas come a little early?
They're definitely coming, but it can take us a few weeks to get through a board in a thorough manner... especially if it isn't playing nice (and we've had a few 'not playing nice' moments so far)!
RIIE? We've not got one of those yet sorry. I've got THREE on the go at once but I've been hitting problems left, right and centre and I've killed/bricked three boards already, so things have gone a little slow They are all booked in the calender, with more in the post so don't worry
Any troubles with the P6T Deluxe? I'm waiting for review of release version of the ECS X58B-A which looks to be the sweetspot depending is they get the BIOS sorted.
We've got boards in-house from Asus, MSI, ECS and Intel at the moment. I think Rich was waiting for the Gigabyte X58-DS4 as opposed to the X58-Extreme/DQ6 which is coming a little later afaik - GigaMan should be able to confirm that.
Richard, excellent review of the P6T, however it left me wondering about the frame rate differences between the 280 SLI and the 4870 CF. Why was the 4870 X2 not used instead of 2 4870's, or would this have even made a difference? I was originally looking at getting a single 4870 X2 to start with the 920 on whatever board got the best review. But seeing the 280's in SLI put up almost 16 more fps in Crysis, 47 in Far Cry 2, and 10 in L4D have ,me strongly reconsidering my stance. Even the single 280 outperformed the CF setup. I'm starting to see that Intel SSD coming into my price range by going with a single 280 to start with instead of a 4870 X2...
We used two 4870 1GB graphics cards in CrossFire because we were testing the board's performance with CrossFire enabled, not a single 4870 X2 (which does all of the CrossFire jiggery-pokery on the card itself, meaning there'd be little/no difference). We were going to use dual 4870 X2s, but the performance was rubbish on both boards so we decided to make things simpler and save 4870 X2 CrossFireX performance for another article that I'm working on.
Thanks Tim!.... I am guessing then in your article you will be diving into not only CFX, but also just a single 4870 X2 card versus the lot on X58 boards?...That will pretty much be the deciding factor for me.
Are the new CPU and motherboard worth it? I heard that the i7 isn't too great for gaming is this true?
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/11/03/intel-core-i7-920-945-965-review/1 Try that. We're still trying to work out FarCry 2 performance, Intel claims to have better but we get reproducible results across a range of X58 boards.
Same execution core as Core 2, just a wider design. Unless you're massively multitasking it's not an upgrade we'd recommend.