wazzer96

http://en.hardspell.com/doc/showcont.asp?news_id=1466
With QX6850 @ 6X multi for some reason
just a few crumbs - heh
there will be an avalanche of benches soon

eva2000

Yeah it's nearly time for the X38 onslaught

cowie

when you going to get one eva?
i like the way you go about testing or reviewing boards.

moloko

You guys are going to kick my arse for this, but I've had X38 boards for the past 2 weeks

The bad thing - absolutely no time to bench it... up until this weekend. This is a semi good thing though it'll be used for an up-coming competition and I'd prefer to not have a head start in knowing the BIOS, tweaks etc. I'd prefer a level playing field - Guys (Kayl, Dino, James), your boards should arrive some time between this Monday and Wednesday I would imagine (don't quote me directly on this, it's just a guess! ).

Either later today or tomorrow I'll be getting some time with it either on air or water. I'll post what I can here though this could be limited. By the way, it's a GA-X38-DQ6, hopefully should have the P5E Deluxe/P5E3 Deluxe some time this coming week or next.

Out with the old...



In with the new...





And yes, I know, they're crappy photos hahah

Overclocka

Ooohh you've had the board for two weeks, but no time to bench

Wow you sure have some nice gear there Asus blitz extreme Water cooling, Team Xtreem ram and the list goes on

Can't wait to see some benches with these new babies. Also will the new pci-x 2.0 significantly improve the performance of the HD2900XT?

The packaging for the Gigabyte X-38 board looks elegant and simple. So lets just hope these boards perform as expected.

eva2000

Josh yeah see that blitz board with fusion block being properly utilised on H20 :d

cowie, not sure when... i'm in no hurry - rather they make sure there's no bugs or major issues with their X38 boards then send me something that is buggy, especially after hearing about the X38 respin recently

wazzer96

I'm guessing you are the only person on this forum that could have an X38 mobo for two weeks in advance and not even test it

moloko

Work is exceptionally busy at the moment as we've got what feels like a million things going on and not likely to calm down until after Christmas

The TEAM Group DDR3 is very nice memory to bench with. OCZ DDR3-1800 is in the Blitz Extreme but the Blitz is.... ummm, a little sick right now I'll look into it around Thursday or Friday but I'm pretty sure it was a casualty of the APEC overclocking weekend

Had to tie up some loose ends today and get some XBOX 360 playing done (yeah, I know, it sounds weird but it was actually for work ) but should be benching by later this evening when I've got things organised

Yeah George, when I was benching dice on a few processors (E6400, E6700 and QX6850 ES) I found that the NB was being unreliable and heating up quite terribly. To fix the problem, I pulled out some 1/4" tubing I had laying around and hooked it up with a MCP-655 and Black Ice GT Stealth 360 + Noctua fans and I was on average able to get an extra 10-20FSB from the chips and push harder memory dividers due to more stable high NB voltage used.

At first I thought it was a gimmick but it actually does a decent job. Unfortunately I hadn't the equipment on hand for proper temperature measurements with and without the water cooling.

Of the X38 boards I have, I know for sure that one is pre-commercial silicon (last stages ES) but I think the other may be full commercial spin. I'll need to have a closer looks at their box codes.

Unfortunately due to time restrictions there's often a handful of things that I don't get to test

Then there are the things that have annoying little things holding me back from testing them. For example, there are two Opteron 2347 (Barcelona quad core) sitting at work waiting to be benched but we've been waiting on the ECC fully buffered memory to arrive as we only have non-ECC sticks

Here's the X38 pair:



The one on the left I'll be prepping for sub-zero action. My SS is at work at the moment so no weekend SS fun and I've haven't a chance to grab some dice either

On the plus side, I'll get to work and be prepped and ready to throw it under the cascade straight away