have a look at how it has been going.. the results are going to surprise u.. it sure surprised me. also look at my conclusion and personal opinions
plus some findings i made....
PS: i'm no screen shot guy much. this kind i dont like to post screens. guys who know me know. there will just be TOO many! i dont like looking at too many. so... i'll just put the scores down!
Test Setup
Intel Core 2 E6550 @ 400x6 2.4ghz
Kingston DDR2 533 flashed 667 running at 1000mhz 5-4-4-8 2T D9 GMH
Asus Blitz Formula 1101 + Maximus Formula 0401
Asus 8600GT @ 540/600
Coolermaster 600W
Here lies what i dont understand. see the pushpin. means u cant take out the heatsinks and pipes cuz u cant take out the push pin. its exactly fitting - means it cant pop up. (apparently i do think that the heatsink is actually 2 parts instead of one. the pwm is one piece and the nb sb one piece. if that is so then there's no prob)
Having a sloping top pwm heatsink means no optional fan?
i ran a set of 10 benchmarks TWICE each time, taking the avg score to be sure it was not a freak score.
Programs | Blitz Score | Maximus Score
1) Super Pi 1M (lower better) | 21.156s | 21.266s
2) Super Pi 8M (lower better) | 4m 4s 313ms | 4m 6s 781ms
3) Sandra Proc Arith (higher better) | ALU- 22226 isse3- 15268 | ALU- 22220 isse3- 15264
4) Sandra Proc MultiMedia (higher better) | issse3 132236 isse2 71636| issse3- 132237 isse2- 71633
5) Sandra Mem Bandwidth (higher better) | INt - 7061 FLoat - 7087 | int - 6695 float - 6708
6) Sandra Mem Latency (lower better) | 70ns | 79ns
7) 3dmark01 (higher better) | 35118 | 34309
8) 3dmark03 (higher better) | 16294 | 15094
9) 3dmark05 (higher better) | 9560 | 8805
10) Company of heros 1024*768 MAX details (higher better) | AVG 49.4 MAX 141.7 Min 24.6| AVG 42.7 MAX 135 Min 21.6
* i took away 06 and pcmark05 due to come problems. now i have my blitz with a quad and i feel its gonna be unfair even if i run with affinity. so i will only take benches that rely mostly on speed and not multi core.
Conclusion and thoughts
First i wanna address why i am running all again. For some reason, i kept getting BSOD about my RAMs when they were known and rated to do 1000 5-4-4-8 at less than 2.2V. I have read around and even have a friend - longsiew who found the board easy to clock. whereas in this case, i found my blitz to clock better and easier.
FSB walls were similiar to the blitz, rams i am testing further as you read this and as i test the remaining benchmarks again. longsiew mentioned abt the board liking d9 gmh memory. as with the blitz, i agree that is true on both boards. HOwever in comparison to the blitz, once again i say, its harder to scale.
Also flashing the BIOS to the later 05 version screwed my clocks to hell. it could not even clock well after i flashed it. from 550fsb to a mere 520! no way! something was wrong and is wrong. i flashed it back to bring u this review first. time allowing i will find out what is wrong.
It is weird that the blitz beats the maximus in all tests, considering the x38 was to be the faster better chipset. i note that the board was cooler overall, but what good is that if performance is not up to par.
Some possibilities some friends and myself came up with are bios, bandwidth - 400fsb not high enough!?, and just the chipset itself - since my bro from Indonesia, AndreX_X has mentioned in vrzone regarding this gigabyte x38-dq6.
all i can say at this moment is that everything is still a mess imo. i will be testing more to find out more also. some issues in the back of my mind are BSODs users have been reporting - i have none except for the rams thing. and i must say, the blitz has the 3 led boot issue, this board has the 3 led bios recovery issue! it justs sits there and dosent recover ur failed overclock! again u have to cut electricity to the system as clr cmos does not work.
i do think that with a more mature bios, the maximus will show its true potential. i could be wrong but i am sure of one thing, the maximus extreme - ddr3 will fly
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