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(More customer reviews)Just finished building this out with an i7 920, and am really pleased so far. It's going to be a monster gaming machine, and runs Ubuntu (64 bit) with no issues. On-board RAID card is nice, though you'll want to ditch the stock CPU cooler if you plan on doing any overclocking.
A few things to be aware of:
- There are some issues with component layout. Right under that big heat sink near the chip is where they decided to place both CPU fan and board power sockets. It's a really bad place, as it's hard to get to and places cables near a component known to get hot.
- The audio plug is between the two PCIe slots, which will be a cable routing challenge if you're doing SLI with monster video cards.
- Not a big fan of how they did the 9 SATA ports (10 really, if you count the eSata port on the backplane). Sata 0-5 are run off the Intel southbridge, and SATA 6-7 and 8-9 are run off separate chipsests. SATA 7 is a port in the middle of the board, designed to drive a port on the front of the case. Anyway, you can only RAID each of the chipsets, meaning any big array you build will need to run off 0-5. There are also pauses during start for each chipset, which is annoying.
- A minor annoyance, but this board takes a while to POST (~20s).
Some things I really like:
- There are power, reset, and CMOS reset switches on the board, so you don't need to make case hookups while you debug stuff.
- There a 2-digit LED on the board, which shows error codes for anything wrong during POST, then turns into a CPU temperature monitor.
- Overclocker's dream. Control over all multipliers voltages needed to take your chip well past 4GHz.
My rig:
This board, with i7 920 (modest overclock to 3.5GHz)
Zalman CNPS9900LED Ultra Quiet CPU Cooler, with Arctic Silver 5
CORSAIR XMS3 12GB (6 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
GIGABYTE GV-N275UD-896I GeForce GTX 275 896MB 448-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Video
3 x Western Digital RE3 WD1002FBYS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
(2 running in RAID1, the spare running as a scratch).
COOLER MASTER HAF 922 RC-922M-KKN1-GP Black Steel + Plastic and Mesh Bezel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
Very nice!
Click Here to see more reviews about: EVGA 132-BL-E758-TR x58 SLI Mainboard with Intel LGA 1366 chipset
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