Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I bought this origianlly knowing it would be good from the beginning - I have been using Asus boards in computers I have been building for the last 5 years now - and they keep getting better.
Quick history of me for a second. I own a small computer company hand building around 8-15 computers a month. I have tried all the brands out there - and the two I have always been proud to work with were Gigabyte , and Asus. Recently alot of my Asus machines have been dominating my Gigabyte built machines on all my performance benchmarks - so I have decided to go with Asus exclusivly - for now at least. I have worked with many MSI , Abit , Evga , Intel , Biostar boards ect. , but none of them lived up to the performance of the new Asus boards out there. I am a major overclocker and performance enthusiast - I test M-boards, CPU's, and video cards to thier absolute limits to see what they are capable of, and for how long - stability is very important. So with that being said - lets get back to the review.
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The motherboard installs nicely , comes with a beautifully designed heat sink for the north and south bridges - if you have a clear side case - the heat sink has a glowing ROP " republic of gamers " light attached to the heatsink glow beautifully all the time even when the board is off.
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Overclocking is amazing on this board - I had a Core2 6700 which is 2.66ghz upto 3.2 stable with a upgraded heatsink and fan on the CPU , had a Core2 6850 which is 3.0ghz upto 3.8 stable using the same heatsink which was a Zalman 9700 " about $50 ".
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I was running the toughest game in the PC world Crysis - and this board overclocked at 3.8, fan cooled ran the game stable for 2 hours no problems - and the CPU load during this game was between 75%-95% on both cores - it also stayed completly stable on the same overclock setting with a cpu benchmark running for 24 hours straight.
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The new nvidia 780 " chipset " drivers allow you to take both lan ports on the board and sort of " SLI " or double them up to give a more stable and high end bandwidth for online gaming, and downloading - I noticed at least a 25% increase on all my internet reaction/ping speed while in this double lan mode - my pings are usually around 20-26ms , and ended up around 8-12ms after the switch to dual mode - very nice addition.
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The PCIx audio card that comes with this motherboar is outstanding , I had it hooked up to a home reciever and watching blu-ray movies - and every sound was amazing - excitingly clear !!!!
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This board is Tri SLI certified - meaning 3 video cards can be hooked up simultaniously. It has 2 PCIx 2.0 ports and a PCIx 16x , which is about the same thing a 2.0 - but is what allows the chipset to respond accordingly to 3 cards installed - gives you a 2.8x or " 280% " performance increase over a single card - the PCIx 2.0 ports are the new big deal - good to have them for future proofing your system. The old SLI motherboards with 2 16x PCIx slots couldnt even handle running 2 video card at full mperformance - the second video card only gave you about a 50% increase in performance - the new 2.0 ports allow full bandwidth giving you a 90%+ increase with the only bottleneck being the CPU but if you have the top CPU you will get near 100% increase.
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This board also supports the new 45nm CPU's - so all the new CPU;s comming out are completly compatible.
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The free game "Company of heroes opposing fronts" is a really nice addtion with this board as well.
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Overall , I am very happy with this boards features and performance - not sure how the other reviewer had heating problems with his northbridge but mine are running very nicely - and I have 3 of them hooked up here.
Hope this review helps - good luck.
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