Massman

I'm pretty excited about this board ... so excited I've already decided to go out and buy a retail sample

GIGABYTE Marketing Hicookie's demos Team.AU's vids The Press More overclocker videos Overclock3D

BIOS - X58A-OC BIOS (F5b): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/X58AOC.F5b - X58A-OC BIOS (F4c): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/X58AOC.F4C - X58A-OC BIOS (F3): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/X58AOC.F3 - X58A-OC BIOS (014): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/X58AOC.014 - X58A-OC BIOS (006): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/X58AOC.006 - X58A-OC BIOS (F1b): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/x58aoc.f1b Drivers - Audio - Lan - Bluetooth - Raid

Thé place to show-off your X58A-OC rig. Bragging rights are yours!

The World’s First Overclocking Motherboard - Designed by Overclockers, for Overclockers The marketing: The truth: Basically, this board is what overclockers have been asking for since years: a board that has none of the fancy Gamer-minded features and all of the high-quality PWM components. Although not being the perfect mainboard (I don't need 7.1 Dolby BIOS beeps), it's a first step in the right direction. Kudos to GIGABYTE for having the balls to do this!

Oops! Overlooked these two: - P67A-C43 (1.9b2): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/E7673IMS.192'>http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/E7673IMS.192 - P67A-C45 (1.9b2): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/E7673IMS.192

Howly!

Bug solved

Shop a croissant in there ... that's more lifelike!

- P8P67 WS Revolution (1103): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/P8P67-WS-REVOLUTION-ASUS-1103.rom

The issue here is how to 'quantify' the rule. 'A lot' countries equals how much countries exactly? As I mentioned before, the current rule isn't perfect but at least it's clear on the NDA part of the topic. If the manufacturer decides it's okay to use the product in public, it's okay for us. You can also continue this reasoning and think about the following: if we would exclude Xpander, would it be okay to allow people to use hacked R3E BIOSes that run 4-Way? If not, what about mods then? What about specific CPU steppings? Like I said before, HWBOT is very open to this discussion (in fact, besides of all the name-calling, I find this a really interesting thread), but any step taken must be a step forward in the 'right' direction. I would much rather see the community put more pressure on manufacturers to open up products for the entire world than for this community to ignore or remove products. In fact, I already see that some people within the manufacturer are more and more aware of this issue. Perhaps, in the future, with the right amount of pressure, we'll see stuff like the ROG Xpander available on the ASUS global site for sale.

That will raise the question of how to define 'available in retail channel'. To make it simple: is it enough for ASUS to make a website showing 1x ROG Expander in stock to be considered 'available'?

Which would be the voting options?

Some drivers didn't co-operate with some GPU-Z versions correctly. So SLI wasn't shown in GPU-Z, although being enabled.

In the past, GPU-Z wasn't detecting SLI in XP OS. It shouldn't be a big problem to separate the SLI from non-SLI runs, though ...

Thanks to Stasio for posting! - P67A-UD3 (F7e): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/p67aud3.f7e - P67A-UD3P (F7f): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/p67aud3p.f7f - P67A-UD3R (F8b): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/p67aud3r.f8b - P67A-UD4 (F8i): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/p67aud4.f8i - P67A-UD5 (F7e): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/P67aud5.f7e - P67A-UD7 (F8f): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/p67aud7.f8f

Oh, nice tip. How's the variance of the benchmark with the same settings? Large or rather small?

Hm. Maybe it's better not to do anything with that picture. Judging by the blue vains popping on his forehead, I think he might get violent :-/

Where are the photoshoppers?

That's what we do: we define "retail" as "whenever the manufacturer decides it's no longer under nda". There are many parameters determining 'retail availability', not of the least importance the region you live in. As far I know, any other definition is either less easy to use or will exclude those who can buy it because some can't buy it. I'm always open for suggestions

X58A-OC is 'released' officially already, I think. Retail availability depends on region ... IIRC it should be available ~ 2 weeks. R3E Black is released as well, I think? Had a long discussion with them about the relevance of NDA/retail/availability. This ROG Expander is prime example that 'retail availability' is a gray area in itself. ASUS says it's retail, but no one can buy it. I'm sure there are 'ways' to buy the board, but it's far from 'retail' as we all define 'retail' :-/

For 'unreleased hardware' we look at what the manufacturer says: NDA = 'unreleased', no NDA = 'okay for results'. We have already pointed out to ASUS that the Expander is not available in retail channels. The response we got was 'yes it is, but only on some places'.

- P67A-GD65 (1.9b1): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/E7681IMS.191'>http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/E7681IMS.191'>http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/E7681IMS.191 - P67A-GD55 (1.9b1): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/E7681IMS.191 - P67A-GD53 (1.9b1): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/E7681IMS.191 - Maximus IV Extreme (1101): http://91.121.148.119/downloads/BIOS/MaximusIV-Extreme-ASUS-1101.ROM

Haha! When I told SoF about this chip today on CeBit, he went completely nuts . Nice benching man!

Haha . 990X is Intel's toughest product