Configuration input please

I would appreciate it if anyone could help me out. I am new to these forums and DS, but they seem great for the price:performance ratio and rep. I'm not a gamer, but love tech. I have read a lot of the recent config. discussions, but still have a lot of specific questions so any input is much appreciated, particularly sincde I can't get through to DS staff on the phone. My forum questions for you knowledgeable elite are regarding the following configurations: 424080 (I want the gulftown because it runs cooler and I will use all the threads at times) and 423425 (I really should stay at 3K to be in budget)

1. Any General suggestions/criticisms of my configurations. I'm  Thinking of asking for "conservative overclock" because my main goals are stability (for work apps) and a lifespan of 4 or more years with 24/7 up time and some up to 18 hr continuous full/near full processor load runs (all threads) of non-attended jobs including simultaneous audio and video processing and transcoding.  I was thinking of asking for at load specs of: max temp <= 70 degrees C and a max voltage <= 1.4V for these goals (what I would do myself). Is it reasonable to make such specific specification requests?

2. Anyone know (or done this) if it possible to have one of the Rampage III BIOSes set to normal processor settings/clocks and the other set to the overclock settings so I can choose which to use based on the work?

3. Anyone know if the Rampage III board support 2 RAID arrays and if so can one be on SATA 6? I plan to add a second RAID array myself.

4. Can I save some cash with Intel 40 GB X-25V SSD until SSds mature some without seeing too much difference. Hey, I'm coming from an old raptor as my OS drive.

5. On config 423425 will the i7 930 really clock to the same as the i7 960 (as some say) with the Noctua NH-D14 or is the 960 likely a higher clockable part on air given my concerns in #1 above?

6. I've been ready to buy for a while, but can't get through to DS sales or tech support even when I leave my number for call back (as directed by their "we’re busy" message) even hours before they close. Are they just busy or are they are having some serious problems or going under?

Thanks all.

I'll leave it to you whether you think you can benefit from the extra threads or not, but do keep in mind that only so many applications actually can.

Don't even bother with fake SATA III boards, and especially don't bother to RAID anything on them, the performance is completely terrible.

And yes, the 40GB Intel SSD performs great and makes a perfect OS/apps drive.

Anywho, your motherboard and case are the biggest too spots to save money on, try this for a base.

Ticket #424485, Price: $2629

processor stress worries me with your needs. even with a great air cooler, what you are looking to do will depend almost completely on the clock speed, which i dont know how comfortable i would be running a 4g overclock for 18hours of load per day for very long.

Originally posted by EyeFixer I wanted a USB III board because I already have a USB III portable HD I.

You can get a PCIe USB 3.0 add on card for extremely cheap.

I also wanted 6Gb/s SATA to stave off obselecence because I have so little time for upgrading motherboards and overclocking these days. I realize despite what the vendors say these technologies probably don't actually have their own discrete chips/signal paths and run off the PCIe bus, but my thinking is that I would rather have the interface built in than not and I am unlikely to saturate the bus without heavy GPU use. Is this thinking all wrong?

That SATA III 6Gb/s is funny, it's basically downright false advertising. Oy vey, where to start. Well for one there are a ton of different implementation methods used:

Some just use a single PCIe 1.1 lane, this gives just 250MB/s bandwidth, worse than even a normal SATA II port which has 300MB/S bandwidth.

Some use a PLX chip to turn four PCIe 1.1 lanes into two 500MB/s PCIe 2.0 lanes, giving 500MB/s to the USB 3.0 chip and 500MB/s to the SATA III chip. Worse yet is that because of overhead data transfer you're only going to be able to use around 400MB/s of that (to be fair overhead also brings normal SATA II lanes down to 250-270MB/s). Worse yet is that the 500MB/s is shared between the two SATA III ports, so if you use both ports you're back down to 250MB/s per port and a RAID array will top out at 400MB/s (like I linked in this thread).

The last and most aggressive method runs the primary PCIe x16 lane in split x8/x8 mode and steals 8 of those PCIe 2.0 lanes leaving only a PCIe x8 lane for the GPU. Each PCIe 2.0 lane is 500MB/s bandwidth. And funny story! The Marvell SATA III chip can only be connected to one PCIe lane at a time, so the USB 3.0 chip gets one lane, the Marvell SATA III chip gets one lane, and then the other 6 go unused. This starting to look familiar? This is just like the last example, the two SATA III ports get to share a 500MB/s lane and max out at 400MB/s after overhead.

Unless you use two PCIe add on cards, in which case the USB 3.0 and SATA III chips give control of all PCIe 2.0 lanes back and just default to single PCIe 1.1 lanes with only 250MB/s bandwidth.

Oh, and icing on the cake time. That Marvell SATA III controller, it sucks something fierce. No TRIM functionality (!), bad overhead, no cache utilization, little or no RAID functionality (only one of the chip models has RAID capability), compatibility issues, and almost no NCQ capability, just to name a few.

The standard Intel SATA II (ICH10R) ports may cap individually at 270MB/s and limit the sequential speeds of upcoming SSDs some but they beat the snot out of the Marvell offering in every other way. Also the maximum bandwidth for the ICH10R as a whole is much higher, Lilim pushes over 800MB/s which is twice what the Marvell chip can manage. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

And the Crucial RealSSD C300, the only SSD currently out with sequential read speeds higher than 270MB/s? Its performance plummets to unacceptable levels without TRIM support, so have fun running that on the TRIMless Marvell SATA III.

Morel of the story: don't waste money on SATA III 6G/b motherboards, they're all a scam.

I also like the dual BIOS in the Rampage III so I could have an overclocked and non overclocked profile which I thought the EVGA Limited couldn't do (although a great board and price). Am I wrong on this too?

No that's something different. A motherboard with a dual BIOS has an actual secondary backup BIOS chip that you can boot from in case you corrupt the primary with a bad BIOS flash or it just has an outright hardware failure.

Most any decent motherboard will have multiple profiles that you can save and load any settings to. This includes all EVGA boards, which I believe have 8 profile save slots. DS will ship you an overclocked rig with the overclock settings saved to one of the profile slots so you can easily switch between it and default stock settings. And you can even freely make some custom mild or intermediate overclock profiles. Though really DS overclocks are already pretty mild to start with, they do warranty the parts with overclock after all.


Edited by Dragoonseal - 23 Jul 2010 at 5:56pm

I really appreciate all the advice and my last choice now is the motherboard. I've been researching boards, but the more I read, try to compare features and get into technical detail (wow complex boards these days) the harder the decision becomes. Can I have some of your thoughts and opinions please? Feel free to include links to sources/articles. I'm less concerned with cost than a board that will last me through lots of upgrades. I'm looking for plenty of future expandability, so I'm thinking newer technology (although I know it's not mature) and lots of PCIe bandwidth. Below is what I am looking for in a motherboard if anyone wants to give me their thoughts. I'm still open to input on other aspects of the build also.  I'm likely going with this build: 426348 (or the i7 970).

1.      A stable, reliable, X58 board that fits the Noctua NH-D14 cooler and overclocks well with multiple profiles to hold the DS overclock, my overclock and stock clock/settings (so at least 2-3 profiles).

2.      Board with 8 SATA connectors and the ability to run 2 separate raid 1 arrays because I know I will add 2 more SATA DVD-RW drives and 2 more 2TB HD right away.

3.      At least 1-2 eSATA connectors. But I guess I can add this with add in card so not a deal breaker.

4.      Plenty of total PCIe bandwidth (see #4-5 below)

5.      Lots of PCIe slots (minimum of >=4-5?) I probably only need 1 x 16 slot because I'll only run 1 video card at a time, but would like a few x8 and x2 (who needs x1?). And 1 or 2 PCI slots also.

6.      Ideally I'd like a board with a decent solution for USB III and SATA III (w/ RAID 1 and TRIM support on SATA III). Is there a board in DS's choices with decent controller chips for these and that gives each reasonable bandwidth, even if it is taken from the PCIe bus (since I won't be using that for heavy graphics bandwidth)? I realize the board chips/solutions are not mature yet, but is this an unreasonable expectation given the technologies' infancies? Should I just put in PCIe add in cards for USB III and SATA III? The ones available not do not seem to add much more bandwidth than the better integrated chips on the better boards, right? It would seem that for adequate bandwidth SATA III and USB III would be on separate x8 add in cards, but I have not seen anything like this for sale.

7.      Decent 5.1 on-board audio (as good as it gets for on-board).

Thanks again.

Thanks Dragoonseal. I know it is a lot of questions. Whenever you can get to it is fine. Below is something else I posted as well. Thanks again.

Edited by EyeFixer - 30 Jul 2010 at 1:25am

Alright, semi condensed summery version. It's all marketing, a big giant sack of lies and false advertising. There is no SATA III 6Gb/s, there is no x16/x16/x16, there is no x16/x16/x16/x16, and there is no spoon.

The unfortunate truth is that every single x58 motherboard all have only 6 SATA ports and 36 lanes of PCIe 2.0, which allow for x16/x16, x16/x8/x8, or x8/x8/x8/x8 configurations (plus one optional x4 or multiple x1 lanes).

Here's a layout of all x58 boards:


That's it, that's all they have to work with, no x58 motherboard has more lanes than this. So why do some boards list x16/x16/x16 or even x/16/x16/x16/x16 lanes? Primarily because they're lying through their teeth. Also because they use one or more nForce 200 chips.

The NF200's claim to fame is that it turns a single x16 lane into two x16 lanes. How does it do this? Magic! And pretty diagrams.



The reality is that the NF200 chips only allow extra GPU to GPU communication bandwidth, but everything is still funneled through the standard two x16 lanes. The thing is GPUs already handle most of their communication through the external SLI bridges and use SLI profiles to minimize any needed communication anyway. In the end it basically does jack for the x58 platform.

Actually, worse is that because the connections have to go through the extra chip there is added latency, which can actually reduce speeds. Worse yet is that the NF200 only works for Nvidia GPUs, it does nothing for ATI GPUs or anything else plugged into a PCIe lane, they still use the standard 36 lanes and have the added latency.

Nuts, that still took too long to write. I'll post the rest later since you're leaving.

Thanks for the detail, and repeating yourself on the SATA issue. I have some other questions for your or anyone. When you are sick of all my questions just tell me to screw off.  I think I finally have gotten it through my thick skull (despite not wanting to). I am stuck with 6 SATA ports . This makes it “a little difficult” to run 5 hard drives (1 SSD OS drive and 2 sets of data drives in raid 1) plus 4 SATA DVD drives. Any ideas how to do this? I do have some great DVD drives in EIDE. Could I use a motherboard with an EIDE connector? Would you have a suggestion for one? Can I use add in cards to add ports (SATA II or SATA III and USB III)? Would I have to use seperate cards for the SATA (espically SATAIII and the USB)? Could I use eSATA on an add in card? Would all or any of this affect my PCIe bandwidth noticable? Is this just creating another version of the same situation you described on the boards themselves. What am I do do? Is there any advantage to some of the “better” (i.e. more expensive) boards versus the EVGA x58 LE? Do some over clock better with their overclocking “features” or is it all hype? I am reading other posts/sites for info, but it is hard to find the details you provide. Thanks again to you or anyone who has  an oppinion on motherboards and these issues.

I often have to make a few DVD's for my students and the more drives I can run to do simultanious burns the fewer runs I have to make.

they do make USB, external DVD drives. there are a ton of USB ports in the rear of most new motherboards.

Edited by justin.kerr - 30 Jul 2010 at 1:44pm

Originally posted by Ch3ssplay3r Looks like dragoon has more info to put in his text file. lol

You underestimate my laziness. I'm not even going to bother to copy/paste that for anyone, I'll just link them straight to this thread.

Yeah you! The person I linked to this thread, I'm talking to you!

If I am going to start a discuaaion/solicit suggestions regarding DS  motherboards currently being offered you guys think I should do it here or start new therad? Or is there one I have missed with my search?

Nah, the Corsair memory has a bit better timings but you'd barely be able to tell the difference even in synthetic benchmarks, and especially not in normal use, so the $180 can be better spent elsewhere.