![]() The MSI X38 Diamond with four x16 slots is about the same price as the Formula at £167. Other X38 boards, like the Abit IX38 QuadGT for example is only £150 now. ValueOverall, the two boards are unsurprisingly some of the most expensive on the market but are they worth it? They aren't the silly £200+ numbers that had our knees clacking together, back before X38 launched, and that's not to say people haven't bought £200+ motherboards before - remember the Asus Striker Extreme and to a lesser extent, the Abit IN9-32X MAX? The Extreme is £15-20 more than the Formula SE and the SE is around £5-£10 more than the non-SE version depending on where you shop.Īs far as X38-based boards go, they are both far more expensive than the Gigabyte X38s but they do offer a load more features which we've already discussed. The Extreme worked just fine and like we found with the P5E3, it not only lowers the idle power usage below that of normal but it also slightly overclocks the CPU under load, within a reduced overall power envelope as well. On reinstalling for the stability test above we tried again and got exactly the same outcome. We tried to use the EPU with our Formula but during auto-calibration it constantly kept crashing. After discussing this with Asus this seems to thankfully not be the case - the board you return will attempt to be fixed, otherwise it'll be replaced with an identical model. One of the worries was that because of the short shelf-life of some of the products, RMAing a board will cause you to get back a different one. One part of the enthusiast regime is to fund future investment of parts by selling on current kit - which again means warranty becomes a key factor. ![]() However, for an expensive performance motherboard one part of me wants to cement the investment with a longer warranty, but the other part argues that three years is sufficiently long enough for enthusiasts to have upgraded already. WarrantyAsus gives a usual three year warranty with the boards which, broadly speaking, is about industry standard. Even though it had been stable throughout testing, it certainly was not happy under extended load. We tried a complete OS reinstall and used a dual-core CPU instead of quad-core, but the result was the same. ![]() The Formula was far less reliable - twice, within a couple of hours of starting, the PC had either rebooted or crashed 3DMark06. The Extreme still set itself to 8x400 and was more than happy enough to complete 24 hours of Prime95 Torture test and 3DMark looping with CrossFire running. StabilityFor the Extreme, we dropped in a new Intel QX9770 for a laugh since it landed at our office the other day, even though the board or BIOS even won't ever officially support it (you'll have to buy a whole new board with the X48 chipset for that). For some sheer MHz, we dropped in the QX9650 and managed to get a very decent 4.4GHz out of it. Our quad-core overclocking endeavours also delivered 500MHz FSB speeds with relative ease, but we now needed to use a few "red" voltages. ![]() On both boards, we threw in an E6750 G0 and it went right over 500MHz FSB easily without the need for coaxing, but then our CPU decided to call it a day at just 10MHz more than that. OverclockingThe "Crazy" auto-overclocking feature works great by simply throwing an extra 100MHz on the CPU front side bus and a bit more voltage with just the one setting. ![]()
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