Custom PC's didn't think much of the Lanparty UT X48-T3R

[gandlers]

The title says it all...

Just got the latest issue of Custom PC and of the three boards they reviewed as Overclocking boards the Lanparty came in third after the Foxcon Blackops with the Asus Rampage Extreme being their favourite.

A little disappointing as I have it's little brother, DFI boards seem to be held in high regard here, have CPC got it wrong???

G

[Kelainefes]

The answer is simple, those reviews are made in less than a week.
Asus and some other brands work way better than DFI when all (or most) of the settings are left on auto, but on the other hand DFI boards shine when you got the time to experiment and tweak.
Otherwise the world overclock record for a Q6600 wouldn't have been made on a DFI board.

[affiliate13]

@ Gandlers
Perhaps but not necessarily,
I read that review very carefully, all i could conclude was that as ever different boards work better with different components than others.
Maybe Clunk or one of the other t3r owners can tell you what their max FSB has been.
CPC reckoned that they couldnt reach 555 with their E6750(?) but the board could work better with later chips, different RAM or BIOS version.
Maybe the board they got wasnt the best, hard to say.

I'm not arguing with their results, they could well be spot on with their conclusion.

@Kelainefes, i never thought of that. Yes in the review they mentioned that they did try tweaking with the extra options on the board but if time was limited then i cant imagine how they could have got the best from it.

[kitfit1]

Originally Posted by Kelainefes

The answer is simple, those reviews are made in less than a week.
Asus and some other brands work way better than DFI when all (or most) of the settings are left on auto, but on the other hand DFI boards shine when you got the time to experiment and tweak.
Otherwise the world overclock record for a Q6600 wouldn't have been made on a DFI board.

Exactly.

Magazine reviews of most hardware is at best hurried, followed by sloppy and lastly corrupt. Lets face it, do you really trust a hack to be able to tell you the best O/C mobo at any given time ?

[gandlers]

I was hoping to get some sort of conspiracy theory about brown envelopes changing hands in dark alleys or the man form asus taking the "hacks" to stringfellows or something along those lines...

G

[Clunk]

I haven't seen the review, someone mentioned it the other day, so can't comment on that.

I do think that the T3RS needs a lot of work and when I left it, I was still struggling to get stable at anywhere over 480FSB.

Since I finished the review, there have been a few BIOS improvements apparently and people are seeing 540-550FSB or so, but I've only seen this with an E8600 and not the older Wolfies.

The most important fix that is needed though, is the overclock recovery.

The other thing to stress though, is that it was rock solid for me at 480x9.5 and 1952Mhz on the memory, so from that perspective, it was pretty good, but as it stood when I finished the review, it was still FSB limited.

[Praz]

Guy's, something to keep in mind about board reviews. It's hard to trust most reviews done by sites/magazines. One of three things usually happen. They don't spend enough time with the board or fully understand the options to properly test the board. Purposely make the board look bad to promote another. Or the most common is to use a BIOS custom built that will never be released to the general public. Review sites that most would place among the top 3 are also guilty of this. It has become common practice.

As shown by what Clunk stated above about the T3RS he is completely honest about the boards he reviews. Unfortunately he is a shrinking minority. I'm not indicating that Custom PC was off-base with their review. We just need to keep in mind that not all reviews may reflect reality in all cases. Good or bad.

[Kelainefes]

Originally Posted by Praz

......Or the most common is to use a BIOS custom built that will never be released to the general public. Review sites that most would place among the top 3 are also guilty of this. It has become common practice.

Custom built BIOSes that grant higher clocks? Why aren't they released to public then?
And i'd have a question, do you know if they (as in the majority of review sites) test their overclocks for stability?
Because from what you can read it looks like they just try to stabilize enough for a bench run and some screenshots.
Maybe DFI boards are not the ones that will get you the maximum clocks, but it looks like that they can run 24/7 stable very high, maybe higher than most others.

[Praz]

There are all kinds of tricks done to the BIOS that would make it useless for general use. A common one is tweaking one strap/divider at the expense of all the others. Disabling PCI lanes, USB and other items that would be required for 24/7 use is another tweak for higher clocks.

Unless screenshots are provided there is really no way of knowing what the reviewer considers stable.

[Chris_Waddle]

I've been a subscriber to Custom PC for a few years now.
Whilst I do enjoy the magazine I have found on several occasions that I disagree with their review of motherboards. In the past they slated the EVGA 680i. I loved that board and got way better results with it than they did. They loved the Striker Extreme, I hated it.
Recently they gave a bad review to the Maximus II Formula. Again, I love this board.

As has been said, they don't have days and days to spend working out the idiosyncrasies of each board as they have to get the issue of the mag out. I've had my Maximus for a few weeks now and am still researching/learning about the bios in order to push my cpu further.

However, on this occasion I find myself agreeing with the review on the DFI. Granted, the version I had was the T2R version, not the T3R version but I had exactly the same issue as them. On my DFI board I could only ever get it to post with an fsb strap of 333. If I tried any other, it failed to post no matter what I changed.
I have to admit, maybe I didn't give it enough time, but I was extremely disappointed in my DFI; especially considering the cost of it.

I have exctly the same fsb strap issue on my friends P5E board, yet my Maxiums II will post on any any fsb strap with exactly the same components.