Some Thoughts And Findings After Initial Testing.
Aside from the minor annoyances listed below, the T2R performs really well. If you are coming from a board from another manufacturer, such as Asus or Abit, you may find the board's behaviour a little
odd at first, and it took me around 3 days to get into the swing of things. Don't get me wrong, you can have the board up and running in a matter of minutes, or, you can take your time with it, it's just that I always find the latter more rewarding
While I have been testing, I have been keeping an eye (well, a finger) on the onboard cooling. I have found that I didn’t need a fan directly on the NorthBridge heatsink, although the
PWM heatsink did need some airflow, especially when higher
Vcore was used, while the SouthBridge just felt warm to the touch, and didn't require any additional cooling.
Up until yesterday, I had been using air cooling in the form of the Thermalright Ultra Extreme 120, and as you can see from the results above, the X38 is doing rather well, especially considering that my Q6600 G0 is in steady decline
FSB wise.
The
BIOS behaves quite well most of the time, but I have been getting occasional lockups on entering the
BIOS, and I was beginning to think that the curse of "Dead
RAM Whilst Doing a Review" had returned, but I tried another set of
RAM and the problem still persisted.
While on the subject of minor
BIOS niggles, I should mention that at certain
FSB frequencies, SetFSB failed to recognise the board, and sometimes wouldn't even load, yet a drop or rise in the
FSB in the
BIOS fixed that until the next time it decided not to work! - Very strange that one and I have emailed the author of SetFSB to see if he can help, and I will report back here with any findings.
One other "quirk" I found when using SetFSB was that when you get to the absolute limit of your available
FSB and you manage to lockup/restart via the reset switch, the board will sometimes hang with error code 88 on the display. I found that i was unable to do anything when this happened, other than clear the
CMOS.
Recovery From A Bad Overclock.
One thing that can let a board down for me is the way it recovers from a bad overclock (or not, as the case may be). I'm happy to say that most of the time, the T2R is well behaved, and on occasion, when it all goes belly up, you can often recover by hitting the "Insert" key at start-up. If this doesn't work, sometimes the board can go into a restart/shutdown cycle for a minute or two, and then suddenly fire up, and take you to the
BIOS. During the cycling time, hitting keys or the onboard power/reset switches appears to have no effect (at least, not for me).
I have got into the habit of saving my settings regularly, using the
CMOS reloaded feature, and it comes in handy if you have to reset the
CMOS.
The Dreaded C1 Error Appears To Be Gone!
I'm happy to report that the C1 error doesn't happen very often on the T2R (two or three times so far), in fact, the only reason that I have mentioned it, is that it was one of the few downsides to the P35 version, so hopefully, this will be good news for people that are upgrading.
Smart Guardian.
I'm not a fan of Smart Guardian. I find it too big and bulky when doing screenies, and the
CPU temps appear to be different to everything else, and only a single reading for four cores! On a board of this nature, and at this price point, I would like to see something a bit more comprehensive bundled with the board, maybe a
DFI version of Everest for example?
I've gone as far as I can possibly go on air cooling now, so........
Yesterday, I fitted the
LittleDevil Single Stage Phase Unit....stay tuned for the results
Linear Mode
