I had been looking forward to the review of the MSI board. I can understand some OC limitation at the price, but then don't call it a "Platinum" board. I really don't do very much OCing, but always view the ability to reach high overclocks as a sign of a more well engineered board.

Anyway, thanks for the review.

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I was wondering why the Firewire performance is so poor in these reviews:

Firewire 400 gets a best throughput of 230.6Mb/s

It is known that Macs have poor USB 2 performance but look at the Firewire results by Barefeats:

http://www.barefeats.com/usb2.html
http://www.barefeats.com/hard70.html

Without the perfect conditions of a RAM disk and no cacheing they get real world performance of up to:

Firewire 400: 304 Mb/s (31% faster)
Firewire 800: 464 Mb/s (41% faster)

For comparison, Macs are getting lousy USB 2 performance. Intel Macs have improved it but that takes it from around 136Mb/s to 168Mb/s. That's 75% slower.

Given the importance of Firewire in critical multimedia applications and it's likely use for HD video camcorders does this poor performance not warrant a mention?

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To be clearer:

Can we please have some real world figures for USB 2.0, eSATA and Firewire 400/800 transfers?

That should take the form of transfers of:

a) Many small files
b) One large file

under default settings and off an internal 7200 HDD you standardize on. That's what most people actually do when the backup, so that's what we need to see in order to make informed choices. I suspect these data rates you keep publishing are ones we will actually never see.

I suggest, also, that poor Firewire performance in Windows is more important than poor USB on Macs. They always have Firewire built in and tend to it on peripherals, while Windows users often make do with USB until they get into music or video editing when they then find the need for Firewire and hit this poor performance just when they start needing mission critical performance. I'm talking about dropped frames and music latency.

Why is that ignored in all your motherboard reviews?

Thanks.

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Thank you for the effort made in reviewing this product. But -please- re-think you prose style and put less effort into describing your emotional traumas: facts can tell the story without recurring analogies to your prom dates, etc.

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I appreciate a little personality in writing, even in technology reviews. Afterall, this is not a data sheet or user manual. Like it or not, a critical review is a form of literary composition and, IMHO, ought to include some creativity. If you don't like it, then skip to the tables and graphs...all the facts with very little commentary.

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I agree with you, but felt this article far exceeded "a little personality". This is NOT a criticism I've posted before, and maybe I'm just having a bad day? I didn't mean to damn the author, just to suggest that he spread it a bit thinner in the future. OMV....

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I agree with mostlyprudent. Sure there is a bit more personality being shown than normal, but variety is always nice, and it's still a great read.

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Ive been waiting for weeks to buy the Asus boards but i just couldnt bring myself to drop almost 200 dollars for one. I noticed the Msi board on the egg yesterday and i about died when i saw the price.I figured "something must be missing" from this board so i started to hunt for reviews last night. I never expected a review from AT so soon. The timing couldnt have been more perfect. From what im seeing the board is pretty decent for someone who has no desire or intention to pursue high overclocks. I just hope the egg doesnt jack up the prices by the time i order it tommorow.
Hopefully with further bios updates the overclockers can get in on the price advantage but for now they may have to stick with the more expensive offerings.
Good review ... i appreciate it

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Reading the review i feel that you are putting more efforts on the overclocking.. definitely there are some extreme overclockers but in my vicinity i see many people who like to play it safe and doesn't go too overboard and exotic with overclocking.

My Suggestion is that if from now on you can post the benchmark of overclocked Motherboards. In which you overclock all the motherboards to a very reasonable level like if the normal FSB is 266 then overclock it to 300 or 325 (where you don;t have to increase the voltage and lower the memory timing)... and then benchmark them to see how the performance improve with the overclocking in each board. i mean is it linear or some boards show more gains than others... So that the vast number of people who like to keep it safe in overclocking can see which one is going to bring more gains at minimal risk. ( and they should be tested on atleast three different benchmark, one normal multitasking benchmark, one game benchmark and one encoding sort of benchmark.)

The catch here is that all board should be overclocked to same level irrespective of the fact how high they can go...

I think it will be a very nice addition to your already very extensive and perfect review.

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My personal experience is that if the boards maximum overclock is around 50%, long-term you will find that you will have to decrease the overclock in order to maintain stability. I have a couple systems that ran great with a 50% (sometimes more) overclock initially, and then a few months later I had to drop the overclock down to more like 40%. I even have one system now that I can hardly overclock at all, where is it used to hit a 30% overclock without difficulty.

Basically, if you find a board that only offers mediocre overclocking performance initially, it is very unlikely that such a configuration will maintain the maximum overclock over the long haul. If ECS is only able to 345 MHz on the bus right now, in ideal circumstances, realistically you are probably looking at 320-333 bus speed for long-term use. That would be fine with typical motherboards, but just about all of the P965 boards are reaching much higher overclocks than that, many of them with lower prices than ECS, so the board definitely is not "extreme" in any way.

As for looking at motherboard performance had a "standardized" overclock, that sort of defeats the purpose of looking at overclocking. For people that don't care about overclocking, they can just ignore our overclocking results and look at the base performance. In our experience, once users start looking at overclocking, they would much rather have a board that easily overclocks to 333 MHz and can be pushed to much higher overclocks with a bit of effort rather than a board that can barely reach 345 MHz. In the case of the former, you are just about guaranteed to be able to overclock is much as you want (within reason), without having to pull your hair out.

Performance should scale just about linearly with overclocking, but that's only assuming that all of the other variables stay consistent. Unfortunately, that usually doesn't happen, as you get a lot of variation between the boards in terms of what sort of memory timings and speeds they can hit with overclocking. The ECS board starts out with worst timings, and they certainly don't get better as you start overclocking.

Just my take on the situation. Unless you need Intel ViiV support, there's really no reason to consider the ECS board. Better boards are available for less money, including the MSI board.

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