Recent content by hyperion0101

Interesting review. As the review notes though, this thing costs like 60% more than an MSI Z170 XPower (at ~$300 or so USD) and this board is up to almost $500. It will be next to impossible to justify the board from a price to performance POV. The Gigabyte G1 Gaming Z170 has at least a...

As one other person indicated, just a heads up that coil whine is a huge problem with these cards. A very high percentage seem to be getting problems. Otherwise it's a solid card.

Thanks Kyle for the review. The chipset is good, the memory controller looks like a big upgrade too, but I am worried about the high voltages 4.7 GHz might be what's possible realistically in day to day use I think. I'd guess 1.25 V is what you are going to use in day to day.

It's a pretty good value - not 970 good (Still beats it in price:performance), but a good deal nonetheless. That and spending more tends to get rapidly diminishing returns. I think it's best to wait though and see what AMD has to offer. That and even if AMD doesn't have much (I hope they have...

Sounds like it is an unstable early BIOS issue. These seem to be endemic across the board with so many manufacturers. Hopefully in a few months, it will be stable - MSI has been historically pretty good about updating it's BIOS. For now though, probably all of the refreshed boards are...

Hmm ... it seems like there are a lot of boards still with really immature BIOS/UEFIs shipping. Thanks for the review and for telling it as it is.

It seems like this is a logical step forward from the Rampage IV Extreme Black and the Maximus Extreme boards. They mostly kept things the same and didn't change much - only addition was the M.2 socket. I guess it's a matter of why change a winning formula? How would you rate this against...

As it stands, the big advantage in the 980 is not in its performance (only 10% faster than a 290X and that advantage somewhat disappears in SLI vs 290X Crossfire), but in its low power consumption, which enables a bigger OC headroom. That and your room does not feel like a sauna after a couple...

Looks like it need a few BIOS updates to get up to its potential. Hardware wise, it looks like a pretty good system that might be worth a second look. Interestingly, Asrock went with Fairchild Mosfets this round. MSI did too, although they use 55A Mosfets. There is one huge issue though I...

The reason why it happens is because Crossfire scales better than SLI. Crossfire adds about 70-85% of performance and at times, SLI adds 60-75% performance. If you were to look at 3 way and 4 way configurations, even with the 780Ti faster at single GPU solutions, 4 290X will outperform 4x...

+1 This is one of the reasons why I think HardOCP is one of the top review sites. They are willing to point out the flaws of a product. A product may be outstanding in absolute terms, but other factors like cost should be considered, along with what the competition is doing. Are power...

In absolute terms, this is a pretty decent power supply unit. But when you consider the price, it's a tougher sell, as the review notes, because of what the competition is offering.

So far, it is looking like some of the Z87 boards have had issues with DPC latency. I think that Z97 mostly solved those and X99 doesn't seem to have any issues. Imo, if it is under 150 ms, you should probably be ok. Yeah I'd agree. They've come a long way. My next motherboard is going...

Might be a decent board with the 5820k. To be honest, at the sub-$300 mark, the MSI X99 MPower seems like a stronger offering.

Thanks for the review. It is for the most part a solid board. The second NIC has issues (could perhaps be fixed with a later driver?) and the IO shield issue being a minor flaw. Is there any way to take off the aluminum IO sheld, mount the offset for the top left corner then put the...