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ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution Sneak Peek
- Thread starter FrgMstr
- Start date
No it wouldn't.
Possibly. I honestly doubt it would be much if any better than the Rampage II Extreme in regard to 3-Way SLI performance.
Both will likely be quite comparable. Six in one half a dozen of the other.
Won't have to get a 8 slot case though...but you wouldn't need to with the EVGA or DFI board either.
This is true.
I think im going to steer clear of the evga board, a noticeably high number of people have received doa boards or defective ones. I was planning on getting one but im not in the mood to try my luck. Is there any reason why the p6t6 ws board shoudnt oc as well as the rampage II extreme ?
It is hard to say. The board handles heat well but the nForce 200 MCP does generate a lot of heat. So that is something to be aware of. I have a feeling given the design differences that the Rampage II Extreme may have more overclocking head room but I can't speak to that as the version I used was an older revision and I used an older BIOS as well as 1.90v RAM.
I would agree with what Dan says here. For an extreme overclocker, I wouldn't recommend the P6T6 and would instead suggest the R2E. However, Morry has already proven that 4GHz is possible for the P6T6 and that's good enough for me as I don't need to overclock as [H]ard as those who strive for benchmarking results and always pushing to better their previous result. The legacy free nature of the P6T6 combined with overclocking options in the BIOS and how it passed Kyle's extensive torture testing is what sold me on the board.
My board with a 920 and Dominator RAM should be here tomorrow. I will be shooting for an OC on air of somewhere between 3.5 and 4.0 GHz. I am hoping for 3.8, with HT enabled, prime95 and Linpack stable but anything above 3.5 on air would suit me just fine. I'm going to bench for stability, not for numbers, and then get on with my work and life.
The oc ability of the board is the only thing that has me worried, my goal is a 4.0ghz clock atleast. I already have the cooling ablility and would hate to me mb limited. I would love to get the r2e but it wont work with my tj07 seeing as im using 3 cardsw/ stock coolers.
I got my parts yesterday and built. I think I like the EVGA board I have at work better than the P6T6 because the EVGA board has the diagnostic display and the reset/power buttons on the board, rather than on a daughter board.
The Asus board has SAS, which is a big plus for me. On the other hand, using SAS seems to mean that you can't use the SATA ports as RAID. I bought a wider RAID card to accommodate for this, but it's pretty annoying that I need a $500 card to make up for a deficiency on a $350 motherboard.
I'm not an overclocker, though I think I have my i7-965 running the memory at 1333 MHz instead of 1066 MHz. I only have a 7900 GTX at the moment, but the machine is a screamer.
The Asus board has SAS, which is a big plus for me. On the other hand, using SAS seems to mean that you can't use the SATA ports as RAID. I bought a wider RAID card to accommodate for this, but it's pretty annoying that I need a $500 card to make up for a deficiency on a $350 motherboard.
I'm not an overclocker, though I think I have my i7-965 running the memory at 1333 MHz instead of 1066 MHz. I only have a 7900 GTX at the moment, but the machine is a screamer.
Awesome Mike, I'm still waiting for my board to arrive (having some issues with NewEgg) but the rest of the parts are here. Thankfully, your concerns do not impact me but they are duly noted. I kind of like the idea of a separate diagnostic board and, if I need RAID, I don't want to run onboard (fake)RAID from any vendor. I'd much rather have a dedicated RAID controller.
Yeah, I did, too; the RAID card is doing all the SATA RAID work. The optical drives are just on the on-board controller, since they're of course not RAID.
I spent $650 on a couple of 300 gig SAS drives to put RAID1 on the motherboard. I figured I'd use this to run my OS, and be golden. It's really nice having RAID1 for the OS drives; no worries at all.
This board stinks, though. While fooling around with the rest of the build, I bumped one of the power cables. One of the two drives went down, which of course put the array in NON-OPTIMAL mode. So I went into the BIOS to try and rebuild it ... and I can't find an option to do so!
After re-installing Windows, I purposefully reproduced the experiment. The machine blue screened when I unplugged power from one of the drives. This means that the code that handles the errors in the RAID1 array doesn't work, and just crashes.
It's pretty disappointing. Maybe I'll buy a couple of velociraptors and run them on the SATA ports, either on the motherboard or on my Areca card, and then use the SAS drives as fast storage.
I spent $650 on a couple of 300 gig SAS drives to put RAID1 on the motherboard. I figured I'd use this to run my OS, and be golden. It's really nice having RAID1 for the OS drives; no worries at all.
This board stinks, though. While fooling around with the rest of the build, I bumped one of the power cables. One of the two drives went down, which of course put the array in NON-OPTIMAL mode. So I went into the BIOS to try and rebuild it ... and I can't find an option to do so!
After re-installing Windows, I purposefully reproduced the experiment. The machine blue screened when I unplugged power from one of the drives. This means that the code that handles the errors in the RAID1 array doesn't work, and just crashes.
It's pretty disappointing. Maybe I'll buy a couple of velociraptors and run them on the SATA ports, either on the motherboard or on my Areca card, and then use the SAS drives as fast storage.
Hopefully the BIOS will add a rebuild option later for SAS RAID 
For a supposedly workstation-level mainboard it has glaring errors, not even mentioning the SLI issues. Methinks Asus should have tested this mainboard a bit more before releasing it.
For a supposedly workstation-level mainboard it has glaring errors, not even mentioning the SLI issues. Methinks Asus should have tested this mainboard a bit more before releasing it.
Laughably, the BIOS has spare drive management. I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do with a spare when there's only two ports under control of the BIOS... But if I can't rebuild, what's the point of RAID1 ?Hopefully the BIOS will add a rebuild option later for SAS RAID
Supposedly there is SAS expander for this and the other Asus X58 boards, haven't been able to find it for sale anywhere though.
Yeah, I asked about it earlier in the thread. I can't find reference to it outside of the Asus spec sheets. Perhaps its an option only available to OEM partners.
I think you can use it with something like this: http://cgi.ebay.com/Intel-SAS-Expan...temQQimsxZ20090105?IMSfp=TL090105122001r33953
Having problems finding just an internal SAS expander card that only takes two SAS lanes. Most seem to be the mini-port type.
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Woot! I ended up finding the Marvell CLI utility, which lets me inspect, edit, update, and reconfigure the logica RAID volumes, HBA, and the physical drives. I'm in a much better mood.
I'm glad, too, because the machine just screams. The Fujitsu drives, in RAID1 with the on-board controller, have a 5.8 ms seek time in HDTune, and very respectable transfer rates. The drives are simply wicked fast. The Areca-1220 hosted drives are awesome, and having eight cores is a great motivation to start parallelizing all my code.
I went from figuring out what I could RMA to salvage the build to being completely satisfied. Sheesh! My only remaining complaint is that the boot device configuration seems a little flakey. If a device is moved or disappears, the BIOS seems to completely reset the boot device selection priority list, which means that the next boot probably isn't right. Hopefully after I get everything stabilized, this won't matter at all.
I'm glad, too, because the machine just screams. The Fujitsu drives, in RAID1 with the on-board controller, have a 5.8 ms seek time in HDTune, and very respectable transfer rates. The drives are simply wicked fast. The Areca-1220 hosted drives are awesome, and having eight cores is a great motivation to start parallelizing all my code.
I went from figuring out what I could RMA to salvage the build to being completely satisfied. Sheesh! My only remaining complaint is that the boot device configuration seems a little flakey. If a device is moved or disappears, the BIOS seems to completely reset the boot device selection priority list, which means that the next boot probably isn't right. Hopefully after I get everything stabilized, this won't matter at all.