Best X79 motherboard?

Xeth said:
All memory bandwidth intensive "professional" computing (that I know of - rendering, encoding, simulation) are being done on (or quickly being moved to) GPUs these days. And those GPUs sit in racks, not under the desk (and guess what, the GPUs have ECC! :p). Standard memory performance is simply not an issue for these types of applications.

My point was that gaming is the only use I can think of where it's important to have a fast machine sitting next to you, and the X58's triple channel bandwidth was already overkill there. Even if you run renders or whatnot on your desktop, having the ECC insurance against a wasted overnight run is way more important than finishing an hour earlier.
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That's debatable. It's hard to really determine how many crashes ECC really saves you from.
 
ecc made a difference back in the day. but with today technology advances in ram. ecc isnt necessary as it once was even in data centers. Sure you will have the old school crowd that will swear by ECC.

in my opinion (which doesn't mean much) but i wouldn't waste money on ECC ram. for home use or professional use.

never once in my IT career or home use have i ever said "well damn i should of had ECC"
 
Filter said:
ecc made a difference back in the day. but with today technology advances in ram. ecc isnt necessary as it once was even in data centers. Sure you will have the old school crowd that will swear by ECC.

in my opinion (which doesn't mean much) but i wouldn't waste money on ECC ram. for home use or professional use.

never once in my IT career or home use have i ever said "well damn i should of had ECC"
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+1 to that...
 
Dan_D said:
The fact that in practice none of that means a damned thing? How many times have you opened a file to find it corrupted and your hard disk drive wasn't actually screwed up? How much data loss have you seen on a home or gaming machine without ECC memory? I've seen none that I could definitely attribute to or even remotely believe it was to blame. Usually any data corruption or data loss can easily be attributed to other factors. Faulty hardware, user error, bad overclocks, hard drive failure, etc. How many times have you seen a lock up or crash that could definitely be prevented with the use of ECC memory? I'm going to wager that the answer is "no" or "none" to all of these questions. It isn't as if having ECC RAM makes lock ups or crashes impossible. I've seen hundreds of machines in data centers experience stability problems for one reason or another and ECC RAM didn't really seem to mitigate that.

This is what happens when people read a statistic and can't fathom it's meaning in the real-world and jump to conclusions which aren't supported by any real world evidence. Just some random statistics that may in fact be true, but are taken out of context. For example; you'll typically only find ECC RAM used in large scales in datacenters. In those situations one may experience data corruption when a system goes down and the SCSI or SAS controller has no onboard battery backup, and data in the controller memory is corrupted or lost. ECC memory doesn't change this. Corrupt data on a disk may not crash the system when read into ECC memory, but that's about the most it can really do for you in practical application.

Point to statistics all you like, but it doesn't change the fact that for most people and in most situations, the use of ECC memory changes nothing.
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Exactly and what constitutes an "error" in this case or this "stat"? 25,000-70,000 "errors" that's a big range too...
 
You do realize how incredibly nerdy this is, I love it! A heated battle over the current perspectives on ECC RAM, can you guys site this stuff because I am about one post away from being able to write a review paper on this...next we can battle over authorship. So much passion.
 
Filter said:
ecc made a difference back in the day. but with today technology advances in ram. ecc isnt necessary as it once was even in data centers. Sure you will have the old school crowd that will swear by ECC.

in my opinion (which doesn't mean much) but i wouldn't waste money on ECC ram. for home use or professional use.

never once in my IT career or home use have i ever said "well damn i should of had ECC"
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I'd still argue for it in servers and crtical workstations. I'd rather be safe than sorry. But back in the day when the electronics weren't as good as they are now, things were a bit different. You also have to understand that the OSes of the day didn't handle errors well and didn't recover worth a crap or at all. These days you can usually kill a single rogue process without taking the whole machine down.
 
If you can wait a month, the ASRock Extreme 11 is supposed to come out mid-May according to TweakTown. Regardless of what you think of ASRock quality, the board looks absurdly awesome.
 
Gigabyte X79-UD5 I have tested the UD3 and teh UD5 is on teh bench right now. I think for teh price it is a great option.
 
You guys know this thread is like 5 months old right?

Anyways I am calling BS on this stat: "25,000 to 70,000 errors per billion device hours per Mbit"

You can PROVE its BS by running Memtest for a few days straight, or Prime 95, or run Folding@Home, all of which will detect these errors and let you know. Why is it that you can run these apps for literally MONTHS ON END without seeing errors.

ECC has it's place, yes, but in a high performance desktop, no, that is not the place.
 
Getting back onto topic, what is the best x79 motherboard as of May 2012? Anything on the horizon?
 
derekb77 said:
Getting back onto topic, what is the best x79 motherboard as of May 2012? Anything on the horizon?
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If you are looking to Tri-SLI without going water-cooling, Asrocks finally released a second motherboard which supports 1-4-7 Tri SLI spacing (1 slot breathing room in between each card which you can put a PCI-E SSD, Sound Card, or Network Card in) called the Asrock X79 Champion that JUST hit Newegg. The ONLY other motherboard in the WORLD that can also do this is the LGA 1155 Asrock Z68 Extreme7 Gen3 but obviously won't be as good since it only has the true 16 PCI-E lanes with a NF200 chip supplying some fake 8x and 16x PCI-E speeds. I was going to wait for the X79 Champion but I ended up going the cheaper Z77 route.
 
I was about to post a thread much like this one...

I'm not a huge gamer, but I'll likely end up with a dual SLi setup in the future. My needs are for the system to last at least 5 years with rock solid stability. Cost isn't a huge deal since this is a once every 5 year kinda purchase.

Must haves?
  • PS/2 port (hey I have a keyboard I don't want to loose) But if it doesn't have PS/2 it should have features worthwhile if I had to loose the port.
  • 8x memory slots
  • intel gigabit lan port
  • VT-D support
  • Good spacing of the PCI-E slots for cooling the video cards.
  • good RMA service in case things go south
  • Good warranty length
 
The Asus P9X79 WS has PS/2 and dual Intel GbE, as well as your other requirements. I'm really happy with mine.
 
The P9X79 WS is an outstanding board. Mine has been rock solid and I'm getting ready to go Tri-fire with it since it's made to do that. It meets your needs nicely.
 
Abit667 said:
The Asus P9X79 WS has PS/2 and dual Intel GbE, as well as your other requirements. I'm really happy with mine.
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EPIC! That looks like THE board to have :)

DooKey said:
The P9X79 WS is an outstanding board. Mine has been rock solid and I'm getting ready to go Tri-fire with it since it's made to do that. It meets your needs nicely.
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Cool, thanks, I'll read up a bit on it. seems that everywhere I read about z79 everyone recommends Asus.

EuphoricRage470 said:
We ended up going with the WS. Thanks, all! :)
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Is it built yet? :D
 
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