Good experience with Asrock X99 OC Formula.

[kapone]

Well, after having had a frustrating month of exchanging boards at the local Microcenter, finally settled on the OC Formula (which they don't carry, so had to order from Newegg).

I needed a board that would handle atleast 64GB RAM, and atleast two video cards and be rock solid stable (trading system). Any overclocking is just icing.

Well, after having tried:

- Asrock X99 Extreme4 - flops around with the 64GB ram. Intermittent boot issues. The RAM was tested thoroughly, so it's not the RAM. Reducing RAM to 32GB makes it "almost" stable.
- Asus Deluxe 3.1 - Same issues as above. In addition, sleep doesn't work under Windows properly, and it seemed to have performance issues compared to the Asrock
- Gigabyte UD4 - Didn't boot at all. Not sure if it was just a faulty motherboard.

The OC formula? Booted straight up with 64GB RAM, 5930K, dual GTX 970s and a Samsung SM951 as boot drive. No USB issues, No sleep issues, no finicky RAM issues, hell it even supports ECC if I go down that path in the future. The build quality of the board is great for $250.

And then I overclocked. Running at 4.5GHz on air (with a Thermalright Silver Arrow) in a jiffy. Ran Aida64, OCCT, Prime95 for atleast 24 hours each, and it's rock solid stable. Honestly, I wasn't even expecting to overclock, since this system is somewhat critical, although a parallel system (but slower) runs constantly as a backup.

Good stuff. Asrock seems to have far with their motherboards.

 

[zaniix]

Thanks for the info, this is the sort of stuff that helped me decide to stay away from x99 and just wait for the 6700k
So many stories of boards not working properly

 

[kirbyrj]

Thanks for the info, this is the sort of stuff that helped me decide to stay away from x99 and just wait for the 6700k
So many stories of boards not working properly

So...you're not going to go with a setup that has had time to mature and bioses released to address issues and you're going with a brand new platform. That doesn't make any sense.

FWIW, good to hear that the OP got his system up and running the way he wants. Probably about time to OC my setup.

 

[kapone]

I looked at the Z170 boards as well, but they don't work for my needs. I need a boatload of RAM, as much CPU as possible and enough pci-e lanes to run 2-3 video cards without bottlenecks. Now, this is not gaming or anything, but the cards are driving six 4K (Benq BL3201PHs) monitors right now, and I might need to add another card and three more monitors.

The trading software doesn't really use CUDA/OpenCL/GL etc, so the GPUs are really just driving multi-monitors. But the latency needs to be as little as practical.

The X99 seems to fit the bill, although I WAS inclined to go C216 dual Xeon as such, with something like a Supermicro X10DRG-Q. While that board is fantastic and has enough pci-e slots, the current crop of Xeons are too slow clockwise. Having 10 cores is not that useful, if each runs at only 2GHz. I'd much rather have 4-6 cores running at twice that (or more). And no current 2011-3 Xeons fit that bill.

And while cost really isn't an issue per se, the current crop of Xeons is horribly overpriced. What is Intel thinking?? They should be less than half their retail value for what they offer.

 

[felt]

That BenQ is a pricey monitor

Got any pics of your workstation / setup? I'd like to see

 

[M76]

For 250? Damn, where I live this costs $500.

 

[kapone]

That BenQ is a pricey monitor

Got any pics of your workstation / setup? I'd like to see

$6000 in monitors may seem pricey, but for their intended use, a "good" hour in the markets pays for them.

 

[dizzy]

The OC formula? Booted straight up with 64GB RAM, 5930K, dual GTX 970s and a Samsung SM951 as boot drive. No USB issues, No sleep issues, no finicky RAM issues, hell it even supports ECC if I go down that path in the future. The build quality of the board is great for $250.

Thanks for posting. When you say "no USB issues", which USB issues are you talking about? Have you had USB issues with the other boards? Can you describe those issues?

And then I overclocked. Running at 4.5GHz on air (with a Thermalright Silver Arrow) in a jiffy. Ran Aida64, OCCT, Prime95 for atleast 24 hours each, and it's rock solid stable. Honestly, I wasn't even expecting to overclock, since this system is somewhat critical, although a parallel system (but slower) runs constantly as a backup.

Good stuff. Asrock seems to have far with their motherboards.

Can you tell me what temps do you get for an under load test (say a Handbrake/transcoding test, that would use all 6 cores without the unrealistic load that Prime95 would place), and also tell us the ambient room temperature, thermal paste used?

Thanks!

PS: I got an ASUS X99-A/U3.1 over the weekend and I am having the dreaded Windows won't boot USB related issues (also Linux has boot problems too, probably same problem/cause) but still am in the Newegg 30 days refund policy, for 15% restocking fee I could return it and buy something else so am looking for people that have had the same USB Windows logo boot lockup problems with ASUS X99 but which disappeared entirely simply by changing to a different board (without changing any other components, especially without changing the connected USB devices)

 

[kapone]

With all of the other boards, the USB was "flaky". Sometimes my keyboard won't work while POSTing (to get into BIOS), sometimes Windows would show driver errors for USB devices, sometimes the system would wake from keyboard, sometimes not, completely random.

I'm using a Thermalright silver arrow and the (overclocked) CPU shows ~23C for individual cores and a main CPU temp of ~35-37C. When running ASUS Realbench (handbrake) I see a max of about 76-78C. No errors anywhere.

My room is fairly normal (it's my basement, so it's slightly cooler than the rest of the house). Our thermostat is typically at 73F. I used whatever paste came with the Silver Arrow.