Post Cards from the Edge - AMD 780G, NVIDIA 790i, Gigabyte 680i
by Gary Key on April 5, 2008 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
For a bright-eyed teenager in 1976 that had high hopes of becoming a journalist one day, the satirical film Network was a revelation suggesting maybe choosing another profession would be a wise move. (Ed: Look at where that got you.) After years of intense investigative coverage of Watergate and the resulting rise in credibility of the journalistic profession, it seemed the right - maybe even honorable - field of study during the college years... until that fateful New Year’s Day in 1976.
In 1976, the country was celebrating its bicentennial, trying to put Watergate and the Vietnam War out of our minds, and looking forward to an election that would chart a new direction in American politics. (These subjects sound familiar 32 years later.) Top films of that year really did represent what we were going through, and to some degree what we would become in the near future.
Rocky found us in love with the underdog who never gave up. All the President’s Men gave us a short synopsis of the Watergate scandal from the perspective of the journalistic team (Bernstein/Woodward) that broke the story and proved that journalists were sexy, provided you resembled a young Robert Redford. The Bad News Bears allowed us to take a humorous look at sports obsessed parents realizing that winning at any cost had taken the joy out of playing the game for many kids (kids who would become today’s Soccer Moms and Dads).
I enjoyed many other movies that year with my friends, which more or less fit in with our very sarcastic yet humorous personalities. Some were dark like Taxi Driver, Marathon Man, The Omen, Obsession, and Carrie, while others were on the lighter side such as Silent Movie, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Silver Streak, and Mother, Jugs & Speed. Of course, we also had the breakout science fiction films, Logan’s Run and Futureworld. (Told you we were sarcastic.) All told, it was a decent year for film, and some thirty years later we still have Rocky, Pink Panther, and King Kong remakes.
However, there was one film that year that left a lasting impression on us; that film was the aforementioned and critically acclaimed Network. What All the President’s Men did to glorify the journalistic profession; Network succeeded in displaying the dark and seedy side of media. In retrospect, it also provided a fairly accurate glimpse of where TV/Print media was headed along with society. Sensationalism - some would say yellow journalism - sells and is what a large cross-section of society enjoys, whether they openly admit it or not.
In Network, Peter Finch played the aging news anchor, Howard Beale, who at one point in the film makes an impassioned speech that resulted in an extremely popular catch phrase of the time. He persuaded his watching audience to step outside and shout, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” This phrase struck a chord with mainstream America during that year and with us now.
It has been a couple of rough weeks for the motherboard team. Our best laid plans have been thwarted for a variety of reasons, most of which have us shouting the above phrase, and we are sure some of you feel the same way. Since the news and review sections are fairly quiet over the weekend, we thought it would be a good time to discuss those items that put a burr under our saddle - to address issues that our readership is having with the technology and companies that we cover on a periodic basis. Believe it or not, we rarely get to rant (and for very good reasons as you will see), but sometimes it's necessary to say what one thinks. So here is Rant Session #1 for your weekend enjoyment.
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johnsonx - Monday, April 7, 2008 - link
After running for 4 days (not doing anything, just idling but at 3.2ghz - no CnQ yet), nothing appears to be wrong with that system. I guess the proof will come when I put it under a full load later.WW2Planes1 - Saturday, April 5, 2008 - link
Power moFSets?other than that, good to know about the power requirements of the new Phenoms, probably wouldn't have crossed my mind when I go to build my new system. Although, after reading this, I'll probably wait a while at the moment.
piroroadkill - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
I noticed that too, it should surely be MOSFET.. metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor.Glenn - Saturday, April 5, 2008 - link
Great article and kudos for the honesty in the face of some hardware giants! In the end, hopefully they will appreciate it too!I build and service alot of systems and have learned some hard lessons along the way. My philosophy may not work for others but it has certainly made my life easier. I quit using anything but Intel chipsets, which also required a shift away from using amd processors.
No matter how much good I read about Nvidia, SIS, ATI or other chipsets, in real world day to day use, there has always seemed to be hair growing out of something! My experience has shown that for every purported preformance or functionality promise, there has been a reliability tradeoff somewhere which I am ultimately responsible for. No Thanks! I may still venture away from that philosophy on my own system occasionally, but if it's built to sell, then its Intel!
sprockkets - Saturday, April 5, 2008 - link
WHen you say you lost the HDD, did they just go corrupt or did they fail to work or be detected anymore?Gary Key - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
We have two 74GB Raptors that are basically dead, they will power up but cannot be low-level formatted. The WD 250GB drive basically had the same problem. The two 500GB Samsungs will power up and repeat a click-clack pattern. The Samsungs have been returned for analysis as will the 74GB Raptors.I am getting ready to do the same for a pair of 150GB Raptors that I wrote off in December. However, those drives failed (no longer accessible) during RAID testing on the 780i board (usually I yell at myself when that happens as I have had far too many RAID 0 arrays drop a drive over the years). I did not think much of it until we started having these data corruption problems over the past six weeks.
Between Kris, Raja, and I there have probably been around 14~16 image reloads the past six weeks after overclocking. We fully except to trash the OS when exploring the boundaries of memory/fsb rates, but it might happen once or twice a month at best and is not limited to NVIDIA chipsets. However, all of these failures have been on the 780i/790i boards and we were not really pushing the systems except for two times when the drives failed or the images were corrupted.
The frustrating/perplexing problem is that the 790i testing with Kris resulted in some of the best overclocks we have ever experienced and they were 100% stable. We changed the settings to a normal overclock at 400FSB/1600 DDR3 and the images are corrupted or the drives went south. It is not repeatable. We have seen results like ours in various forums so there is something amiss here, just trying to find it right now.
In all cases, we have had the memory settings set at something other than stock/default. I am still working with Derek as he has experienced several data corruption problems during SLI testing the past couple of weeks. I did not mention that until we figure out if his problems are related to ours.
TheBeagle - Saturday, April 5, 2008 - link
I was wondering (and hoping) if this article would ever appear. It took guts for Gary and AT to publish this article. We all know by the banners, etc on Anandtech that Gigabyte is a major advertiser on this web site. So for Gary to "tell it like it is" is truly a breath of fresh air. Gary was quite understated in his description of that FIRESTORM that is brewing against Gigabyte on account of its rather insane handling of this fiasco involving the failed N680i boards. In fact, this matter ought to be a case study on how to NOT handle a public relations crisis!What is even worse, is the equally asinine reported present requirement of Gigabyte that an owner of a failed N680i board has to actually own a QX6850 processor (and show a receipt and pictures of it) in order to get a replacement/upgraded motherboard. That is just NUTS! The N680i board NEVER supported that processor, although it was clearly and openly advertised on the web, the literature and on the board packaging to specifically support an "Intel Dual Core 2 1333FSB Extreme" processor. That condition concerning ownership of an QX6850 CPU is just a flat out slimy maneuver by Gigabyte to avoid having to replace these failed N680i boards!
I, for one, want to openly thank Gary and AT for their courage to disclose this matter in a published article - WELL DONE!!
Best regards to everyone. TheBeagle
gfredsen - Saturday, April 5, 2008 - link
"it is discerning to us that this problem seems to be rearing its ugly head again." Did you mean perhaps to say disconcerting? I know how it is, believe me I know.Gary Key - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
Sorry, I set the article to a post time that occurred before I finished my final edits and Jarred had the opportunity to complete his edits. It was disconcerting to me that I was still writing while the article was live. ;-) Thanks for the comments.corporategoon - Sunday, April 6, 2008 - link
I'll pick nits!There are sentence fragments, incorrect words, wrong phrases (low and behold should be Lo and behold), and sentences that just don't make sense. Even without the missing word, "In addition, we will look at what we despise about the new releases of PowerDVD 8 and WinDVD 9, maybe it’s not their fault but whose it." still isn't a proper sentence.
Great work on the research side - I'm guessing this was just a quickly written article to address these issues before the full reviews go up. Still...