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
AMD 780G Motherboards
It has been an agonizingly slow process dissecting seven boards and trying to devise a set of benchmarks that satisfy the home theater, casual gaming, and home office crowds all at once. We think our roundup will come close but there are sure to be a few bumps in the road. We await your comments on the upcoming video analysis and roundup articles over the coming days.
However, we almost did not finish our testing (we actually still have some Phenom benchmarks to complete) as we lost four of our seven boards during final benchmark sessions this past week. It very easily could have been seven out of seven, but we stopped the killing spree after verifying why our boards seemed content to go to digital heaven without Kevorkian assistance. We could stop here and say wait for the article, but that would be sensationalist journalism, right?
Our normal course of testing has us installing a wide variety of processors in each board, regardless of the target market. We do this to ensure compatibility, and at times (like now) we wish this was not the case. This week, we tested the 780G boards with the LE1600, 4400+ X2, 4850e X2, 6400+ X2, Phenom 9600BE, Phenom 9900, and now the 9850BE.
We discovered quickly that running the 9900/9850BE or 6400+ X2 on these products resulted in the loss of the board, in a matter of a few seconds to a few minutes. Granted, it will probably be rare that a user will purchase a 9850BE to run on this platform, but in case you were considering that course of action, we highly suggest you do not. Let’s get this out of the way quickly; it is not a 780G chipset problem. In fact, it is not strictly a board problem either, but rather a design issue.
This design issue can just as easily occur on NVIDIA or Intel chipset boards, so while we are talking about the 780G product line, just be aware that it can happen on any board with any chipset. In fact, our last GeForce 8200 has already experienced a painful demise. The design issue comes down to the manufacturer trying to balance performance requirements and costs when providing a product in this market sector. The budget sector is very price sensitive, and for the most part users will typically use a lower-end processor.
The vast majority of the 780G boards have a three-phase or four-phase PWM circuitry design. These designs are completely acceptable for the 45W, 65W, 89W, and 95W TDP rated processors; however, drop in a 125W TDP processor such as the Phenom 9850e or 6400+ X2 and you are asking for trouble. Trouble is exactly we found, as each board we tested eventually succumbed to the greater power requirements of these 125W TDP processors.
The four-phase motherboards held out longer and seemed to run fine at stock speeds for a short period. Trying to overclock these boards even slightly resulted in almost immediate board failure. The three-phase boards did not fare as well since we blew MOSFETS on power-up, or they failed after a short OCCT load. We have returned the failed boards for analysis. However, we are comfortable with our statements after spending the past two days on the phone with the board manufacturers and AMD.
Now for the kicker. Although we were testing with a Phenom processor, that does not mean the manufacturer had qualified the board with this particular CPU. So while those front page ads and marketing information list all the processor families that will theoretically run on a board, users need to read the fine print or search for the suppliers' QVL/CPU support lists to ensure the desired processor has been qualified. We also plan to provide this information in the review process.
We searched each vendor’s website to find out if we were “running” the board out of spec with the 9850BE/9900 processors. What we found was very interesting, and we are having spirited discussions with the motherboard companies and AMD at this time.
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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...