HardOCP review of Bloodrage

[Mean Machine]

Yes, a standard Crossfire bridge reaches from one red port to the other, no worries.

[Utnorris]

Really, Dan on Hardocp is saying it will not reach between 1 and 3. Any chance you have a pic? If so, please post it over there under the thread.
Thanks.

Quoted from Dan:

"The standard Crossfire bridge does not reach from Slot 1 and 3. The board also does not come with one that does."

[Blacklash]

Crossfire bridges are shorter than SLi, that's one reason I asked.

Just looking at the board it seems the spacing is just a hair too far to run something like HD 4890 Crossfire. Those cards use dual slot coolers so you'd be forced to slots 1 and 3.

[saaya]

I've explained it somewhere. Where you have little bit bigger cooling on graphic card, than you cant use PCI audio card. Which is exactly my case, so I put graphic to bottom, and audio card over it. But since I don't have super-big case, its not good, cause graphic card at that position has very few air to use.. I'll solve that later, but having PCI at bottom of board would be better for me (tough, it would probably cause some trouble for tri-sli/crossfire users). Its just that lots of thing in my PC are definetly not stock looking or stock cooling. I'll just mod case soon, and problem will be gone.

And anyway.. you can't change anything now so.. doesn't really matter. Well.. none of us can. Except going and buying Classified (which has almost identical slot layout . Tough that gap they have between first and second PCIe should help with this..

well you can run 2 dualslot vgas plus a pci card, r2e cant, p6t can but the pci card is next to one of the vgas as well, same for gigabyte and everybody else... the best would be to put the pci the first, but then itll cause a big mess for the pciE traces from the x58 chipset... plus honestly, there arent that many people using pci anymore, and i dont think the focus for a new board should be to work with old hardware...

the first slot is pciE x1 for a soundcard, so it doesnt block the vga, even if you run 2 dualslot or 4 single slot vgas. thats the best layout imo... classified has a slightly better layout than br slot wise, i agree on that... and i dont feel bad about it since i think i inspired it at least a bit
i was looking at all possible slot combinations and their drawbacks and advantages and showed my results to shamino just before he left for evga

Kyle's Thoughts:
I not only don’t like the BloodRage motherboard, I hate it and hope to never have to ever use it again. The BloodRage was problematic from the moment I opened the box and got a huge metal splinter stuck into my finger from the machined logo on the LN2 cup that was not deburred or cleaned up.
What a looser sounds like he has a burr up his ass instead of a splinter in his finger.

huge metal splinter huh? yeah that logo is huge already, he can be glad it didnt cut off his arm
the metal stickers are not perfect and i recommended foxconn to improve them somehow since they do come off if you rub them strong enough... i never thought wed have to put out a warning for people to not hurt themselves on the stickers tho

Logo on L2N and WC is actually put on with some glue.. and I got same "issue" with mine WC.. logo just don't stick with it.. and yes, its very sharp.. cutted myself too. Thats why I wanted Saaya to give me new one (and hopefully he will).

Btw. if you have nothing to do and wonder why Saaya has his nickname.. try Google.. your eyes will pop out.

ill do my best...
btw, do you refer to that model from china?
thats not where i got my nickname from, i had my nick for 10 years, by then she was 8 or something i think :P
its easy, on the german keyboard z and y are switched, so that puts s a and y in a triangle on the far left of the keyboard... so its very easy and fast to type when your not used to keyboars, like i wasnt back then
i played around and saya or saaya sounded and looked the best

funny thing btw, jason aka mickeymouses original nickname qwert originated from the same lazyness

Guys would a standard Crossfire bridge even reach from one red PCI-e 16x slot to the other. You couldn't use the first two slots with dual slot cards, you'd have to use 1 and 3, or 2 and 4.

you mean on the classified? on br you have to use 1/3 or 2/4 for dualslot vgas, yeah.

[saaya]

Crossfire bridges are shorter than SLi, that's one reason I asked.

Just looking at the board it seems the spacing is just a hair too far to run something like HD 4890 Crossfire. Those cards use dual slot coolers so you'd be forced to slots 1 and 3.

what do you mean with forced?
why would you want to use slots 1 and 2 or slots 1 and 4?
1 and 2 would never work since they are next to each other and 4890s use dualslot heatsinks, and the 4th slot is only x8... actually wouldnt make a big performance impact, but i dont get the point in using it... unless you wanted to use an i-ram card in the central pci slot...

the older bridges are too short, but afaik all the newer ones are long enough... i just checked newegg and some bundle short bridges like xfx, asus, diamond and sapphire, and some have the long one, like HIS, gigabyte and powercolor... we thought by now everybody bundle the long bridges... our bad!

but even so, most people i know have half a dozen flying about since each card comes bundled with one, and they can be bought on ebay for 5$, so this shouldnt be a big problem

[BenchZowner]

its easy, on the german keyboard z and y are switched, so that puts s a and y in a triangle on the far left of the keyboard... so its very easy and fast to type when your not used to keyboars, like i wasnt back then

funny thing btw, jason aka mickeymouses original nickname qwert originated from the same lazyness

Guess the same thing happened to that guy

[Mescalamba]

Lol, well.. I tought it was something like that (nickname).. I was just curious, so I tried google. Thanks for explanation..

BR vs Classified.. when I saw Classified, I had strong feeling that layout was copied from BR.

I don't care much about that PCI slot.. I'll solve it somehow anyway.

[Blacklash]

what do you mean with forced?
why would you want to use slots 1 and 2 or slots 1 and 4?
1 and 2 would never work since they are next to each other and 4890s use dualslot heatsinks, and the 4th slot is only x8... actually wouldnt make a big performance impact, but i dont get the point in using it... unless you wanted to use an i-ram card in the central pci slot...

the older bridges are too short, but afaik all the newer ones are long enough... i just checked newegg and some bundle short bridges like xfx, asus, diamond and sapphire, and some have the long one, like HIS, gigabyte and powercolor... we thought by now everybody bundle the long bridges... our bad!

but even so, most people i know have half a dozen flying about since each card comes bundled with one, and they can be bought on ebay for 5$, so this shouldnt be a big problem

That's all I was interested in, if some Crossfire bridges were too short for connecting cards from slot 1 to 3. Thanks for the info about which manufacturers have longer bridges included. I was thinking some folks might want to run HD 4890 Crossfire in the Bloodrage. Looks like they'll want Powercolor, HIS or Gigabyte if they don't want to bother with ebay. I think MSI has a longer one too and I'm not sure.

[saaya]

Guess the same thing happened to that guy

Lol, well.. I tought it was something like that (nickname).. I was just curious, so I tried google. Thanks for explanation..

BR vs Classified.. when I saw Classified, I had strong feeling that layout was copied from BR.

I don't care much about that PCI slot.. I'll solve it somehow anyway.

watercooling the vgas will probably be the best solution to freeing up space
and i found that even with the fastest vgas out, 16 vs 8 doesnt make a difference at all, or its microscopic. since we switched to pciE 2.0 8x seems to be enough, only dualgpu cards seem to gain a bit with full 16 in high resolutions.

i showed shamino a pic of the BR prototype with heatsink when he just joined evga, and he really liked the looks of it, so im sure it insipred him to make the classified look similar, but i wouldnt say he copied it. in the end me and the product manager at foxconn were insipred ourselves by the asus pinot noir, rampage extreme and amd rd480 ES boards.







the last one is the amd rd480ES board, mine had red/purple dimm and pciE slots though, dont know why this one is all black and white.

about the crossfire bridges, yes, we should have bundled 2 long ones... im not 100% sure who bundles what bridges, they might have different packaging bundles... i checked on newegg and some of their pics are either really low res or the pics didnt load at all... seems newegg has some problems with their pic hosting/database.. even the ones that did load took forever.

[Utnorris]

I already pointed out to Dan on Hardforum that none of the highend board come with CF bridges except for the AsRock Supercomputer board. I understand where he is coming from on the layout and this board may not be the best choice for some. For me, it's about performance and how easy it is to work with, both which are easy. While I may agree with Dan that there should have been certain accessories included such as a second SAS cable, I disagree with him on most everything, specifically that the board "Just sucks". I have had a great time with my board easily overclocking my chip at lower voltages than I did with the EVGA. I love the fact it comes with a solid copper water block since I water cool my PC. I love the looks of it even though someone said it was "Ricey". Overall I ahve been pleased with the board, does it have some quirks, sure, but show me the perfect board and I will open your eyes.

[RayderR6]

Btw. if you have nothing to do and wonder why Saaya has his nickname.. try Google.. your eyes will pop out.

Damn Saaya, you're hot , but seriously, wish you the best man.

I got stabbed by the logo on the waterblock and I didn't cry, much less cry to the internets. some of us just don't mind shedding a little blood I guess

[RayderR6]

I let them know what I though, look again at how much buzz is happening on that thread.

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1413005

Seems to come under control. Peace.

[Utnorris]

Yeah, I can't complain too much about my Blood Rage:

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=555012

[saaya]

Damn Saaya, you're hot , but seriously, wish you the best man.

I got stabbed by the logo on the waterblock and I didn't cry, much less cry to the internets. some of us just don't mind shedding a little blood I guess

it gets better, my real name is sascha krohn and there are several sascha krohns on the web, one of them is a dj, unfortunately not a very good one

really? you cut yourself on the block and it was bleeding?
hmmm ill forward this to the product manager again.

[Utnorris]

Yeah I stabbed myself with the emblem too, got to be careful with it.

[MpG]

really? you cut yourself on the block and it was bleeding?
hmmm ill forward this to the product manager again.

Seriously, the little silver emblem on the block lifts up at the point, and it's bloody sharp. Like a metal sliver from hell.

[Mescalamba]

Seriously, the little silver emblem on the block lifts up at the point, and it's bloody sharp. Like a metal sliver from hell.

Its called "BloodRage" for some reason.. you can't expect it to work without little bit of your blood. (same happened to me..

[ProStock]

i cut my self also tell foxconn i will drop charge on thems if they can provide me a oc panel

[Logos]

...I got stabbed by the logo on the waterblock and I didn't cry...

adding: I don't think anybody mentioned that in the thread; Foxconn stated very clearly when they announced the BloodRage that the layout wouldn't be optimized for triple SLI for the following reason: NVidia announced very late that it would allow SLI at all on boards without an NF200 chip, so it was just too late for the BloodRage, design was done, at least that's what I understood from an old thread months ago. In the same thread was also explained why they thought 3 dimm slots would result in faster RAM performance than 6 like the others do

[Master_G]

I have to say that when i read this review i picked up on it's tone right from the start.
I read a few hard reviews (i know the history and don't take it as gospel, just include it as part of a few sites i read) and this one had a distinctly different tone.
Maybe i have become used to Anandtech's reviews which are, IMHO, always done how a review should be, quite clinical, a straight presentation of facts and findings with constructive criticisms (which they tend to feed back to the manufacturer to try and improve things for the customer). This review however just seemed to me to be full of emotion, it became pretty apparent that they didn't "like" the board for some reason. Phrases such as " there are some serious design flaws I don't like" and the continual use of the 1st person indicate the emotion behind the review.
IMO the problems they encountered were either minor (layout is fine for almost all users, 3 RAM slots is sufficient for almost all users) or were their problem (always look where you stick your finger ).

G

[Logos]

+1 on Anandtech reviews I also read them regularly, they're extremely rigorous They would never comment like HardOCP did, even if they don't like something, they're just different, and they just go more into things, bios details etc...when they test.

[RayderR6]

really? you cut yourself on the block and it was bleeding?
hmmm ill forward this to the product manager again.

Indeed, it was no big deal for me. I even left the blood on the tip, might be enough for a dna match, so if someone steals my pc, I can say, check the dna

Now if you read my past comments about "bleeding" for your pc, I won't be a phony


Holy crap, I've been quoted in a sig. Thanks for the honor Logos.

[W1zzard]

doesn't foxconn have advertising money to get good reviews?

[Logos]

doesn't foxconn have advertising money to get good reviews?

I'm not sure this was the right thing to say
I've followed the threads where guys like Saaya and others here spent quite a lot of time presenting the projects, trying as much as possible to take the user's comments into account, then presenting the boards with every possible detail...I'm not a Foxconn owner but I understand many XS users enjoy their BlackOps and Bloodrage...so I don't think Foxconn has to pay to get good reviews

[massman]

doesn't foxconn have advertising money to get good reviews?

I'm sure that if you are for sale, you just need to send Foxconn a mail