Quote Originally Posted by Kluster View Post
After going through this thread with blinders on I purchased the 975XBX2 and was happy....for a day. Then I tried pushing my mushkin PC2-8500 1066MHz and got no love. A call to Intel tech support confirmed that the board isn't designed to run memory at that speed. So much for an "extreme" motherboard.

Cut to last night when I finally got around to installing 3DMark and earned a lackluster 10662.

Upon investiagation I find that running an Nvidia 8800 GTS in slot 1 and a 3ware raid card in slot 2 forces the 8800 to run at PCIe x8. Since the raid card is x16 physical 8x electrical, the only way to run it full speed is in slot 2.

So, this POS board is going back and I guess I have to hold the vomit back and get an Asus or put the rose colored glasses on and get an evga 680i and hope the endless problems are being addressed in a timely manner.
1. It's a 975 chipset board. 975 chipset isn't designed for heavy memory overclocking. This is no secret. Pretty much no one pushing memory past DDR2 900 or 1000 or so is using a 975.
2. How is the board a PoS? The PCIe specs are there for anyone to read. It's not like Intel tried to deceive you.

I am able to run my quad at 3.33GHZ and 1333FSB with 1.3625 vcore and lowest possible board settings for FSB and MCH (1.2 and 1.5). Plus my actual results from SPi and other benchmarks are equivalent to much higher OCs on 965 and 680i because of the tight 975 latencies. Plus it's insanely stable. So yeah, I think it deserves its "extreme" label for those reasons.