The problem should be in SPP somewhere. Logically it's performance should be limited by a driver (or a BIOS), therefore if FSB speed is too high to be correctly handled by a CPU or timings are too tight to be handled by SPP/memory, it shouldn't let you boot setting an error flag to BIOS. It doesn't happen and system can't correct or control the errors caused by such situation, sending false commands and data to a HDD and corrupting it.
In BIOS P03 they limited memory bandwidth and latency (and, therefore, it's performance) to make the situation stable enough (it means they have limited the OC abilities of the board, therefore it became to be slower than a regular x38 or x48 non-top over-clocking board).
Now they need to find a better solution, either in BIOS, in SPP driver or in the worst case - in hardware (SPP). They are working on it, as far as we all know, but why should we suffer because of such situation - it is a question.
Well, we still have a solution - we can use seriously limited P03 BIOS with standard timings or find our own limit of stable performance experimenting with FSB and memory timings to have max over-clocking and still have no corruption problems. It's a PITA though. The problem is not so clean also because FSB limitation is different for dual core and quad core CPUs, the first ones support 550 MHz FSB stable enough and the last ones have corruption problems with 450MHz FSB sometimes, therefore the research for limitations requires a lot of patience and ability to restore the corrupted HDDs.
What is worrying me - that Nvidia has found a problem before BIOS P03 release (because they have used bandwidth and latency limitations in it), and they still have no solution.
790i Ultra SLI board is definitely not a good purchase for now, it only can be recommended to people, who like to reach max and don't mind to have some PITA, IMO.![]()
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