ASUS Maximus II Formula - new P45 king?

[mikeyakame]

I have respect for Ket's work but on my boards they do almost nothing... I get just a tad better ram performance but really nothing earthshattering at all. Better clocks not here... ( I have 2 Dlx and 2 E boards...5 45Nm CPU's to work with) But imagine Ket having to do this for all P45 builds of Asus... will be a lot slower then...Asus is not like DFI or other brands, they put out a lot of mobo's , maybe too much but they want to sell as much as possible... Secondly Ket works with the code the engineers put in the bios, he just makes a nice mix out of it... (simplistically put, he's a very bright guy no doubt) and really you don't seem to be aware how many bios updates ( alphas and betas some of us have gone through on these boards to make them work better... Even DFI boards that come to the market months later then the competition still need updates to ensure compatability...

Some people never seem to be aware how much different hardware there is around and that Ocing is still not guarantueed... because ya neighbour can do it, doesn't mean you ca do it with exactly the same hardware... is it purely the mobo ? is it the bios ? is it the modded bios ? you tell me...

I didn't noticed anything different coming from P35 or X38 in daily usage... maybe I swap hardware to often (harddrives and co) but this board is way more stable then my Formula SE ever was... in benches I could feel the differences... daily sorry nope... I just love new toys but comign from a rock stable and good performing P35 (with one Gfx card) X38, X48 and P45 are not really a worthwhile step up for normal clocks (400-500FSB range, depending on CPU)

For the difference between the Dlx and the MFII think the PCB layout is pretty the same, you just pay extra for all the gimmicks and a few tweaks in the bios... between the E and Dlx boards there's a whole lot more clocking potential in the Dlx...

Without full access to bios code and Intel's super secret register documentations they keep us back with I suppose his effort is quite applaudable. Most of the problems with the P45 chipset all come back to the core bios code written by Intel. It was a chipset that was never designed in the first place to do most of the things it is semi-capable of doing now. It's a mainstream chipset aimed at a mainstream market that at present is performing at times on par if not better than the high end X48 chipset which was designed from ground to do what it does. P45 was only ever designed to support a maximum of 1333MHz DDR2/3 and what more it does is cause of Intel's superior knowledge of optimized asm and no doubt impossible feats to make the impossible possible.

Heavy pressure from OE mobo manufactuers for this chipset to work outside it's original design specs has probably resulted in very specific optimized asm routines which I believe are the reason that this is no doubt has become the most impressive generally incompatible and unpredictable chipset in Intel's history. It either works fantastically with certain hardware or fails miserably with others. It's always going to be the case of hit or miss to balance performance Intel pulled out of thin air with wide market component compatibility. Where as chipsets like the X48 since they aim at the smaller high end market don't have to maintain such a broad spectrum of compatibilities since most high end users stick to pretty specific high end hardware which more times than not operate much closer to a common set of specs than mainstream equivalents do. High end memory ic's are limited to only 2 or 3 different memory manufacturers, namely PSC, Samsung and Micron at present.