Anandtech 1st Review Of Bloodrage

[Raja@ASUS]

I'd like to hear what sort of issues AnandTech's reviewers are currently facing, as I'm not having a single glitch apart from the known issues, and two not so "crucial" for everyday usage bugs that I've reported back to Foxconn.

Foxconn is working on new BIOSes and I'm pretty sure that they'll be giving us new releases every now and then if not from day to day

Hi BZ,


I'll make a post here in the Foxconn area as I promised I would take a long term look at the board and help out where I can.

Primary problem on our 3 boards is the constant need for the 'force reset' button. To date I've tried older Micron based 1800Mhz sticks from OCZ, Corsair 2GB Samsung based modules, 2X1GB 2133Mhz CAS 9 based Samsung from Corsair, Kingston Hyper X and also the Cellshock Blue, add to that Gary's Gskill triple channel kit. PSU front - PCP 1200W PSU, Coolermaster 1200w PSU and finally the silverstone 1200w supply.

In some instances I have to go down to 1 dimm after a long power down and repeated presses of the button to get the board to fire up. I can try to take a video of the cycling with my webcam at various points if you wish - it'll take a bit of time, but will clear it up if you want to see it.

Anyway, I'm responsible for the writing and I distinctly recall saying that it may be unique to us. So I'm glad some of you out there are not experiencing the same. I wrote to Foxconn about this from the first day I fired up the board. Gary had a board stasteside so we spoke over skype while he fired up and found the same. Lastly, we made a decision to check one from Newegg. It seems that we have a combination of parts that may be causing this problem and I'm still leaning towards PSU - both gary and I fired up initially using the PCP 1200w units. Of course, that could be a red herring. Rest assured, I would not have said anything had it not have been true. Sascha has known me long enough and we've always been very honest with each other.

Nehalems boot up sequence has been enhanced over previous generations, read/write levlling is dynamically sensed on every reset, more than one person in the know has told me that. Some of the other boards are employing longer cycling times at higher BCLK reference clocks to get things right at boot time. The onus is no longer on motherboard vendors to make changes to skew tables, it happens dynamically every reset apart from on a S3 resume. That is assuming that's one of the problems. if I use 1 DImm the reliance on that button does diminish drastically, but it's still there. I have a hunch something on our boards is preventing the BIOS from entering it's full reset state - PSU?


Other than that and the AEGIS panel thing, i have no major gripes. Last bug is the triple channel DIMM 1 DQ ref, that's a BIOS code issue locking the steps to X0.496 in triple chanel mode, a quick and easy fix for the BIOS guys.

In fact, so is the red button stuff (if it turns out to affect more part combinations consistently)...

I have not toyed with S3 resume modes yet, but Gary will take a look at that functionality for the final write up. That's it. I'll be getting hold of some more CPU's to test on the cold front, so that's stll ongoing.


later
Raja