DFI: Not for the enthusiast!

[0iD]

Just buy an old PhysX card that everyone used to laugh about.

[Lee H]

At least you've got a reply which is refreshingly honest from them - many other manufacturers haven't even replied to queries I've had in the past over certain things.

I've had my DFI since the beginning of October and I have to say it has been the most stable motherboard I have since my Abit NF7-S rev 2.0 days.

Overclocking has been a dream and my Q6600 has a nice 450 Mhz FSB now as opposed to it's standard speed and it's running stable 24x7 with no blue screens, stutters or excessive heat generated.

[Hawker1986]

Im not saying it was helpful, I dont think anyone here thinks its solved anything, but surely its better than them wasting your time for months, this way you can get it replaced. You expect them to go buy that hardware you have and have them write you your own BIOS? It may be a hardware limitation, if your Areca card needs 16x bandwidth to work using all 3 PCI E lanes they run in 16x/8x/8x so that may cause problems (or 16x/16x/4x which is prob the reason your 8600GTS is limited). You might want to try the Asus board that has 6x16x PCI-E - http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Asus-...Revolution-X58

Hawker

[shaithis]

Im not saying it was helpful, I dont think anyone here thinks its solved anything, but surely its better than them wasting your time for months, this way you can get it replaced. You expect them to go buy that hardware you have and have them write you your own BIOS? It may be a hardware limitation, if your Areca card needs 16x bandwidth to work using all 3 PCI E lanes they run in 16x/8x/8x so that may cause problems (or 16x/16x/4x which is prob the reason your 8600GTS is limited). You might want to try the Asus board that has 6x16x PCI-E - http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Asus-...Revolution-X58

Hawker

I expect them to purchase whatever is necessary to iron the bugs out of their BIOS.....and this is not a BIOS for "me", its a BIOS that functions properly. The raid controller is 8x and is crippled when in a 4x slot.....so it's nothing to do with PCI-E lanes.

And I am well aware of the Asus board, it costs 50% more but I'm guessing that's the price of support these days perhaps.......

[Clunk]

I expect them to purchase whatever is necessary to iron the bugs out of their BIOS.....and this is not a BIOS for "me", its a BIOS that functions properly. The raid controller is 8x and is crippled when in a 4x slot.....so it's nothing to do with PCI-E lanes.

And I am well aware of the Asus board, it costs 50% more but I'm guessing that's the price of support these days perhaps.......

That raid controller should run fine in a 4x bandwidth slot and shouldn't be crippled - that's according to Areca. I almost bought one a couple of years back and I emailed them specifically about it.

Also, the slots on the DFI are PCI-E 2 - your card is rated for 8x PCI-E 1 which is only half the bandwidth of PCI-E 2. In other words, your 4x PCI-E slot, in theory is capable of transferring data at 2000MB/sec the same as an older 8x PCI-E 1 slot.

I know that doesn't help your plight, but I thought i'd chuck it in anyway

[Thorsson]

Areca stuff is like £300, no? "Enthusiast" hardly covers it...

Anyway there's nothing in your tests that says it doesn't work with the board. What happens if you just have the ATI Card and the Areca? If it doesn't work then it's a problem with Areca. Otherwise it's 'just' a dual videocard issue. Well dualish, since the 4870x2 has two GPUs, and who's to say that isn't part of the issue?

[jim]

Whatever the case, it's not fit for purpose.

[BobF64]

It wont be long before boards start coming with warning labels

"WARNING : This board does not support non-graphics cards in the PCI-E 16x slots, nor does it support mixed graphics cards."

Just so they can avoid "problem" areas.


I notice your use of "enthusiast", if something is aimed at the "enthusiast" market, thats either their definition of the term, or several manufacturers definitions, but rarely is it your own

[Zak33]

To those who think they did good, put yourself in my shoes.....you just built a system and found an issue and the manufacturer tells you "tough luck".......how the hell can you applaud them?

because they could feed you a line, leave you hanging on for 6 months, and still never fix it... leaving you feeling like a lemon.

You now have a choice... you can move on knowing you have tried. If yuo were waiting for a fix, you mgiht get it... you might not... when is long enough?

[Antagram]

At least you can use the reply as reason for RMA if you do decided to switch to an Asus product.

Would be interested to know if Asus would handle the same set-up, and if it didn't would Asus then offer a BIOS update. I suppose only then you can appreciate the DFI reply if you are left in limbo by Asus with same problem.

On a side note, would the original PCI PhysX card provide better performance than a 8600GTS?

[dave87]

My thoughts are that you are verging on the territory of a professional board rather than that of an enthusiast orientated one. Something like the higher end 775 based workstation boards would semingly provide the compatibility you require?

Depending on what the machine is structured to do, could you offload some of its functionality to a second machine?

I guess the above is negating the problem rather than fixing it, but I've always worked from the assumption there is more than one way to skin a cat...

[BUFF]

Would be interested to know if Asus would handle the same set-up, and if it didn't would Asus then offer a BIOS update.

I suspect that you would either a) not get a reply or b) get the run around.
Whilst it's obviously not what the OP wanted to hear he did at least get an honest reply so kudos to DFI for that.

[TooNice]

because they could feed you a line, leave you hanging on for 6 months, and still never fix it... leaving you feeling like a lemon.

You now have a choice... you can move on knowing you have tried. If yuo were waiting for a fix, you mgiht get it... you might not... when is long enough?

I can appreciate honesty, but I don't think that alone is applaud worthy. I reserve that for instances where I feel that the CS has gone out of their way to help.

It's handy when a someone who has committed a crime plead guilty; it saves money and time but that does not mean that I am going to go 'Yeah, respect'. Not that I am equating the lack of effort on DFI's part to an actual crime (from a business perspective, it is probably better for them to alienate one/a few customer than investing in a potentially difficult fix), but just because other companies service could be worse by leaving one hanging, it doesn't make it still doesn't make it worthy of applauding. In my opinion.

It's disappointing to hear that nVidia/ATI cards do not play nice in the same box though. One might say that it's to be expected, but the idea of having an nVidia card for PhysX in a setup with an AMD card did cross my mind. I seem to remember seeing a benchmark showing that that the standalone PhysX getting beaten by a number of nVidia card. I don't recall exactly if the 8600 was one of them, but I think that it is. I *seem* to remember reading that the 8500 was in fact excellent value for PhysX.

@CAT-THE-FIFTH: AFAIK It's non-essential in a similar way that AA/AF is non-essential. I am sure there is a level of subjectivity to it, but I have certainly read positive opinions about PhysX. While no games needs it, some have said that once you have experience in games that supports it, the game would feel less alive/organic once you disable it. Personally, I wouldn't right it off, just as I wouldn't right off more people adopting a multi-GPU setup in the future. There are simply things that GPU do better than CPUs, and at this point, physics appear to be one of them.

For me, a waste of money would be zero benefit. If there is any benefit to be gained, it's up to you to weight the benefit with the costs, but that's highly subjective.

[scaryjim]

bottom line shaithis? Email back and ask if they'll support an RMA for full refund as the board does not meet your requirements. If they say yes to that, then they are giving excellent customer service, rather than just "better than standard for the tech industry, which lets be honest is pretty appalling".

While I understand your frustration, I think you need to accept that you are running a very unusual setup; one that stretches the definition of "enthusiast" to the limits. There are so many potential conflicts in your system that I can see it taking DFI months just to resolve what is actually causing your problem, let alone the amount of time it would then take to fix it. While it's fair to say that particular DFI board is not suited to your requirements, it is unreasonable to therefore deduce that all DFI products are unsuitable for all individuals who identify themselves as "enthusiasts".

You say you've previously had an issue with your areca card anyway, so you must be aware that support for it is limited. Was the previous issue one of conflicts with several other cards in the system, or was it just that the card plain didn't work? Because those are two very different situations...

[directhex]

I don't know to what extent the third 16x slot on most boards is considered "usable" outside SLI/Crossfire configs, certainly doubt it gets much QA testing for that kind of arrangement

IMHO you want a refund plus an Asus P6T6 WS Revolution

[Agent]

I've run nvidia and ATI cards together without issue, so I know they can work together on some boards.

To be fair there are so many things this could be, trouble shooting it would be a pain from a user point of view.