Well this is a bit of a story but I think its worth reading.

I have had quite a few boards and set ups over the past couple of years and spent an absolute fortune with LEE P at scan but this latest set up although I have only had it running for a couple of days now and still dont fully understand all the settings in the bios I just had to post some where how good i think its going to be.
the story starts on the older 775 set up and my first high end board which was the striker 2.I have to say that board was a real heap of ***** and would not even run stock settings untill there had been several bios updates. Luckilly for me the board failed completly and whould only run on 1 stick of ram so it went back for replacement to scan. The best part was that they had none in stock and after a couple of days I was able to buy a slightly more expensive board and get a refund on the striker.
So i purchased a rampage extreme this proved to be a much better board and subsequently I ended up building 2 more macines for other people using the rampage boards and q66 cpus.
Further on from that my step son wanted to have abetter pc and I was starting to get interested in ocing so we purchased yet another q66 cpu and I bought my self a MAXIMUS EXTREME mobo to go with my QX9650 extreme cpu. Again this board seemed to a nice mobo at first and I was able to get it up to a FSB of 440 and the cpu was running at 4.2 gig on water. but after a while i started to get some random BSODS and had to wind down the FSB to keep it stable. after doing some research on the net it seems that this board has some issues with a weak NB even with the water cooling connected as I had already done. To be honist I think it would be very hard to oc the maximus at all with out running the NB on water as I have heard that if the NB gets much above 47c they start to break down and mine ran at that temp at only stock settings .
Any way even running the NB and cpu on my massive external water cooling system as time went on I had to run the FSB lower and lower just to keep it stable. And when I bought a 280 card the pc started to give a VGA bios error on boot more often than not resulting in having to press the restart button several times b4 it would finaly boot up and run.
Buy this time I was having to run the FSB at only 400 and had decided that it was time to rma the board to see if scan could find anything wrong with it as on any other gpu it would boot ok with out the dam vga bios error showing on the lcd poster.
So I bought a P5q delux.. Tis is an ok board but if you are a gamer like me and want good fps perhaps its not the board for you as in stock form the FPS was some 60 lower than my MAXIMUS board. Once again my bad luck continued and the board failed after only one week of running and has already gone back for a refund.
So having been looking at the I7 set up for a while I decided to sod the cash and go for it, buying 3x 2 gig sticks of OCZ gold 1600Mhz ram a P6T delux and the new I7 920 cpu. The reason I had not gone for this set up in the first place was because I had bought the QX9650 XTREME less than 12 months earlier costing 600 pounds and didnt want to make this expensive cpu redundent.

Ok on to the I7 setup.

Although I have only had this set up running for 2 days I would recomend it with out any hesitation.
Already I have the cpu running at 3.99 gig and the bclk at 190 and as for the fps its about 50 higher than i was getting on the extreme mobo . Thats in deathmatch by the way which is a game i play alot of still.

The only possible warning I would give is that when I got this board it came with a bent cpu pin and had to go straight back so I would advise that you ask for it to be inspected before its sent out as I have seen reports on other forums of I7 boards ariving with bent cpu pins.
And when you start to overcolck it be carefull of the voltages as my P6T delux was overvolting the cpu so you need to set them manualy.

I will also check other voltages soon as if they are overvolting as much as the cpu was I think that damadge will be possible to the cpu or poss the board.

The only real question I have is just how far will this set up go as on the old 775 stuff if you got over 400 fsb you knew you were doing quite well, and up near 500 fsb your kit was really fast but on these new boards and cpus what is expected from them.


OH YEA and thanks to scan and LEEP for all the help and sorry for the paperwork trail of returns from me. As I have told LEEP many times b4., If there is a faulty item sat on a shelf. It will be me that gets it almost every time...