I had a few problems initially when I installed this motherboard. XFX had sent us two of them for some reason, so I installed the first one I grabbed. I could not get this one to work (Windows wouldn’t install, hard drives/CD drives not recognized, etc.) so I swapped it out with the other one. This one seems to work fine, leading me to believe that the first one must have been broken. Here are a few pictures of the motherboard installed and running.
As you can see, the northbridge heatsink is not in the way of anything, which is good since I have a huge heatsink (Thermalright AX-7) on my CPU and a large heatpipe cooler on my GPU, and everything fits just fine. The 5 PCI slots will be enough for pretty much anybody, although I know some boards come with 6. Everything seems to fit well, I didn’t have any problems installing my heatsink like I have with other motherboards due to the capacitors around the CPU socket. All in all, a very well laid out board.
When I installed Windows and installed the drivers from the included CD, I immediately went to Nvidia’s website to download the newest drivers. After I installed these, I noticed that when burning CDs the buffer would fluctuate like crazy, and burning a normal 650 MB CD took over 5 minutes on my 52x burner.
I later found out that Nvidia had removed the acclerated IDE drivers from the latest driver pack, due to some problems associated with them. I finally found a driver pack that included the drivers on a forum, and after that my CDs burned fine.
This is completely Nvidia’s fault, not XFX’s, so I hold no ill towards them as a result. Also, since this board is brand new and (as far as I know) not available on the market yet, there was a lack of downloads for it from XFX on their website, but I’m sure as soon as it is widely released they will have more downloads available.
The manual has to be one of the best motherboard manuals that I have ever read. It is written in clear English, instead of the “Engrish” that most motherboard manuals contain. It completely outlines every feature, jumper, connector, and BIOS setting available, with lots of pictures and diagrams.
I wish more motherboard manufacturers would hire people who speak fluent English to write their manuals as it is clear that XFX has done. The only thing I found lacking was the fact that the SPDIF install is a little confusing.
Other than the few caveats explained above, the installation was smooth. Let’s check out the BIOS features.
