Post Cards from the Edge - AMD 780G, NVIDIA 790i, Gigabyte 680i
by Gary Key on April 5, 2008 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
For a bright-eyed teenager in 1976 that had high hopes of becoming a journalist one day, the satirical film Network was a revelation suggesting maybe choosing another profession would be a wise move. (Ed: Look at where that got you.) After years of intense investigative coverage of Watergate and the resulting rise in credibility of the journalistic profession, it seemed the right - maybe even honorable - field of study during the college years... until that fateful New Year’s Day in 1976.
In 1976, the country was celebrating its bicentennial, trying to put Watergate and the Vietnam War out of our minds, and looking forward to an election that would chart a new direction in American politics. (These subjects sound familiar 32 years later.) Top films of that year really did represent what we were going through, and to some degree what we would become in the near future.
Rocky found us in love with the underdog who never gave up. All the President’s Men gave us a short synopsis of the Watergate scandal from the perspective of the journalistic team (Bernstein/Woodward) that broke the story and proved that journalists were sexy, provided you resembled a young Robert Redford. The Bad News Bears allowed us to take a humorous look at sports obsessed parents realizing that winning at any cost had taken the joy out of playing the game for many kids (kids who would become today’s Soccer Moms and Dads).
I enjoyed many other movies that year with my friends, which more or less fit in with our very sarcastic yet humorous personalities. Some were dark like Taxi Driver, Marathon Man, The Omen, Obsession, and Carrie, while others were on the lighter side such as Silent Movie, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Silver Streak, and Mother, Jugs & Speed. Of course, we also had the breakout science fiction films, Logan’s Run and Futureworld. (Told you we were sarcastic.) All told, it was a decent year for film, and some thirty years later we still have Rocky, Pink Panther, and King Kong remakes.
However, there was one film that year that left a lasting impression on us; that film was the aforementioned and critically acclaimed Network. What All the President’s Men did to glorify the journalistic profession; Network succeeded in displaying the dark and seedy side of media. In retrospect, it also provided a fairly accurate glimpse of where TV/Print media was headed along with society. Sensationalism - some would say yellow journalism - sells and is what a large cross-section of society enjoys, whether they openly admit it or not.
In Network, Peter Finch played the aging news anchor, Howard Beale, who at one point in the film makes an impassioned speech that resulted in an extremely popular catch phrase of the time. He persuaded his watching audience to step outside and shout, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” This phrase struck a chord with mainstream America during that year and with us now.
It has been a couple of rough weeks for the motherboard team. Our best laid plans have been thwarted for a variety of reasons, most of which have us shouting the above phrase, and we are sure some of you feel the same way. Since the news and review sections are fairly quiet over the weekend, we thought it would be a good time to discuss those items that put a burr under our saddle - to address issues that our readership is having with the technology and companies that we cover on a periodic basis. Believe it or not, we rarely get to rant (and for very good reasons as you will see), but sometimes it's necessary to say what one thinks. So here is Rant Session #1 for your weekend enjoyment.
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duron266 - Thursday, April 10, 2008 - link
http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=kX3zQRILICo">http://it.youtube.com/watch?v=kX3zQRILICotake a few minutes time to watch and to learn about the truth of the advertised "fully support".
strikeback03 - Thursday, April 10, 2008 - link
what is that video trying to show? Everything is so blurry I have no idea. Can't tell what units of temperature measurement that is - either the room temp is very low if Fahrenheit, or that board gets quite toasty if Celsius. Is everything just shutting down when screen goes blank, not a BSOD?Visual - Thursday, April 10, 2008 - link
I too have no clue... I watched it without sound because I'm at work though, and so didn't want to comment in case the important details were there.It feels like it was filmed underwater for the most part, it is so wave-y. The poster's comments/description is not giving any details for the actual problem, and the last of his "(my thoughts)" blocks made absolutely no sense to me. The guy is also fiddling with the electronics out of the case, so who knows what he didn't plug correctly or shorted out with his meter or some other absurd user error...
And even if it's not a user error, what's his point? He might have gotten a faulty board or something, but that's not indicative of all the boards out there in general. So just return it and get a new one, and stop bitching about it...
But I'll watch it again, with audio, when I get home. Maybe I'm missing something important there.
Bikerskummm - Wednesday, April 9, 2008 - link
Lots more 790i corruption of data events being reported over at XSThe poll itself is a bit broken at the moment but a lot of the posts speak for themselves.....
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...">http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...
Bikerskummm - Wednesday, April 9, 2008 - link
Lots more 790i corruption of data events being reported here @XSThe poll itself is a bit broken at the moment but a lot of the posts speak for themselves.....
deruberhanyok - Wednesday, April 9, 2008 - link
Gary,Thank you so much for posting this. It's great to see the information out there in the open.
I'd love to see an article about a motherboard that states "but we couldn't finish the review because the board exploded" or "and the hard drives are still showing corruption / totally unusable even after all these years" especially when explanations, like those presented in this article, are given.
You wrote: "We are hoping the short-term fixes occur quickly over the next thirty days" which is great, but the companies didn't want to wait thirty extra days to release the products and so they should be reviewed as-is, data corruption and all.
bobaboo - Wednesday, April 9, 2008 - link
check gigabytes website the 9850 is now supported on their cpu list for 780g platform.Bios f3insider - Wednesday, April 9, 2008 - link
what does this mean? is it just a software update that's needed in order to let this gigabyte mobo operate and sustain the 125w or is it done by changing also the hardware ???bobaboo - Wednesday, April 9, 2008 - link
aparently they built the board with a 4 phase power setup but had to set up in the bios for the power distribution. Most people built this board with a 3 phase power distribution. Only Asrock built it with a 5 phase power setup and AsRock board is also saying their board supports the 9850.techflavor - Tuesday, April 8, 2008 - link
Thanks very much for the information about the mobos not really supporting the Phenom or 6400+ (125w).However, I need some help locating a nice motherboard that will support these. There is one problem though... the motherboard I am looking for needs to be MicroATX and our company also requires an integrated Serial (COM) port.
I've found ~15 MicroATX boards with 4-5 of them with Serial ports; however, I'm not sure if they fully support Phenom (9600 for example) or the Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Windsor (125w).