P6T WS PRO vs Gigabyte UD3R?

[ncage]

I think i have narrowed my decision between the two boards in the title. I will be getting either a 920 or 930 proc but haven't decided yet. Whats important to me is overclockability, stability, and to use all RAM slots without any issues (stability or decrease overclock). I won't ever do SLI. I'm not a big gamer. Currently have Core2 Quad overclocked to 3.8ghz and i'll probably be happy with 4ghz . I'm going to start out with 12GB of memory (4x3) and will probably add another 12GB sometimes this year. Any help would be appreciated.

It looks like the p6t has SAS which is really cool. It don't have to worry about USB3/SATA6 because it comes with a free card and as far as i know thats as good as onboard. Also it looks like it supports ECC memory. I hope that doen't mean that i have to use expensive ECC Memory.

 

[GearJunkie]

I have the P6T WS Pro and really like it. It's been extremely fast and stable. I use it for Photoshop, Lightroom, and BFBC2. I initially installed 12GB of RAM but found that I never used more than 4 - 5 GB of RAM while doing image editing, so I sold it and bought a faster set of 6 GB. I only do light overclocking because cool and stable are more important to me. I'm running my i7 920 at 3.0 GHz, with the ram at 15x200MHz at 7-7-7-20. (And, no, you don't have to use ECC memory.) The CPU is at 1.2V, and the RAM is at 1.6V. I really like that the board has no legacy connectors to slow it down.

There are a lot of negative reviews of this board on Newegg, but most of them are due to problems with the SAS. Since I don't use this, I can't comment on it.

My only downside has been ASUS support. A few months after this board was released, and the P55 boards were released, ASUS stopped supporting it. They have updated the BIOS a few times, but there are virtually no mature Windows 7 drivers, nor do ASUS's utilities work with Windows 7. It's not that big a deal though. The built in Windows 7 drivers are very good, and there are 3rd party apps that replace ASUS' utilities. Lousy ASUS suppurt is pretty typical though.

Overall, this has been my favorite board since my DFI NForce 4 Ultra-D!

 

[jaqie]

Between something else and gigabyte, I will always choose gigabyte hands down... they just smegging work. To me there is nothing more important than something just working so well and so long that you tend to forget it's there.

 

[Rubycon]

Do you have SAS drives? Otherwise you won't need (or want) a SAS controller. The controller is very low end (as it has standard SATA headers instead of proper SFF-8087 connectors. The issues reported is its BIOS address space overlapping with VGA BIOSes as well as the Intel IOstor BIOS when used simultaneously.

It's a good board and will o/c to 210MHz BCLK with no issues (my experience). ECC support is there for the W series Xeon processor. ECC is not required at all with either CPU but if you have a W series CPU you can use unbuffered ECC DDR3 if you want.

 

[ncage]

I have the P6T WS Pro and really like it. It's been extremely fast and stable. I use it for Photoshop, Lightroom, and BFBC2. I initially installed 12GB of RAM but found that I never used more than 4 - 5 GB of RAM while doing image editing, so I sold it and bought a faster set of 6 GB. I only do light overclocking because cool and stable are more important to me. I'm running my i7 920 at 3.0 GHz, with the ram at 15x200MHz at 7-7-7-20. (And, no, you don't have to use ECC memory.) The CPU is at 1.2V, and the RAM is at 1.6V. I really like that the board has no legacy connectors to slow it down.

There are a lot of negative reviews of this board on Newegg, but most of them are due to problems with the SAS. Since I don't use this, I can't comment on it.

My only downside has been ASUS support. A few months after this board was released, and the P55 boards were released, ASUS stopped supporting it. They have updated the BIOS a few times, but there are virtually no mature Windows 7 drivers, nor do ASUS's utilities work with Windows 7. It's not that big a deal though. The built in Windows 7 drivers are very good, and there are 3rd party apps that replace ASUS' utilities. Lousy ASUS suppurt is pretty typical though.

Overall, this has been my favorite board since my DFI NForce 4 Ultra-D!

Thanks for the awesome reply very helpful. Ya i actually already ordered the gigabyte board and after your writeup i'm glad i did especially since it sounds like asus has forgot about the board.