Where Are The Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 Motherboards?

[JASTECH]

How do I correct that error in mine to speed them up?

 

[JASTECH]

I already PM'd the moderator but maybe you might know the answer. I can't seem to change my Profile. As you see my post above with all the "Have It" and "Ordered", I need to remove all of them as I have all the parts and am using the system now. I keep changing it in Profile then click "update" and the screen refreshes and nothing has changed. Any ideas?



Moderator fixed it for me, Thanks MOD!!

 

[TheBeagle]

Good Evening Everyone.

It is my understanding that yet another BIOS revision has hit the street. This time it's Rev. 5Fi. Hopefully Mr. Gary will be able to post a link for it IF it's worth a damn. I sure wish the Gigabyte BIOS elves would get their workshop cleaned up and produce a solid BIOS revision. Maybe this will be "the one." Say a prayer. TheBeagle :beer:

 

[Salamandar]

I think BIOS for this Mobo are maturing fast, hopefully it will come out good enough.

 

[Al Capone CC]

Good Evening Everyone.

It is my understanding that yet another BIOS revision has hit the street. This time it's Rev. 5Fi. Hopefully Mr. Gary will be able to post a link for it IF it's worth a damn. I sure wish the Gigabyte BIOS elves would get their workshop cleaned up and produce a solid BIOS revision. Maybe this will be "the one." Say a prayer. TheBeagle

Well, that said, let's put some myths to rest concerning the GA-X38-DQ6...

First of all, Mr. Beagle's mobo was not defective. He merely encountered a bios error most likely due to clock settings, either for his cpu or ram timings. The easy fix on this mobo is keep hitting F2 on restart. This loads default bios settings on the secondary bios rom area. This is a normal occurance on this board if you push anything out of usable areas. Thats WHY it's a Dual Bios mobo. The hard way to do it is to short the CMOS jumper that only has 2 pins, and no jumper. Simple enough, I used a screwdriver (before I figured out the F2 trick) and made contact for 30 seconds with the PSU unplugged (again, standard for any mobo).

Secondly, Creative soundcard issues? NO WAY?!! LOL.... Creative has had issues since day one, especially when a new OS comes out. There is no reason that the onboard high def audio couldn't have been used with the Creative POS unplugged to trouble-shoot this issue. Don't be greedy, do you really need that extra 2 fps in World in Conflict to justify spending $150 on another junk Creative card?

Third, no-one needs to post any link to any Gigabyte bios update. Use you @Bios live updater. As long as you select the Taiwan server #1 as the FTP server, it will find the newestr bios, beta or not, and update it within a pre-school easy-to-use GUI.

Fourth, NO SLI FOR YOU! This board does NOT support SLI! Blame Nvidia, because the mobo COULD do it if Nvidia would allow support in their drivers. Bottom line, so far, if you want SLI, buy an Nvidia chipset based mobo and suffer. This mobo DOES however support ATI Crossfire to the N'th degree!!!!! Golf clap for open source driver developement!

I got my board from NCIX with small hassles, and the board is great. It has small teething issues, that are almost all worked out already (thanks to swift bios updates). I am running an INtel E6850 1333 fsb Core 2 OCed @ 3.83 with air on a Thermalright Ultra 120Extreme heatsink, and a pair of Patriot PC800 2gb double sided LL sticks running at 850 w/2.10 volts. I would've bought PC1066 4gb kit, but no-one makes a 4gb 2-piece PC1066 ram kit, they are all 4 piece kits, and that creates more of a heat pocket than its worth. Trust me on this one, if you want 4gigs, go with a 2-piece kit. Running Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit, I score 5.9 on all but CPU and video. My E6850 @3.0GHZ was scoring 5.7, I OCed it to 3.83, then it scored 5.8. My video is a Sapphire Radeon HD2900XT 1GB Spcl Edition DDR4 card, and it scores 5.8, OCed or not.

I am happy, content, and still have some room to play with OC's even where I'm at. This board is stable, runs well, and has ample support, drivers and other wise, but if you are a noob to bleeding edge tech, you can buy with confidence, install it at stock speeds, make it work, THEN start your learning curve. Don't EVER install any OS overclocked, or expect miracles out of the box. Every new decent piece of hardware needs to mature somewhat, and stabilize while also getting faster. Part of the reason I bought my Sapphire...it's only gotten faster over the last 6-months. But as far as the Gigabyte board goes, it's good right now, and was good since the F5f bios. No worries.


Cheers.

Any other questions, please make them specific and clear. I would tell anyone, just buy the board, and run it. It will work. Just don't overcoplicate things right away or get nuts on OCing till you have a stable OS.


One other final note, the driver DVD from Gigabyte does NOT have Matrix RAID drivers for the Intel controller (stupid oversight), so if you want to RAID up on the ICH9 chipset, get the drivers for the OS install first (either from Intel or Gigabyte). I'm running a pair of WD RE2 500gb drives on the Intel Matrix Controller....very nice. Very stable, and throughput is the best I've seen.

Good luck all,

Al Capone

 

[Al Capone CC]

An additional footnote, I have noticed that on my external USB header (running an NZXT full tower all aluminum case with a Silverstone Strider 1000w PSU-70 amp rails) that the standby power is at full power mode with the system shut down. I know of lot of you file/torrent propagators tend to leave your machines on 24/7 and connected to the net with broadband (all your little knuckles should be spanked with a ruler, remember the DOS attacks a few years back?), and this mobo seems to leave full USB hot plug power enabled even at a full shutdown. I'm still not shure if this is a Vista issue, a mobo issue, or a matter of the "Intel Turbo Speed Boot Enhancement" feature (which uses a USB flash drive to store boot data and cache OS handles).

But what I DO know, is that this GA-X38-DQ6 board keeps my platters spinning 24/7 on my external 2.5" 20gb notebook drive I planted into a Coolmax enclosure unless I unplug the USB cable.

Good for charging cell phones or your PS3 controllers, but not so good for external USB hard drive life-spans.

Food for thought.

DoS attack: see definition as follows http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

 

[TheBeagle]

Good Afternoon Mr. Capone,

Thanks for your enlightening recent postings. However, just to set the record straight, I did ALL of the remedial steps you mentioned, plus a few more, and the original X38 board still would not POST - it was just one of those unfortunate situations where the board was actually defective - of course, with no disrespect expressed concerning your insightful opinion on the matter.

With regard to the PCIe X-fi sound card, the net cost for the OEM version was approximately $38.00 USD. I found that to be a quite reasonable expense to see how the new PCIe sound card would function, and especially since it worked out so well, I don't regret that expenditure at all. Additionally, again in an exploratory mode, the X-Fi board was removed and reinstalled (several times) to see if it affected the X38 board's performance - it didn't.

I have found that Gigabyte does not always post their latest beta BIOS on their Taiwan server in a timely fashion. Mr. Gary has a lead on any new beta BIOS revisions usually well before the rest of the world even knows about them. Also, if possible, Gary won't post a link for a new Beta BIOS until he personally tests the revision. If Gary can determine that a new beta BIOS is likely crap, then there usually is no posted link. Thank you Gary. Admittedly, the @BIOS utility is a handy feature, but I still have reservations on flashing a BIOS in Windows - I guess I'm a bit old fashioned in that regard.

I likewise enjoy a 5.9 rating on all rated factors on my X38 rig in Vista 64, and I'm not extremely OCing it. Right now its humming along at 356x9=3.20GHz. And that's actually a quite reasonable OC for a Q6600 on air cooling. The problems that I encountered were related to the interaction between the CPU and memory ratios. However, the latest BIOS seems to have improved that situation.

We are all pleased to hear that you are fully satisfied with your X38 board, and we wish you well in your future endeavors in personal computing.

Best regards to everyone. TheBeagle :beer:

 

[JASTECH]

Hmmm, (myself) walks over to closet and gets out a #5 bag of yummy milk bones. Opens said bag and reaches in and takes out one bone and starts to hand it to Beagle, looks into the eyes of Beagle, then puts bone back in bag. I do not close the #5 bag of milk bones though, I just set it down in front of Beagle! Good job Beagle!!

 

[TheBeagle]

Good Evening Mr. JasTech.

Your gracious support and delicious milk bones were sincerely appreciated.

Best regards. TheBeagle :beer:

 

[Salamandar]

Clearly creative has problems with making good 64bit drivers for the X-Fi cards, I tried the Audigy 2 ZS and the SB live! and they work fine but not the X-Fi, I even tried the X-Fi 2.15.0002 drivers and they seem to be better than the 2.15.0003 yet they also give me BSOD from time to time.

I'm still waiting for some good 4x1 DDR2 1066, I was supposed to recieve either a kingston brand or a super talent but my order will delayed for some time next week " Hopefully".

Jastech..... are u plugging the SATA HD to the yellow or purple SATA plugs on the mobo ?

 

[JASTECH]

Salamander, the yellow ones.

 

[Blazer7]

ok guys. I'm sorry to spoil your party here but you must see this : http://forums.anandtech.com/me...ead=y&STARTPAGE=1#last

Have a look at renethx's post and the 2 links there.

 

[TheBeagle]

Hello Mr. Blazer.

Glad to see you also posting on this Thread as well. Many thanks for the reference to those two very interesting articles. As has been said, "Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water ....."

There might well be something to the rumor about unresolved issues with the X38 chipset, since it sure doesn't make much sense to launch a virtually identical X48 board within a few months of the X38 launch. A brief review of the quite good photos of the X48 board seem to indicate that it's a virtual clone of the X38.

VERY interesting to be sure. Again, thanks for the heads up on the X48 board. TheBeagle :beer:

 

[MichaelD]

This board has the heatsinks UNDER the motherboard; one of them appears to be directly under the CPU socket.

That means you cannot use an aftermarket heatsink that requires an under-board mounting plate like the Tuniq Tower. What good is a super-overclockable motherboard if you can't use any good heatsinks with it?

I own a P965-DS3 and love it. Though I'm not currently using a monster HSF, the option is there if I want it. I think Gigabyte messed up with this under-board cooling system.

 

[Salamandar]

Originally posted by: MichaelD
This board has the heatsinks UNDER the motherboard; one of them appears to be directly under the CPU socket.

That means you cannot use an aftermarket heatsink that requires an under-board mounting plate like the Tuniq Tower. What good is a super-overclockable motherboard if you can't use any good heatsinks with it?

I own a P965-DS3 and love it. Though I'm not currently using a monster HSF, the option is there if I want it. I think Gigabyte messed up with this under-board cooling system.

This heatsink is removable!

 

[JASTECH]

Here it is for those who want to read it.



Intel's next best high-end chipset since the X38, the X48 will arrive as soon as next month and one of the first manufacturers to get ready for its release is non other than Gigabyte. The Tier-1 board maker already has the design ready as the new chip doesn't require much work so a few tweaks on the 'old' X38 design did the trick. The first pictures of the DDR2-boasting GA-X48-DQ6 have now reached the interweb and show that the board looks similar to the X38-DQ6. The cooling solution is full-copper and pretty discrete, the board has two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots with Crossfire support, four DDR2-1066 DIMMs, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, eight of USB 2.0 connectors and eight SATA 3.0 Gbps ports. The X48-DQ6 has 'official' support for the 1600 MHz FSB and should arrive by the end of the year.

 

[JASTECH]

Question: Then what about those of us with the motherboard? Will they replace it via the vendor (Newegg) or RMA them to Gigabyte?

 

[JASTECH]

Also, I hooked up my Monsoon speakers to the new motherboard and there is no sound out of the rear jacks. I tried plugging into other jacks and the mb piked that up and had me select what speakers they were. Sill nothing for the rear, so I unplugged the front speakers and plugged the rear ones in the front jack and they work fine. The realtek Audio chip is updated via Microsoft updates. And yes I tried it before the update too. Any ideas? Maybe the X48 will be better? Thanks, JAS

 

[TheBeagle]

Good Evening Everyone.

According to a VERY knowledgeable source that some of you fellow members are familiar with, the X48 boards were not scheduled to launch until February of 2008. Early comparison testing of X38 versus X48 boards did not exhibit much more than a 1% increase in speed with the X48 chipset, using the same components. Although the X48 boards will accept high speed components that will be available in the future, the X38 boards are indeed certified for Penryn and the 1333 FSB components. The source indicated that both chipsets have their share of anomalies and need continued BIOS refinements to achieve their design objectives.

Therefore, it would appear that those of us with the X38 boards will not be left along side the road immediately, but, like with most computer products, we will be faced with the newer and "better" components of future. As long as Gigabyte can finalize a stable BIOS revision that will allow for a reasonable OC, and works with Penryn, I will consider the investment in this board to be satisfactory.

It is my intention to keep working with this X38 board to achieve that operational stability, and hope that Santa brings some improvements that I can use. Best regards. TheBeagle :beer:

 

[Salamandar]

Originally posted by: TheBeagle
Good Evening Everyone.

According to a VERY knowledgeable source that some of you fellow members are familiar with, the X48 boards were not scheduled to launch until February of 2008. Early comparison testing of X38 versus X48 boards did not exhibit much more than a 1% increase in speed with the X48 chipset, using the same components. Although the X48 boards will accept high speed components that will be available in the future, the X38 boards are indeed certified for Penryn and the 1333 FSB components. The source indicated that both chipsets have their share of anomalies and need continued BIOS refinements to achieve their design objectives.

Therefore, it would appear that those of us with the X38 boards will not be left along side the road immediately, but, like with most computer products, we will be faced with the newer and "better" components of future. As long as Gigabyte can finalize a stable BIOS revision that will allow for a reasonable OC, and works with Penryn, I will consider the investment in this board to be satisfactory.

It is my intention to keep working with this X38 board to achieve that operational stability, and hope that Santa brings some improvements that I can use. Best regards. TheBeagle :beer:

Yes I've been following the x48 info around the net, Mobo vendors say it is nothing but a newer revision of the x38 chip and u can see that by comparing the pictures of the gigabyte x38 and the x48.

They say it doesn't offer any advantage in preformance or add any thing new so they wonder why intel chose a new name for the chip?

Also some vendors say that their top of the line x38 has no problem working with next generation Intel CPUs or running DDR2 1333 which will come at the end of the year.

check this out, it will summerize it all : The inquirer . net

 

[Blazer7]

Yes, I?ve seen this too and there is another article on the inquirer with a link to the same site that renethx posted yesterday. This whole X38 - X48 thing is weird to say the least.

 

[Salamandar]

I do not know whats wrong with the x38, my mobo is working fine, intel is not telling and mobo makers are not telling either..............

Some say x38 has some problems while using some of the PCI e 4x and 8x mainly I/O cards.

 

[JASTECH]

Salamander, you asked if i was using the yellow SATA2 connections on the mb? Would there be a differents in speed? Also, I noticed one LAN connection shows 100mb/s and the other indicates 1 gb/s. I was asking due to my internet seems to be a bit slow. I just ran a speed test and it shows 627kbps, so I was wanting to get the most out of it. So, the X38 has some problems with PCIe slots, but if they give us RMA's for the X48 what about the DDR2 RAM we have? I would want the same 4gigs in DDR3 but can't affors to pay them prices. Thanks, JAS

 

[Blazer7]

Mr JASTECH,

I do not know if Gigabyte will grant you an RMA for an X48 mobo but if they do you won?t have to worry about changing your memory. If you take a look at the photos you will see that Gigabyte?s GA-X48-DQ6 comes with 4xDDR2 slots. (Notice the print on the board between the DDR slots ? DDRII800/1066)

 

[JASTECH]

Blazer7, I sit corrected, lol. Hmm, interesting they chose to stick with DDRII, but it's fast and cheap so why not? What about the question on the SATA II and the LAN connections? If you care to make a input. Thanks, JAS