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RIP: Asus responds to its flaming motherboard

Posted on 18th Mar 2009 at 10:12 by Richard Swinburne with 7 comments

Asus has responded with a detailed report as to why its M3A-H/HDMI went up in flames and smoke. After publishing the first episode following the freshening smell of burnt electronics festered in our labs, Asus was keen to take the board back to Taiwan for further testing and let us know how it got on.

RIP: Asus responds to its flaming motherboard RIP: Asus responds to flaming motherboard

Here's its conclusion, with Asus' words and pictures (all we have done is tidy the English a little):

Tags asus, flame, m3a, mobo, motherboard, report, rip

RIP: Asus M3A-H/HDMI bursts into flames

Posted on 20th Feb 2009 at 14:26 by Richard Swinburne with 9 comments

All right, so the title sounds quite dramatic and I know the rule, "pics or it never happened" but unfortunately we were more concerned about yanking the power switch and reaching for the fire extinguisher before grabbing a camera. Sorry.

So we swapped out an Athlon 64 FX-62 dual-core for a Phenom X4 9600 B2 stepping chip in Harry's machine. Both have a similar TDP and Harry needs the two more cores that the Phenom has for his work.

Tags asus, flames, motherboard, rip

What else do we need?

Posted on 10th Feb 2009 at 16:18 by Richard Swinburne with 19 comments

What else can motherboard manufacturers do to increase the features and sell us new things?

We've got plenty of everything these days: SATA, USB, Gigabit Ethernet, HD sound - it's all "good enough". Motherboard manufacturers are stretching to include energy efficiency wherever they can, and more recently, extreme overclocking and cool designs to draw people into upgrading but for the most part the core hardware levels have remained the same for several years. We're still looking at six to eight USB on the rear I/O, six SATA (sometimes more) on the board and a couple of Gigabit Ethernet sockets.

What have northbridges become? Nothing much - what more can you do with PCI-Express? We've hit two/three/four lanes of x16 or x8 at a squillion MT/s and it's now all pretty normal.

Epic Fail: ECS X58B-A motherboard

Posted on 30th Jan 2009 at 11:05 by Richard Swinburne with 4 comments

We've tried and tried and tried over the last few months to get this motherboard to work, and eventually we sometimes just have to call it a day. And that's often one of the hardest things to accept because we've ploughed so much time into it.

One of the benefits of our new blog is that there's now a medium for us to forewarn you about those products that come into our labs but don't make it through the review process after many, many man hours trying - for example, this board has been on and off the test bench for nearly three months now. It gives us a chance to name and shame products that really don't meet the grade at all - we hope it won't happen too often but you never know... this could become more regular than we'd expect.

Epic Fail: ECS X58B-A motherboard Hardware Fail #1: ECS X58B-A Motherboard

To cut a long story short, our first board was sent back to ECS in Taiwan after our initial failed attempts to get it working. The company claimed it was faulty and sent another they guaranteed as working - it even came with a nice "It works!" sticker on the box.

RIP: DFI motherboards don't like photography

Posted on 27th Jan 2009 at 17:38 by Richard Swinburne with 5 comments

Urgh, another day, another hardware failure. I was aiming to have a review of DFI's LANParty 790FX-B M2RSH done this week - it's all tested (albeit slower in every-single-benchmark compared to the MSI DK 790GX Platinum), and I literally only unplugged everything for some photography, before putting it back on the test bench again for some more stress testing.

RIP: DFI motherboards don't like photography Hardware Death #1: DFI motherboards don't like photography

Sadly, the LED readout says only 88 and the fans spin up to their full flow without a hint of relent. Changing every piece of hardware later has no impact - something static must have hit it, which is surprising considering I passed on wearing nylon underwear today.

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Archive for the ‘motherboard’ tag

RIP: Asus responds to its flaming motherboard

RIP: Asus M3A-H/HDMI bursts into flames

What else do we need?

Epic Fail: ECS X58B-A motherboard

RIP: DFI motherboards don't like photography

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