Cool and thanks.
What setting did that board need vs your other mobo's?
I did not adjust it, and left it on auto. In fact, other than vDIMM, vIMC, and vCPU, I do not change anything in BIOS, other than enabling XMP and adjsuting multis. This is in part becuase of how I measure VRM power consumption, and secondly because I want to show just how really easy it is to clock IVB. vDIMM and vIMC should be taken care of by XMP settings, but many many boards do not adjust vIMC even if XMP profile dictates such a change, so I manually set them anyway, and the vCPU change is pretty obvious, of course. It also gives me a good idea of just how mature the BIOS is, to measure other changes and see how the boards react differently on auto settings. The more the OEM does for the end user automatically, the better, IMHO. We pay big bucks for PCs, so ease of use is a priority for that expense for many.
Nice to see a Gigabyte "high end" board not covered in guns and bullets. They may have moved away from their "Rainbow Colours" but the Sniper Series have been just as tacky.
Great revue Dave but shame on you for spelling colour wrong
I think Gigabyte has listened to user feedback about heatsink design, nevermind that's why we have a mATX Sniper, as users demanded it. Perhaps we will see a mITX board in the future too...
He's only human and not a Terminator, yeah Dave smarten up lol!
It's a small board and is why I'm thinking it's lacking the gay bullets and shit
See above.
My feeling with the core3d chips will never be a positive one. I was looking forward to the updates of the sniper/assassins or w/e without the gunsinks, but then I saw they downgraded the audio. I'd rather have the decent realtek solution in the biostar than this. Daniel_k sums it up
http://forums.creative.com/showthread.php?t=697046&page=2&p=532625&viewfull=1#post532625
Yeah it has been pretty obvious the Recon 3D and it's onboard solution is a pretty dumbed down chip compared to the previous X-Fi chips. They have clearly taken the easy way out and just simplified down to the point of it not being much better than an onboard solution.
I don't fully agree with Daniel_K's stance. He is a bit biased against Creative anyway, simply becuase he makes alternative drivers for audio products. He does to a lot for the enthusiast community, and he does touch on very valid "pros", but many of his listed "cons" are just nit-picking in my opinion, since he doesn't have the actual hardware at the time that post was made...he might now.
I use what many would consider high-end audio daily, and I must say, I really prefer the Recon3D chips that as all I've tested so far have been butloads ahead of X-Fi solutions to my ears. Daniel_K's posts admits that 3D positioning is better with these new chips, and what truly matters to most users is the actual quality of the audio, which can be greatly influenced with circuit design. Many other add-in solutions offer the option to swap out OpAmps for just this same reason.
Dont get me wrong though, overall I generally agree with that there post of his, but I think he's a bit too focused on shortcomings for overall audio design, when it might be better to have a simplified, more gamer-oriented DSP, which he does say it kind of is, anyway. And he does say that his opinion was based on looknig at the software, too, anyway.
The big thing to me is that is does offer very decent audio for gaming and music playback, while 3D positioning is better than it has ever been, but yes, the recording side of the chip is a bit lacking. One of the X-Fi's strengths was MIDI/ASIO latency, but since more users that will end up with the Recon3D products won't really use those functions anyway, it's not that big of a deal that they are gone.
