The first board we received had quite serious issues, and while we accept this happens sometimes things only half got better when we received a new board. At first the old board had serious overheating issues -- the aluminium heatsink would get far too hot and it would require active cooling otherwise our 125W AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ would lock up when it was running our benchmarks. Thankfully, this second board didn't suffer the same problems -- the heatsink gets warm, but now not to the point where it starts glowing red.

What has remained is the finicky memory issues that cause "C1" stalls before POST: the motherboard is generally quite fussy and it isn't clever enough to work out what's wrong and work around it like some other boards we've used. It didn't like our Kingston PC-9600 at all and our Corsair 6400-C3 didn't like one set of slots, then the other, but then decided it //was now going to work in the original slots after some OCZ FlexXLC PC9200 memory was tried. The OCZ also suffered the same sporadic "I'm going to work... and now I'm not" problems, depending on air pressure, time of day, flying pigs, whether I had eaten breakfast that morning... you name it.

Once it's working you may be tempted to leave it alone, but because it requires an investment in time to find the performance niche and stability where everything just seems to work, this can require the usual BIOS mishaps and CMOS resets.

After some considerable time of not having much fun we fiddled with the drive strengths, tweaked a few timings and voltages //just a touch and suddenly everything began to sing -- it was like night and day. While we found it surprisingly not to be any faster in our tests, the "feel" of the system (I hope some of you will realise what I mean) just seemed clearly superior.