P67 Extreme6 or Z68 Extreme7

[Jizzo]

Hi, I'm in the process of putting together a new system spec based around an Intel i7 2600K, 16 Gb RAM and multiple HDDs. Main use is media server, VMs, web development & CS5. Unlikely it will be used for games, but I may dabble with overclocking. The 10 SATA ports on the Extreme6 led me to Asrock and this is the main reason for choosing this board. However, the Z68 Extreme7 is about to be released soon. Anyone know when?

Question is, do I buy the P67 Extreme6 now, or wait for the Z68 Extreme7? Will the Z68 offer anything over the P67 that will be useful for this system as I'm not intending to use it for gaming? I have thought about SSDs, but would use one as a boot drive rather than additional cache (feature of the Z68 chipset) However, SSDs seem very unreliable at present so I will probably wait and use my existing HDDs.

Any thoughts?

[kick]

Re: P67 Extreme6 or Z68 Extreme7

If you are going to wait for a higher z68 board release all you can do for guesswork now is compare the p67 exteme4 and z68 extreme 4.

The p67 extreme 6 has a few more features/vrm etc than the extreme 4 ,I personally am just glad I didnt spend the extra cash on the mr fatality face in the bios p67.

you know the extra features with z68,I think something is dropped compared to p67 ,dual lan? not sure im too lazy to go checking articles,maybe its the fdd connector .

Lets just say If I had been offered a free upgrade to a z68 extreme 4 when I was exchanging my b2 p67 extreme 6 for a b3 I wouldnt have taken it.
If there had been a z68 extreme 6 upgrade for free ,I probably would have tried it.

One other consideration is with a brand new board type there will probably be lots of bios revisions and perhaps a few bugs,even tho z68 is p67 with a couple of bells n whistles or maybe like h67 and p67 combined.

ssd seems to be where its going,as the cost comes down.Hybrid drives are dying out.My 60g sata 2 one has been v reliable since I put it in 6 months ago and no more defrags is good.

[Jizzo]

Re: P67 Extreme6 or Z68 Extreme7

Thanks for the reply! The guesswork is the tricky bit & I was hoping to get more of an idea about the release date of the Extreme7.....

Anyone tried using multiple HDDs and overclocking with 16 Gb RAM? I've found Corsair Memory Vengeance Blue 16GB DDR3 1600 MHz CAS 9 at a very good price and wondered if a Coolermaster Hyper 212+ would fit with this RAM installed?

Thanks in advance!

[radier]

Re: P67 Extreme6 or Z68 Extreme7

The expansion of Z68 is continued into the Extreme7 – possibly named to push it above the P67 Extreme6. Along with the improved ferrite chokes, we have 10 SATA ports and an NF200 chip to increase the PCIe lanes to the five full length PCIe slots. I was told by the designer that a switch is in place, so that if one GPU is used, the connectors bypass the NF200 chip so we don’t see the 2-3% decrease in performance that it brings. Though at some point it would be worth testing the following scenario – no NF200 but two GPUs at 8x/8x, or NF200 present with 16x/16x. In most situations (i.e. those where memory to PCIe exchange is low), I would expect the 8x/8x design to perform better, as it doesn’t have that constant 2-3% decrease in performance.

[Jizzo]

Re: P67 Extreme6 or Z68 Extreme7

Thanks for the picture! It confirms what I'd read about the board and wonder if this is going to be too expensive with the emphasis biased towards multiple gaming video cards. It would be great if manufacturers considered the non-gamers and produced a cheaper board with multiple SATA ports for home media server type setups.

[Jizzo]

Re: P67 Extreme6 or Z68 Extreme7

I went for the Extreme6, couldn't justify the wait, probable extra expense etc!

I was given a Toshiba SSD (THNSNC064GMMJ) and installed Win 7 x64. All went well untill I installed the Intel RST driver and then it BSOD on bootup. If I remove the Intel RST driver all is OK. Driver version ends in 1008.

[kick]

Re: P67 Extreme6 or Z68 Extreme7

My driver version is the same as yours.
From the information given.


1.Might seem obvious but make sure everything is done under ahci ,windows installation ,the lot.
Enable all advanced sata in uefi'
(If you reload all bios defaults it will go to ide mode).

2.Make sure the ssd is set up properly no defrag /all that and firmware version is correct check it on toshiba site.

3.Make sure iastor /rst is done at the right point in the installation,it should be automatic .

4.My ssd is on sata 3 port 0, the first one as yours probably is.

5. Check the ssd is recognised properly and that the 100mb system reserved partition is on it.

6.I originally installed everything under bios 1.3 i think it was on my b2 board,I have tried bioses 1.3 1.33 1.5 and 1.6 on my b2 board ,but still have the 1.5 bios that my b3 board came with loaded.

7. There is a new beta bios for the z68, to improve rst..and there is a beta bios for extreme 6 ,altho it doesnt say anything about rst for the extreme 6 bios , I may try it anyway, when I get a chance.

[Jizzo]

Re: P67 Extreme6 or Z68 Extreme7

Thanks for the pointers ;) I'm not in front of the system now, but will check later.

All set to AHCI and SSD connected to Intel SATA3 port 0.

Haven't checked the firmware version yet, but I did disable various services like prefetch, defrag, indexing ..
.
I tried the auto install from the Asrock CD and then reloaded the OS and did manual installations of more up to date drivers. Both methods produced BSOD using 1008 RST drivers. I've just downloaded RST drivers from the Gigabyte forum here where collection of tools and drivers is maintained.

SSD seems to be rocnised correctly as everything else works OK. I never let Win7 create the 100Mb partition and always manually modify the partitions during setup. Have done this on countless builds, so don't see this as a reason for the BSOD.

Many thanks again