Thanks, I certainly tried. I went with i5 4670k and msi z87 mpower; what an abosolutly amazing board. Zero problems: raid worked out of box with no drivers, the comp now has 7.9 rating on win 7 while before 7.1, the bios for that board is crisp and intuitive. Do not worry Asus, I still have your back with 2 760's.

No offence but by reading some reviews you could have figured that out before you bought the AMD setup, saved you the money and the hassle if you really wanted to have the quickest setup.

Nevertheless, AMD still -to my opinion- offers THE best performance vs value.

(and my 300FSB FX-8350 eats all core i7's alive, at their stock speeds of course, not talking about an overclocked K-series in all honesty)

Hmmm, my i5 scored 7.9 stock out of box all defaults loaded on bios. I think you might be misinformed. My i5 haswel k series chip with msi z78 mpower is quite possibly the best build I have ever done; I am making this decision based strictly on ease of use.....EVERYTHING works otb. And not just works but works very well. Raid 0 worked with 3 clicks on less than 3 minutes, overclocked to 4.7 stable in 3 steps, all drivers were installed and updated in less than 5 minutes, I cold boot in less than 12 seconds, my chip has yet to go over 70c and my home is about 75f.

I do not want to flame Asus nor anyone else on this thread but facts are facts. I have used asus boards for (gawds) 17 years maybe and my switch to msi was not without reservations, but the difference is night and day. Sorry.

I'm definitely not misinformed and my FX-8350 does perform top-notch compared to stock Intel systems on various benchmarks. That being said, I'm fully aware that once overclocked, Intel takes the lead again by a hefty margin. But that comes with a pricetag.

I just think that, in the heat of the emotions, you're kinda harsh on the AMD/Asus combo. I too and many others have had zero problems with their AMD setup. Mine too was hassle free install with just a matter of clicks here and there to get instant performance without issues.

I agree that , coming from an heavily overclocked i7-860, in the end I lost a little bit of performance. But it's all the other bells and whistles like UEFI BIOS, USB3, SATA3, and other things I'm fond of that made it all worth while.

Even so, MSI has had the reputation to be extremely unfriendly to work with and unstable in terms of "hit or miss" (you either have a great setup or a crappy one) over the past 4 - to 5 years and are now recovering by investing more into their motherboards and it shows of; people like yourself are very happy now with the latest MSI offerings. But that doesn't necessarily mean everything else is a waste.

A few years ago EVGA was thé hottest thing to own. I had the "Classified" series motherboard and I absolutely hated it. Didn't OC well, have had tons of problems with it, installation was a nightmare and all during the time everyone was screaming from the rooftops that EVGA was the **** ! So you see, every now and then, things go wrong. No one can explain why, they just do. And it seems that during the 20 years I'm into computers now, I have had my share of problems, issues, reinstalls, younameit. But right now, at this very moment, I could not be happier with my AMD/Asus combo. It's just so f*cking a shame that AMD can no longer keep up with Intel and Asus is only targeting top-performers (being Intel) in the ROG line. But we can't blame them, as this is what AMD is not aiming for at the moment...

I'm glad you're happy with your setup, so am I with mine. Another happy user instead of a frustrated one in a complex world of today !

True all that.

Ive had my ups and downs with lots of different company brands products. I never though i would use any other boards but gigabyte cause i was on a hot streak with them, then i had a some issues with a x79 gigabyte board and make me jump ship to a Rampage extreme. Sometimes everything works perfectly and sometimes im dreading troubleshooting for days/weeks. That's the wonderful world of building, modding, and having fun with PC's 🙂

I'm sorry for your bad experience but with all things just as stated above S**T Happens and you get a bad product. I can for another state that your 7.0/7.1 scores were probably due to a bad board which happens, I know personally because here on these forums I had purchased a Crosshair IV Formula that was bad and it took 3 RMA's before I got a good one and part of it's problem was Really Low Performance.

Now I've been a Tech for over 40 years plus owned 4 Different and Successful Computer Store and have seen a lot of different boards over the years. I have owned Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA, PC Chips and Technology, ECS to name a few and NEVER will I purchase a MSI Board again! as to Gigabyte I would worry greatly because I owned the Fire Starter Board that had a bad Northbridge chip (ran at 97c Idle) but I've had excellent success with ECS which is now making Asus Boards Asus Products and EVGA.

I can also prove that your low scores were not normal just by this:


As you can see it's a Phenom II x4 965 Black at stock speed on a Crosshair V Formula/Thunderbolt with 8gig's of DDR 3 1600.

Once again sorry for your bad experience with a Faulty Board, I also have had no problems with this setup other than my own Stupidity of blowing up Power Supplies.