Conclusion
Pass! This board took everything we threw at it and never complained. We filled every port (save the 1394) used the included USB 3.0 breakout and stressed it with no problems. We overclocked it and streamed again while benchmarking; no issues. We ran one hour of AIDA stability test while overclocked and streaming.
We did not make a single HWBot entry this time as we wanted to take this board to its multitasking limit; not overclock it for awards. We tried to crash it and choke it but nothing failed. If we hit the limit; it was a soft wall, because the systems rock solid stability under a moderate-high air overclock while serving media over two networks from two external and two internal logical drives while being benchmarked and stressed tells us more than any HWBot score ever could.
So where does this board fit? Almost anywhere. Add an i7 and Zen linux and you can use it as a VM server, you can stream video or serve files 24/7 while working, gaming, encoding… without a huge impact on performance or you can walk away and leave it running and it will burn about as much energy as an incandescent light bulb.
Could we have done more in the overclocking and benchmarking arena? Yes; we could have done plenty. What would it have told you about this board? Nothing that everyone else hasn’t already said. Would you have even thought about the fact that some boards can not do what they claim? Sure the ports are there and you can use every one but perhaps not concurrently, yeah they claim to have UEFI BIOS but drop your GPT formatted drive out of your old system in one and have a big 0 when windows tries to install without you having to go into BIOS and pray that the 2TB plus unlocker fixes the issue, yes they give you a manual that might get you somewhere… Get the drift here?
Well this board does not just get an award and it won nothing – It earned it!
And if anyone is interested in what happens with SRT on a slow SATA I drive?
