Quote Originally Posted by 'Freddie',index.php?page=Thread&postID=172500#post 172500
Your knowledge is enormously valuable, and I wish I had known what you know to warn Owltoid in time. It's a lucky thing having you on this board.

But I want to defend the "idiot-user reviews on newegg." They are good for revealing certain kinds of facts but not others. They have to be read with discretion.

One of the things they are good at revealing is a product's inability to do something it's advertised to do. Ordinary customers notice this kind of thing easily. (Of course they often make mistakes about this so their complaints have to be investigated further. But they are good at ringing warning bells.)

That's the kind of problem we have here. So why did the Newegg reviews fail in this case? (If they did, I didn't read them.) Probably because these boards aren't selling in large numbers yet and because relatively few people are installing 12 GB in them.

If this had happened next year, when far more reviews will exist and far more people will have installed 12 GB of RAM, I think the Newegg reviews would have revealed this problem.
Thanks..
I love Newegg, but it's unfortunate that they don't have staff reviewing the reviews properly. I can't tell you how many times I see elaborate posts by people claiming to have "high" tech knowledge posting comments that are flatly wrong. (The 32-bit vs 64-bit memory issue is a BIG one.) For every 1 valuable review on Newegg, there are dozens that have to be completely ignored.. which is why I thoroughly research a product on professional reveiwer sites first - anandtech.com, xbitlabs.com, tomshardware.com, silentpcreview.com are some of my favorites, and forums with good info include hardforum.com, forums.extremeoverclocking.com, and overclockers.com. I go to the review sites to get generally good info on specific products, then search forums for detailed info on who's used specific components.

Anandtech.com has an article from Nov/Dec comparing X58 boards, and they had problems with MSI's X58 Eclipse even running well on 12GB memory (even though MSI said it was supported). Anandtech worked very hard with manufacturers to get them to push newer BIOS out, so hopefully many of those issues have been fixed. At any rate, if this machine is being built by someone else, they should notice that it's not working properly if the BIOS and 12GB are having issues. The manufacturer's comments are that no gamer should use 12GB, since generally the more memory you put in a machine, the slower you can overclock it. While true, there are certain aspects of gaming where more memory helps over pure memory speed - like multiboxing.