Bull Dozer

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Introduction

Buying a motherboard these days is quite a difficult task since, in terms of performance, there is very little to choose between the top contenders. Brand loyalty is one route but leaves the feeling that something good could be missed out on through lack of awareness of the various offerings. Manufacturers have had a tricky time and most have been forced into an “arms race” of adding more and more features to make their boards stand out. A recent example is the trend towards putting large amounts of copper onboard with little performance gain to show for it but at a disproportionate cost. Why did they do it? Simply because people choose motherboards based on reading the specifications in a quantitative fashion. We think that far greater value for the customer can be attained by putting features (software and hardware) in the package that gives them tangible benefits.

ASUS are a prime example of this. Their strategy is to lead through innovation and not follow the herd. Readers will already be familiar with products such as the Eee range and other home entertainment products they have developed. The ROG (Republic of Gamers) brand is rapidly gaining popularity with extreme gaming and overclocking workshops and seminars being held in many countries. The selection of prizes given out at these events shows how closely ASUS understand the needs and aspirations of their target audience. We’ve been impressed for some time now with the feature set of ASUS motherboards and think it’s now time to review them with a focus on those features and not a plethora of benchmarks comparing 20+ boards that happen to perform within 1% of each other. Today the board in question is the Maximus III Gene, a flagship socket 1156 product for Intel i5 and i7 (8XX series) processors.

Board Features

A brief summary of the main features follows: Removed to save space – please refer to www.asus.com for more details

Board Layout

The box comes in a nice package that prominently displays the ROG logo showing that this is an enthusiast and gamers motherboard.

It truly is Windows 7 ready and everything was detected correctly during our 64-bit Windows 7 Pro setup. Installing the additional drivers and utilities that come with the enclosed CD is still highly recommended though.

The onboard X-Fi supports EAX 4.0 for advanced HD sound and comes with a filter to eliminate background noise while recording. We tested in both 5.1 and 7.1 channel modes with no distortion and good separation of channels.

There are so many features that the front and back of the box are not enough and an extra flap is used to elaborate further. It also adds to the “gift box” effect and may make a nice present this holiday season.

All these features on a board that’s not cluttered and is mATX! As well as the SLI/CrossFire capabilities we can see that it is passively cooled with a big heatsink in the bottom right. There is a twelve phase power design consisting of eight phase CPU power, two phase VTT power and two phase memory power. There are 7 SATA-2 ports and an E-SATA port header. The four DDR3 slots operate in dual channel mode and support memory up to 16GB DDR3-2133 through the BIOS. The red button allows for recovery without clearing the BIOS if settings are too extreme during overclocking. The addition of an on/off switch helps testers or those not using a traditional case. A legacy PCI slot is there for that old PCI RAID controller etc. you just cannot bear to part with. RAID 0 and 1 is supported on the SATA-2 ports and will be cost-effective until SSDs become mainstream.

PS/2 keyboard connectors are the only look to the past and 8-channel audio is fully supported and configurable when the full audio drivers are installed. The USB port on its side is actually the ROG connector and allows a notebook to monitor and configure the PC remotely. In practice this worked well with our Eee PC 901 using the supplied cable. Firewire and E-SATA (there’s another E-SATA and Firewire connector on the other side of the board for cases which have those connectors on them) are included. The addition of a CMOS clear button on the back panel will please overclockers and save tension reaching for a jumper with a pair of long-nosed pliers while holding a torch between teeth and aiming it with tongue manipulation….

Included in the box are SATA cables with metal bars to make them easy to remove and still keeping them securely in place against accidental removal – a long way from the first SATA cables which are still supplied with many motherboards today. The ROG cable is just a USB (male to male) lead. Padding on the back shield forms a snug fit with the edge of the board and it is thickly constructed making it easy to fit and remove without bending. The SLI bridge is easy to install and the most notable thing is the Q-Connector for case wires (HDD, power, rest switch etc.) so that they can be fitted there and the entire connector taken out as needed for access. This is the sort of time saving feature that leaves people wondering why no-one has thought of it before.

Test Setup

Removed to save space – please refer to html version of article for details

Overclocking

Socket 1156 processors, like their socket 1366 siblings are renowned for their overclocking capabilities so we started with high hopes for our i7-870 on this board using the extensive options available in the BIOS. The BIOS is too detailed for us to explore in this review but we recommend viewing this YouTube video here and if your appetite is whetted for more information you can download the manual from the ASUS Support Site.

Our first target was 3.5GHz and this was achieved without any noticeable increase in temperatures (the Corsair H50 sealed processor watercooler is truly remarkable and completely silent). All benchmarks were run without problems.

Incredibly, the system posted and booted into Windows at 4GHz on stock voltage. Running the Far Cry 2 benchmark caused a lockup though and we increased the processor voltage to 1.35V before the CPU completed all tests without any problems. Even so, 1.35V is still on the low side compared to some extremes we have seen with simple cooling.

We conducted our tests at stock speeds though to allow readers to make comparisons on a fixed baseline.

Test Results

We should explain why we have selected certain tests and why we repeated them for 1, 2, 3 and 4 cores. People buy motherboards for different uses and whether you are a gamer who can make do with 2 cores or an avid video editor who will max out 4 cores determines which processor you will pair the board with.

We always advise not skimping on motherboard selection and purchasing a high end, fully featured one like the Maximus III Gene (high end by socket 1156 standards – half the price of a socket 1366 board) provides the greatest flexibility as we will see. The benchmarks will show which processor is best suited for particular uses. We are comparing the ASUS Maximus III Gene with the ASUS M4A79T Deluxe.

The advantage of DDR3-2000 versus DDR3-1600 and the Dual channel memory can be clearly seen. Synthetic benchmarks eliminate other bottlenecks and show the true potential of increasing cores. Only users of the AMD platform will be able to replace their current CPU with a 6-core “Bulldozer” one next year. There are no plans for 6-core “Gulftown” (aka i9) processors able to fit in a socket 1156 motherbaord.

Similar situation with very linear scaling.

The number of cores has no effect on memory bandwidth (fortunately there are no single core Athlons in the AM3 configuration).

The results here are quite interesting and a leveling off after 2 cores for the i7-870 but more linear for the slower AMD X4 CPU. The results are above average for boards of these chipsets.

Far Cry 2 is widely acknowledged as being the game to bring any system to its knees and we deliberately tested at the highest settings for each resolution and with 8x anti aliasing. Frame rates are perfectly playable at all resolutions (we don’t have a 30″ monitor for the ultra high resolutions).

Contrasting the FPS of Far Cry 2 is Tom Clancy’s HAWX which is a cross between flight simulator and air combat game and we achieved over 60 frames per second at all resolutions.

Horror games are currently popular and Resident Evil 5 has a great benchmarking function built in. The board performed very well in this test.

Conclusion

We’ve deliberately avoided getting bogged down with dozens of benchmarks comparing many motherboards as this is one component where the performance varies by usually less than 1% across the range. Readers looking to see these types of benchmarks are pointed in the direction of AnandTech and similar sites. We have already explored in depth and rest assured that the Maximus III Gene is in the top 3 in virtually every test in available benchmarks. Instead we are focusing on the added features and bundled software that add unique value to each motherboard.

ROG motherboards have never disappointed in terms of features and the Maximus III Gene is no exception despite its mATX form factor which puts a pressure on available “real-estate”. The choice for this seems to be to allow the board to be used for small form factor and easy to carry systems for gamers to use in LAN parties and gaming conventions etc.

Overclocking used to be the realm of the connoisseur requiring great skill/experience and tenacity with nerves of iron required and the constant danger of equipment destruction adding tension over the hours it took to get a stable overclock. No longer is this the case now that ASUS have made it easy for everyone (and no longer can we impress women at parties by introducing ourselves as PC overclockers….) with PC stepup, iROG connect, MemPerfect and a host of utilities within Windows making it easy to get professional results in a fraction of the time and with little or no risk.

When everything is taken into account we are convinced that the ASUS Maximus III Gene is the best socket 1156 motherboard currently available and is keenly priced for its target market.

I am aboard Apolonia, a 43-foot cabin cruiser, riding in Colonial Beach’s Riverfest boat parade. Riverfest is the town’s biggest do and it has been held annually since 1951, come hell or high water—and believe me, they’ve had plenty of both. We have just pulled out into the Potomac from the shelter of Monroe Bay, which forms the town’s back door, and are working our way north, past Colonial Beach Yacht Center and Gum Bar Point and heading for the once and future municipal pier. To our starboard and stretching astern are the famous Kettle Bottom Shoals—historically some of the richest oyster banks in the world. It’s about 1:30 in the afternoon and the June sky is overcast and threatening, but the Potomac is flat and happy, at least it feels that way in the comfort ofApolonia. Her owner, Paul Bolin, is at the wheel, easing us along the parade route in the number-two position, just behind the fleet commander and ahead of the rest of the pack.

It is just here, as I look out across the six-mile-wide Potomac and then back at the town’s famous three-mile beach, that it strikes me: It’s a good thing I’m not driving this boat, because if I were at the helm I’d be dodging ghosts. You see, this particular part of the Potomac, 60 miles from Washington and 40 from Point Lookout, is positively crowded with historical apparitions, and this afternoon I see them every way I turn. For example, there off the starboard bow, I see a ghostly fleet of British warships being warped by hand across the oyster-thick shoals on their way to capture Washington. It is 1814, and they will succeed. Coming back down the river they will have an additional 25 prize ships in tow, and, again, the crews will offload everything and pull the ships across the shoals by hand. A slow and agonizing process, to be sure, but still they will make it to Baltimore harbor in time for Francis Scott Key to see their rockets’ red glare. And look, there, tearing across our wake, it’s a Maryland patrol boat hot on the tail of a local oyster dredger. Hear the machine-gun fire? One of them is going to end up dead. Now look ahead of us, just passing under the U.S. Route 301 bridge, there’s the ghost of the famous paddlewheel steamer St. Johns, its rails crammed with happy early-20th-century excursionists bound for Colonial Beach. Yes, from the ring of a thousand one-armed bandits to the creak of an oar as a Confederate spy slips between a pair of Federal warships, the water off Colonial Beach is alarmingly and charmingly crowded with ghosts.

Paul Bolin, however, is not distracted. He holds Apolonia steady on her course. His eye is not on the past but on the future of Colonial Beach and what this town, which has had more ups and downs than a bobber in a five-foot swell, is on its way to becoming. Because Colonial Beach, most recently walloped by Isabel’s unprecedented storm surge, is as surely on its way up the next big wave as the life of the waterman is on the decline.

With us on this Sunday drive in the barque are the parade’s grand marshals, Sonny and Dottie Schick, who live next door to Bolin’s Bell House Bed & Breakfast, and their son Kyle and his wife Relda. Kyle and Relda are particularly looking forward to a ride up any wave at all, since Isabel was actually the second punch in a one-two combination that left their Colonial Beach Yacht Center reeling.

The largest and one of the oldest marinas in the area, Colonial Beach Yacht Center was first devastated in May 2002 by a fire that tore through the marina’s docks, blowing up boat after boat like so many harbor mines. Fifty-six vessels, some of them irreplaceable wooden classics, were destroyed. Many of those lost woodies would have been with us today in the boat parade, but instead are now part of yet another ghostly flotilla. After the fire, the Schicks set about rebuilding the marina and were making good headway—until Isabel rolled through like a bulldozer, tossing around thousand-pound rocks and destroying another 40 boats, many of them on trailers and cradles.

“What the fire didn’t take, the hurricane did,” Kyle Schick had told me as we toured the Yacht Center earlier that weekend in a golf cart, Colonial Beach’s new vehicle of choice. Damaged in the storm were the Yacht Center’s Dockside Restaurant, ship’s store, boathouse, boat-lift area, pump-out area and fuel station. “We’re putting things back together, but better,” Schick said. “We’ve had a lot of support from the community and other marinas, but insurance never covers what you think it will.”

The new docks are wider than the old ones and all have pedestals with a phone jack and enough power for even the hottest days and the most demanding boats. The new covered docks will be made of galvanized trusses and canvas that form an arch over each slip. They will be fire resistant and keep UV rays out while letting in the sun. With a number of the new docks already in, the Yacht Center will soon have 100 open slips and 20 covered slips. There is room for another 100 boats on the hard. Currently, there are 15 transient slips with plans for 40.

Colonial Beach Yacht Center’s position at the entrance to Monroe Bay has long made it appealing to large boats coming and going from Washington, D.C., but at the same time it makes the marina more vulnerable to storms than those tucked into Monroe Bay. The facility was originally an oyster-packing house established in the 1930s. During the great hurricane of 1933, the building floated off its piers, but it was hauled back and a concrete slab was poured to keep it in place. In the 1940s, when the marina was developed with about 200 slips, the oyster-packing house became a restaurant. Isabel failed to move it but she did destroy the interior. That has since been restored, and the Dockside Restaurant reopened earlier this spring.

Two other popular Colonial Beach restaurants on the water also were destroyed—the Happy Clam and Wilkerson’s Restaurant, both at the north end of town. Wilkerson’s, since rebuilt, reopened several months ago with fresh fish, piping hot hush puppies and a wall of windows on the Potomac. But the Happy Clam has yet to make its comeback.

Although the Yacht Center was the only marina in the area to lose boats in the storm, others felt the effect as well. Jan Swink of Nightingale Motel and Marina on Monroe Bay stands in the center of her new kitchen to show me where she stood that night, knee-deep in water, watching minnows swim between her toes. “Our docks were like an accordion in some spots,” she says. In Nightingale’s motel rooms, the water rose above the headboards; all six units had to be entirely redone. But like hundreds of others all over town, Swink and her husband Bob got to work and were ready to reopen in time for the 2004 boating season. “And I got to make some changes I wanted to, anyway,” she adds, opening the doors to show me two new bathrooms and showers for boaters.

Just a little way up the bay from the Nightingale is Colonial Beach’s last marine railway and a must-see stop for any boat lover. There, the doyenne of Colonial Beach’s marina owners, Mary Virginia Stanford of Stanford’s Marine Railway, sits in the ship’s store “living room” and shakes her silver head slowly when I ask about the loss from Isabel. “So many people had trees fall on their houses,” she says sadly. “In the car the next day, I would ride a little bit, then cry a little bit.” At the railway, where for more than 60 years her husband Clarence built boats that are still in use today, the wind blew off part of a roof and the water rose halfway up the shop building. But it did no serious damage, since all of the electrical equipment had been moved earlier to higher ground. The slips survived, as did the covered wharf, which house both Hermione, a meticulously restored 1927 Elco, and Pathfinder II, the last boat Clarence Stanford built.

Back in the center of town at Doc’s Motel, Ellie Carruthers and her husband, “Little Doc,” simply went to bed when it got too dark to take any more storm pictures and the power failed. “The next morning I said, ‘Oh, my God!’ ” Ellie says. The last surge of water had lifted debris over the four-foot fence that separates the town’s oldest motel from the Potomac and left it strewn between the two wings of rooms. “We filled eighty big bags,” she says. “Everybody set to. It was like being in a parade to the dump. Finally, they had to close the dump.”

North of Doc’s, the town pier lay in ruins that day, as did a neighboring charterboat dock. When I visited the spot before the boat parade, I could see that the charterboat dock was back in place, but the town pier still needed a few more planks to be finished.

Past Doc’s and the piers stretches Colonial Beach’s famous boardwalk, once alive with vacationing families who crowded the wooden walkway and food stands. Today, it’s a concrete sidewalk snaking through the sand, bordered only by two or three food vending survivors. Buy an ice cream and take a walk along the boardwalk, though, and you won’t be alone, you’ll be in the company of some of the beach’s most raucous ghosts—the gambling casinos and dance halls that drew tens of thousands of eager summer visitors from the late 1940s through the ’50s. But time, antigambling laws, a fire in the 1960s and several earlier storms took their toll, and the Monte Carlo, the Jackpot, Joyland, Little Steel Pier and their like were gone years before Hurricane Isabel was so much as a zephyr in the Sahara. Only the Riverboat (once the Little Reno) remained, perched over the Maryland-owned Potomac and offering off-track betting, keno, two state lotteries and lunch to a quiet summer crowd. But the Riverboat is gone, too, another victim of Isabel. Unlike the others, however, the Riverboat will be back.

Peggy Browning Linthacum and Laura Raley, who are sisters, preside over a small construction trailer at the beach end of the Riverboat’s ruined pier. Their job is to assure the curious—me, for example—that the Riverboat is indeed going to be rebuilt. “We had to go all the way through the permit process, which has taken a long time,” Linthacum tells me. “But the Riverboat was pretty much grandfathered in, so it’s finally okayed.” Linthacum and Raley are the sisters of Peggy Flanagan, who with her husband Tom has owned the Riverboat since 1992. The new Riverboat, which must keep to the same footprint as the old, will actually look like a riverboat this time, Linthacum says, complete with a working paddlewheel. “We were the number one lottery sellers in Maryland,” Raley says proudly. “Customers would buy a Virginia lottery ticket and then a Maryland ticket just a few steps away.”

It was the ability to take those few steps, from the Virginia shore to the casinos that sat on long piers over the Maryland Potomac, that set the neon blazing and the joint a-jumpin’ from 1949 to 1958, when the one-armed bandit was king of Maryland amusements. After the completion of the U.S. Route 301 bridge across the Potomac in 1941, Colonial Beach was no longer such a long drive from Washington and Baltimore, and the town’s hundreds of slot machines, casinos, dance halls, welcoming beach and a boardwalk jam-packed with amusements gave people plenty of reasons to come.

“We used to open the motel on May fifteenth and stay full all summer,” Ellie Carruthers recalls. “If we weren’t full by noon, we wondered what was wrong.” Carruthers herself first came to Colonial Beach when her father, a Washington bricklayer, finally found the time to take the family on a precious two-week vacation. “When I came in 1951, there were slot machines everywhere. It was crazy!” She met Little Doc (his father was the Doc) at the Riverside and never left. “You would go up on the boardwalk at night, with mothers and fathers and children of all ages, all having a wonderful time,” she tells me as we sit in her tiny but comfortable motel office. Now in her 70s, Carruthers recently broke her hip, but, unfazed by the experience, she puts me in her wheelchair to chat while she settles into the office chair. “I have guests who met one another on the boardwalk, and other couples who make their reservations to meet here at the same time each year. Some of my customers have stayed with me every year for fifty years. I make the reservations for them before they even call.”
Watching this year’s boat parade from Doc’s is one of the motel’s first guests, now a frail old gentleman in his 90s. With him are his daughter, his granddaughter and his great-granddaughter and their families. They have taken six rooms for the weekend. Mary Virginia Stanford is another long-ago come-here to Colonial Beach who fondly remembers its wild and crazy decade. She met been-here Clarence during World War II while he was in Apalachicola, Fla., on a menhaden fishing expedition with his father. She and Clarence returned to Colonial Beach and in 1945 built a marine store and boatworks which, she says, “We’ve been working on all our lives.” They are both now in their 80s, and while Mary Virginia remains active, Clarence is confined to a wheelchair.

Mary Virginia had no objection to the old slot machines, though. “I’m all for gambling. Live and let live.” She played the nickel machine one time, she says. “I put one in and sixteen came out. I put them in my pocket, went home and bought curtains.” She remembers the boardwalk, the old homes and the time singer Jimmy Dean, “before he was famous,” came to Colonial Beach to perform. “My head came to his belt buckle.”

Stanford also remembers the Oyster Wars of the 1950s, when Maryland marine police would give chase to Virgin-ians who were dredging Maryland oysters (in the Potomac they were all Maryland oysters). Power dredging had long been ruled illegal in Maryland because it tore up the already diminished oyster beds. Only hand-tonging, slow and work intensive, was allowed (and, on certain days, skipjacks could dredge under sail). A tonger pulled oysters up with what looks very much like a Brobdingnagian posthole digger, bringing in only enough at one time for a moderately hungry man’s hors d’oeuvre. But dredging (or dragging) the beds could bring in many more bushels of oysters than tonging. If the illegal dredgers hightailed it, it wasn’t uncommon for the marine patrols to open fire as they gave chase—sometimes all the way up Monroe Bay.

“I was standing out in back with a baby in my arms,” Stanford recalls, “when the police followed a boat into the bay. The two boats came flying in. The bullets were ricocheting all around me.” Carruthers, too, remembers the sound of machine guns in the night. “The young men would just come up on the beach to be in Virginia when the Maryland police were after them. I saw one young man walk up out of the water and call back, ‘You can’t get me.’ They sat there and waited for him.”

On April 17, 1959, the bullets finally found a target and left Colonial Beach resident Berkley Muse dead. The fatality prompted the governors of Maryland and Virginia to reach a compromise, and the Oyster Wars, which had been waged off and on for a century, more or less ended.

But as the oyster harvest slackened and the slots disappeared, vacation habits changed, too, and for the next 40 years, Colonial Beach became a quiet place indeed, “a dreamer of a colorful past,” as Frederick Tilp called it in his 1978 book, This Was Potomac River. 

In 1985, residents discovered a few ghosts they hadn’t even known about. One morning after a bad storm, strollers came upon several skeleton feet sticking out of a sand bank at Gum Bar Point. When excavated, the bodies all showed they had received a blow to the skull. “They probably were immigrants pressed out of Baltimore bars in the late 1800s to work aboard a skipjack oystering,” Kyle Schick tells me as Apolonia passes what is now often called Ghost Point. “This was their payoff.”

Now it seems that Colonial Beach is about to receive a payoff of a very different kind. In the past year, real estate prices have grown wings, and real estate agents like Bob Swink of Colonial Beach Realty can’t keep enough listings to meet the demand. Homes now sell often within a week of coming on the market, something of a novelty for home–owners on Virginia’s Northern Neck. Michael Wardman, who recently invested in a block of downtown real estate of his own, told me that for the price he purchased his Colonial Beach home a few years ago, he couldn’t even buy the lots now. Housing starts are way up, as well. “In the past two years, we’ve built about ninety new homes. Before that, it was less than ten a year,” Town Manager Brian Hooten said. “The beach has been rediscovered.”

Colonial Beach’s Planning and Zoning Commission has also given preliminary approval to two big development projects. The larger would put an 18-hole championship golf course and about 900 housing units on 600 acres near Wilkerson’s Restaurant. The second, more controversial because it includes a proposed marina, would create 250 housing units, mostly townhouses, and boat slips for residents on 50 acres bordering Monroe Point. “With all this growth, the biggest challenge the town has now is maintaining its charm,” Wardman said. “It’s a big opportunity.”

It’s a challenge much on the mind of Brian Hooten, as well. About 10 years ago, the town bought up all the boardwalk’s neglected and derelict properties and then demolished them. Now the town has put those four acres of land out for bid in the hope of drawing an offer to develop the site with tourist-friendly businesses. After doing this twice, Hooten said, the city is still not satisfied. “The proposals have been weighted toward residential,” Hooten said. “We want commercial applications used by tourists and residents—like restaurants and ice-cream parlors.” The proposed residential projects are also multistory, which both Hooten and Wardman oppose. “I’m against high- and mid-rise buildings here,” Wardman said. “I don’t think it would be a good decision because it would make Colonial Beach look like everywhere else.”

Paul Bolin, too, is a prime mover in Colonial Beach’s renaissance. He is president of the Chamber of Commerce in addition to operating the Bell House Bed & Breakfast with his wife Anne and taking guests out on Apolonia for four-course dinner cruises. He is also spearheading “Vision 2015,” which he says will develop a consensus among residents for the town’s direction and growth. “I think the town will change,” he tells me as he holds Apolonia off the town pier so we can watch the rest of the parade. “But once you start development it’s hard to control where it goes. There’s no rheostat.”

“In this town it’s often the old residents, the ones who were young in the ’50s, who want to see the town get crazy again,” says Relda Schick, coming up to sit beside me on Apolonia’s flying bridge as we watch the Elco glide elegantly by. “And it’s the younger ones who want it to keep its quaint charm. It’s one of the ironies of Colonial Beach.”

There is at least one resident, how-ever, who would like to have it both ways. “I’d like to see some development, but I’d hate to see things change,” Mary Virginia Stanford had said to me as a duck walked in the front door of the ship’s store at Stanford’s Marine Railway. And that mallard, at least, was no ghost.