Greetings,
Sorry guys, but I agree with the OP although I have reasons for why I dislike the Black I even entertained rolling back to the RIVE but have decided to hold fire on that until x99 and the Rampage V becomes available. Even then I may jump ship to a different manufacturer.
I can't say I had any issue with the RIVE except for the lack of a couple of features like additional SATA III ports and WiFi. Generally the board worked and the system was very stable. Fast forward to the RIVBE and the story is different.
I have three add-in cards in my machine. two GeForce Titan's in SLI and a Creative Labs Sound Blaster ZxR PCIe sound card. When the sound card is in the PCIe3x1 slot there is an audible sound artefact that creeps into the playback of any piece of audio sourced from any media (BLu-Ray, MP3, FLAC, Games, Youtube streaming etc.), yet when I move the card to the next PCIe3 x16 slot the sound is perfect but of course datalane sharing cuts the allocation to my second video card. So I have a choice, bottleneck the video cards or have functional sound. No I will not use the on-board audio.
I have confirmed this issue as being present in Both Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Windows 8 x64 Pro, and Windows 8.1 x64 Pro. I have even swapped the ZxR out and used a Xonar Essence STX in it's place and get a similar issue exhibited in a slightly different manner. I assume that is probably down to a difference in the architecture of the audio processor. And that's not all, for some reason during gameplay and even watching a movie the computer will just simply freeze up for a fraction of a second. No idea why, it just does it. The Wi-Fi is useless because I had to disable it due to what I suspect are issues related to hardware resource sharing on the board. You see when WiFi is enabled, my add-in sound card would play audio that would break up everytime the Wi-Fi network was accessed.
This is a seriously poor board (RIVBE) that costs quite a lot of money. And I'm pretty pissed off about it, I've owned quite a lot of Asus boards and ROG boards over the years and haven't had many significant problems with any of them, but this one is a doozy. All these issues happen before I even apply an overclock. The system RAM has gone through 8 successful complete passes using MEMTest86 (and yes I only use one single memory kit in this machine), in the end there are only so many times you can format a machine, swap out its hardware, change Operating Systems and put fresh up to date drivers on it before the reality dawns that the board has issues with resource allocation and sharing. I remember the early days of the RIVE and it was a pretty disastrous product at launch, I really don't want to have to wait for months for a stable firmware to fix this product. There is no reason for random freezing up during media playback and gaming and yet with the same Titan's and the same RAM and the same CPU and PSU and sound card in the RIVE I never had an issue. Yes indeed bring on X99 but maybe this time from a different manufacturer, I'll wait for the reviews before making that choice. Then again the RIVBE is highly rated despite its severe issues.
