New Quad-Core build, decisions about GPU/Case/Mobo

[afusion]

When I built a friend's Pentium 4(775) idk how I got it right the first time lol, I was pretty nervous pushing those pins down (bottom left(1st), top right(2nd),bottom right(3rd),top left(4th)

[+shift. MVC]

Well you are supposed to do two at at time (two opposite corners at a time) to have even pressure. :p

[+Chsoriano Subscriber²]

Those temps look alot better. Gotta love those push pins. :angry:

Lol, seriously, I know when I did my last build the heatsink did not require that much work.

I had to take the motherboard out to hold the back/bottom of the board while I pushed the pins in. It took a lot of effort to make sure I didn't break it.

[Mannlich]

Lol, seriously, I know when I did my last build the heatsink did not require that much work.

I had to take the motherboard out to hold the back/bottom of the board while I pushed the pins in. It took a lot of effort to make sure I didn't break it.

I refuse to use the intel stock cooler because those push pins are such a pain to deal with.

[+Chsoriano Subscriber²]

I refuse to use the intel stock cooler because those push pins are such a pain to deal with.

What cooler do you use? I think I may end up getting a different one eventually, but probably not for a while.

[CrashG]

Lol, seriously, I know when I did my last build the heatsink did not require that much work.

I had to take the motherboard out to hold the back/bottom of the board while I pushed the pins in. It took a lot of effort to make sure I didn't break it.

I attached the fan for my E6550 with the mobo out of the case (it was a brand new build), but I just swapped it out for a E8200 and didn't have to remove the mobo. I had the pins in the "locked" position and pushed them in until I heard the click.

The E6550 is going into the wife's new build in a week or two.

I did like the older retention method with "tabs" on the side of the socket, clip one side and hold it with a finger while using a small flathead screwdriver to push the other side of the clip on.

[+shift. MVC]

I like the system that Noctua has with the NH-U12P cooler.

[+Chsoriano Subscriber²]

I had another question, I have all four DIMMs filled with 2GB sticks of ram. I've read at a number of places that a lot of NB's have issues when all four DIMMs are filled and the recommendation, including gwai lo's (I think) was to up the voltage for the NB.

I was hoping someone could help me identify the setting in the BIOS as I'm not sure what it's called. Is anyone familar with the Gigabyte bios setting for the NB voltage? I think it uses an Award bios but I can't remember for sure.

I found the voltage settings, but there are a bunch of acronyms and the explanations aren't very clear.

Well you are supposed to do two at at time (two opposite corners at a time) to have even pressure. :p

I actually had to remove the motherboard to hold the bottom firmly around the holes so that I could push the pegs though.

[+shift. MVC]

I found the voltage settings, but there are a bunch of acronyms and the explanations aren't very clear.

What are those acronyms and explanations that aren't very clear? We can't help if you don't tell us what it is :p

[+Chsoriano Subscriber²]

Haha... yeah, sorry Shift, I'll post again when I have those acronyms... I'm away from home again so I won't be back there until Thursday. I'll have this weekend to work on it but I'll try to look at the BIOS on Thursday night and I'll post what I see in the BIOS relating to voltages then.

Actually, I kind of want to install Windows XP on the system to check if sleeping/resuming works fine in XP and to see if some of these hangs on shutdown/startup go away while using XP SP3... then I wanted to install Vista x86 to see if I have any of the same problems as well, and then finally re-install Vista x64.

I'm just not sure if I have any bad components, but I also want to run Memtest86 as well, that checks more than just the RAM though right?

[+Chsoriano Subscriber²]

I think I've decided to just try another motherboard since I am having so many problems with the machine... and I don't want to wait too long because then I won't be able to get a refund for the one I have.

Any other recommendations?... I don't mind paying more for a better board. I was thinking maybe a good ASUS or EVGA board.

I found these two ASUS boards that seem alright and aren't too expensive:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16813131296

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16813131299

Edited July 23, 2008 by Chsoriano

[+Chsoriano Subscriber²]

I ordered the P5Q Pro, I'm going to install it and try it out Friday and if it works better than I'm gonna keep it. I'm hoping it does. Depending on how that goes I will ship one of the motherboards back to Newegg on Saturday.

Anyone know if the P5Q Pro is regarded as better than the Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R?

[+shift. MVC]

P5Q Pro is high end I believe, which would more likely compare with Gigabyte's EP45-DQ6. Not that there's necessarily a direct comparison.

The P5Q-E would compare to your current DS3R.

[+Chsoriano Subscriber²]

P5Q Pro is high end I believe, which would more likely compare with Gigabyte's EP45-DQ6. Not that there's necessarily a direct comparison.

The P5Q-E would compare to your current DS3R.

Okay, well I just wanted to make sure it was as good or better than the board I have now... So I'm hoping that I don't have the problems that I'm currently having. I just needed to get one soon so that I can still return the Gigabyte board should I choose to do so.

[+Chsoriano Subscriber²]

I put the new P5Q Pro in my system... and I love it, even the Express Gate works which a lot of people were complaining didn't work... I'm really glad I bought this board now. At this point I really wouldn't care if Newegg didn't give me a refund for my Gigabyte, but I really hope they do... it's within the return period so I don't see why they won't.

[+shift. MVC]

Glad that you got your system working. I'm starting to think you would have been fine if you just RMA the Gigabyte board. But that ASUS board is excellent from what I've read.

[+Chsoriano Subscriber²]

Glad that you got your system working. I'm starting to think you would have been fine if you just RMA the Gigabyte board. But that ASUS board is excellent from what I've read.

Yeah so far it's been a smooth ride setting it up (except for that damn heatsink again :angry: ) lol, but oh well.

The only problem I had was an error on boot every time about the Marvell SATA device. I realized that simply disabling it however would work just fine.

I did want to thank you Shift, and gwai lo, and everyone else who offered advice and opinions... thanks a lot.

Here's to hoping everything keeps going well.

[utdarkviper]

Thank yourself as well for actually being smart enough to read up on stuff as you should :) So many people don't put the time into researching and complain later on lol

[+Chsoriano Subscriber²]

Thank yourself as well for actually being smart enough to read up on stuff as you should :) So many people don't put the time into researching and complain later on lol

Yeah... I run into a lot of people who don't do research on their own... but I know I missed some things when I was getting ready to build this machine... I didn't know about the voltage settings for ram/cpus before shift recommended that article to me. To be honest, the most frustrating part was the damn heatsink, lol.

The hard thing for me was that I only have the weekends to work on the machine, I've spent only about 4-5 days total with the machine since I built it two weeks ago... so that made it kind of hard. I tried to find out everything I could during the week so that I kind of knew what I was going to do on the weekend :) Oh well, I am glad that this new motherboard fixed absolutely all of my problems... machine sleeps fine, resumes, starts and shuts down fine. It's perfect now.

Hopefully I'll start OC'ing once I get back from my internship :)