Watercooling, Mk. III: Good bye, Asus!
I'm just going to come out and say it. Asus' new P35 motherboards suck. Hard.
Since I installed this computer, I have had intermittent boot-up problems that manifest themselves as no POST whatsoever. Then, inexplicably, it'll POST later that day. Or tomorrow. I changed out the mobo, the power supply, CPU. The only things I didn't change out were the video card, which works perfectly, and the memory.
Ah yes, the memory.
It's fine. I've checked it. I've run tests on those sticks for hours and hours. They're fine. OCZ says they're fine.
Asus says the memory is faulty. OCZ says it's good. I changed out the mobo once, and have the exact same symptoms. Asus and OCZ aren't playing together nicely right now.
The fault lies with Asus, and I've confirmed with several sources that it's been a bit of an issue with them and OCZ memory for a while now. Apparently, the main logic on the Asus board refuses to deliver the voltage that these high-performance PC 9200 memory modules need to operate. So sometimes, they just lock the whole damn system up when it's POSTing, waiting for the right voltage to be applied to the DIMMs and allow the system to continue its boot process. I'm not the only one to have this issue. But it's the last time I'm going to have it.
This weekend, I gave up and ordered a new Gigabyte P35-DQ6 from MWave. I installed it this morning. It came up immediately. It's awesome.
Once I finished the task of updating all of the device drivers in Windows, (Gigabyte even puts the Gigabit Ethernet straight on the PCI-E bus, instead of the PCI bus like Asus. Classy.) I just clocked the thing straight up to 375FSB (the best I could do with the Asus board,) and it's been humming along all day with Folding@Home pegging all 4 cores without a single hiccup. I even loaded up ATITool and let the overclocked GPU run full-bore at the same time, in an effort to overload the revamped cooling system to provoke a system crash. Nada. The system grinned at me, and asked me whether I'd like to play a nice game of chess while I was waiting (okay, that might have been the mid-afternoon margarita giving me a bit of War Games nostalgia. Or a flashback or something. Don't look at me that way. It's Sunday, the day for rest and all that.)
So for now, Asus has dropped off of my preferred vendor list. Yes, I could have switched out the memory, but Corsair doesn't have these badass water-cooled RAMsticks like OCZ.
I wonder what Gigabyte's X38 board is going to be like?
Since I installed this computer, I have had intermittent boot-up problems that manifest themselves as no POST whatsoever. Then, inexplicably, it'll POST later that day. Or tomorrow. I changed out the mobo, the power supply, CPU. The only things I didn't change out were the video card, which works perfectly, and the memory.
Ah yes, the memory.
It's fine. I've checked it. I've run tests on those sticks for hours and hours. They're fine. OCZ says they're fine.
Asus says the memory is faulty. OCZ says it's good. I changed out the mobo once, and have the exact same symptoms. Asus and OCZ aren't playing together nicely right now.
The fault lies with Asus, and I've confirmed with several sources that it's been a bit of an issue with them and OCZ memory for a while now. Apparently, the main logic on the Asus board refuses to deliver the voltage that these high-performance PC 9200 memory modules need to operate. So sometimes, they just lock the whole damn system up when it's POSTing, waiting for the right voltage to be applied to the DIMMs and allow the system to continue its boot process. I'm not the only one to have this issue. But it's the last time I'm going to have it.
This weekend, I gave up and ordered a new Gigabyte P35-DQ6 from MWave. I installed it this morning. It came up immediately. It's awesome.
Once I finished the task of updating all of the device drivers in Windows, (Gigabyte even puts the Gigabit Ethernet straight on the PCI-E bus, instead of the PCI bus like Asus. Classy.) I just clocked the thing straight up to 375FSB (the best I could do with the Asus board,) and it's been humming along all day with Folding@Home pegging all 4 cores without a single hiccup. I even loaded up ATITool and let the overclocked GPU run full-bore at the same time, in an effort to overload the revamped cooling system to provoke a system crash. Nada. The system grinned at me, and asked me whether I'd like to play a nice game of chess while I was waiting (okay, that might have been the mid-afternoon margarita giving me a bit of War Games nostalgia. Or a flashback or something. Don't look at me that way. It's Sunday, the day for rest and all that.)
So for now, Asus has dropped off of my preferred vendor list. Yes, I could have switched out the memory, but Corsair doesn't have these badass water-cooled RAMsticks like OCZ.
I wonder what Gigabyte's X38 board is going to be like?