thinking about getting the P4P800? if so, read this before hand...

well, all this hype about the Asus P4P800 being such a good O/Cer made me decide to order one and it came yesterday. oh boy, what a big surprise I got...

it came yesterday at 9:30am which is when I began to put everything together.

good God, what a freakin' nightmare that was.

first off, that Ai BIOS bull**** is exactly just that, utter bull****. that had to be the screwiest BIOS I've ever laid my eyes on.

for God's sakes, why the hell couldnt they have made a simple, very easy to understand BIOS like whats on the IC7 board. hell no, they couldnt. instead they put a bunch of tooty-fruity things thats doesnt translate into anything but a **** BIOS along with maybe a **** board. who knows...

all I know is that I f*cked around with that board for almost seven hours straight trying to get a decent O/C from my 2.4C and in the very end, all I could get was 2.7Ghz while being able to run Prime 95 stable. anything over 2.7Ghz and the machine would just fall on its face. it didnt matter how many volts I stuck to the chip, didnt matter what mem timings I did, didnt matter, the machine would just fall flat.

so I then tried to do their tooty-fruity "auto O/Cing" feature to where you can O/C the chip by steps like 5%, 10%, all the way up to 30% which in my case was almost 3.1Ghz.

well, the machine did boot up at 3.1Ghz and I could run Prime 95 for a little while longer, a whopping 20 minutes this time.

that being that, I decided to throw in the towel and took the machine down and put everything back together with my IC7. and guess what? 2 hours later (after reformatting and such), I'm running at 3.6Ghz again in full force.

never EVER again will I mess with that Asus crap.

do I sound like an Abit fanboy? you're damn right I am. at least the IC7 works right the FIRST time and has a BIOS thats VERY easy to understand and tune.

Wow, sorry to hear you had that much trouble with it. Thanks though for the update. I myself don't have the time to put in a board that seems to still have some growing pains

you think the asus is bad? try the new abit springdale lol. i finally got it running, tooke me about 4 or 5 hours just to get it running at STOCK speeds lol, mostly it was windows not wanting to install with the ram timings off the spd of the xms. but it was still the WORST problems ive ever had with mobos, besides my a7n8x just up and dying for no apparent reason TWICE, im on my 3rd a7n8x, lol. i had much less problems with my epox 8kha+ than with either asus or abit.

bummer dude. I changed the ratio to 5/4 and went straight to 3 gig the day i got it. I had voltage set to auto. was rock stable on everything.

what bios version were you using.

I don't think the bios would've changed anything. I'm thinking that he was trying to get higher speeds with a 1:1 mem ratio.

I was looking at the Abit boards too but after reading the abit forums, I quickly changed my mind. There's a lot more problems with the Abit board than the Asus board.

Am I biased? Not really. I had to RMA my board back after flashing the bios on my P4P800. Googlegear has my order packed for 2 days and it still hasn't shipped. I hoped I was going to get it on Friday but that's not happening. If it doesn't ship tomorrow, I'm just going to cancel my order and order with Newegg.

-Bobby

Bobby said:

I'm thinking that he was trying to get higher speeds with a 1:1 mem ratio.

Click to expand...

dude, I wouldve settled for any kind of decent O/C with ANY mem ratio.

I tried them all and I still couldnt get past 2.7Ghz from my 2.4C chip.

as I said, I changed back to my IC7 setup and now I'm back at 3.6Ghz w/o any problems at all.

ozziegn said:

I tried them all and I still couldnt get past 2.7Ghz from my 2.4C chip.

Click to expand...

Sorry to hear about your experience. I haven't had a chance to o/c my board during the 24 hrs I had it (had to RMA it back) but it seemed fine until I tried flashing the bios. I have heard of many people hit 3.0g easily with the 2.4c chip.

as I said, I changed back to my IC7 setup and now I'm back at 3.6Ghz w/o any problems at all.

Click to expand...

I was looking at Abit boards but after a few days reading the problems Abit has with the IC7/IS7 boards, I was swayed to buy Asus. I hear the new bios helps a lot with the abit boards.

-Bobby

I've got the 2.8 chip and the Asus and I'm hitting 3.677 on air with a slk900U. I run daily at 250x14=3500. I'm a noob but think it is a great board. Course I liked my A7N8X Deluxe too. Got it in December with a 2700+ chip and was running it at 200x12=2.4 gig. Like the intel better.

I'm running on the Intel HSF at 250Mhz fsb/3.25GHz (2.6c) stable as hell on my P4P800. As soon as I decide on water or better air, she'll go way higher because I've tried it with more voltage and fsb, but didn't like the temps creeping above 50c so it stays as it is for now.

ozziegn what are your temps like with the IC7? Are they high like other Abit boards?

ozziegn.....i think it might be just one of those unlucky ones you end up with. being quite new to o/c i found the p4p800 excellent, at least i didn't need to read the manual every 2 mins when i setup things in the bios. i've had few boards over the years, mainly amd based, abit kt7a, asus kt133, msi kt400 and now settled with p4p800. i found asus is probably the easiest one to use and most trouble free. the kt7a was a completely disaster, it wouldn't start again once i turned my machine with no o/c........how frustrating was that. msi is quite good in terms of value for money, a lot of extras. the prices of asus is wee bit on the higher side with less accessories but its rock solid with good support. maybe the ic7 is a great board for asus is always consistent no matter what boards they put out.........plus they are the market leader in terms of technological progress.

look here
http://www6.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20030603/index.html
again asus has jumped the technological frontier by "enabling" PAT on 865.

Ozzie only loves the ic7.

BTW my IC7 was a total piece of crap.

I've got a p4p800 deluxe and a p4c800 deluxe. Both are f'n awesome.

One bad apple doesn't set a trend.

I love my P4P800 DX. My system is running a 2.8c @ 3.6 right now. Very easy to overclock in my opinion. Yeah, the BIOS is a big 'different', but I didn't really have any problems understanding things..

My only complaint is the lack of normal IAA support (no 865 or 875 has this), and the fact that my system runs DOG SLOW right after an install of Windows XP, until I get SP1 loaded.. very wierd. Not sure if that's something with the P4P800 or an 865/875 thing in general. Very annoying. It took like 2 HOURS to install XP SP1 - that's how damn slow it was! Once SP1 was installed, system was fine. Odd..

JohnMK said:

One bad apple doesn't set a trend.

Click to expand...

EXACTLY!

ozziegn said:

well, all this hype about the Asus P4P800 being such a good O/Cer made me decide to order one and it came yesterday. oh boy, what a big surprise I got...

it came yesterday at 9:30am which is when I began to put everything together.

good God, what a freakin' nightmare that was.

first off, that Ai BIOS bull**** is exactly just that, utter bull****. that had to be the screwiest BIOS I've ever laid my eyes on.

for God's sakes, why the hell couldnt they have made a simple, very easy to understand BIOS like whats on the IC7 board. hell no, they couldnt. instead they put a bunch of tooty-fruity things thats doesnt translate into anything but a **** BIOS along with maybe a **** board. who knows...

all I know is that I f*cked around with that board for almost seven hours straight trying to get a decent O/C from my 2.4C and in the very end, all I could get was 2.7Ghz while being able to run Prime 95 stable. anything over 2.7Ghz and the machine would just fall on its face. it didnt matter how many volts I stuck to the chip, didnt matter what mem timings I did, didnt matter, the machine would just fall flat.

so I then tried to do their tooty-fruity "auto O/Cing" feature to where you can O/C the chip by steps like 5%, 10%, all the way up to 30% which in my case was almost 3.1Ghz.

well, the machine did boot up at 3.1Ghz and I could run Prime 95 for a little while longer, a whopping 20 minutes this time.

that being that, I decided to throw in the towel and took the machine down and put everything back together with my IC7. and guess what? 2 hours later (after reformatting and such), I'm running at 3.6Ghz again in full force.

never EVER again will I mess with that Asus crap.

do I sound like an Abit fanboy? you're damn right I am. at least the IC7 works right the FIRST time and has a BIOS thats VERY easy to understand and tune.

Click to expand...

Friend of mine helped me build my first rig 8 months ago. I decided to go with Asus mad:.
Rig ran good for 2 months or so until one day she started being VERY unstable. When trying to find a solution, i was suprised to see the overwhelming problems that seem to come free with a lot of Asus mobos. Anyway took it out after finding the mobo was the problem, RMAed it (in the process was warned by distributor to not gamble with my money on Asus again). He rates Asus as being one of the most returned brands has dealed with and had stopped dealing with them.
All problems i had was not user related( verified by Asus which took 2 months...................... i was so ****ed off), and even then recieved an older revision. NEVER AGAIN ASUS
Even though being a popular brand, Asus will not see my money again, Abit all the way in my book!!!