- Joined
- Nov 1, 2001
- Location
- New Iberia, LA
Last week I decided to try out a P5NE-SLI board instead of a p965 based board due to cost reasons for a replacement board for my e6300 system, since the 775i65G board just didn't have enough fsb headroom to do any justice to an e6300 because of it's low multiplier. This is for a dedicated crunching/folding rig, so for now it will only have an old pci Radeon 9250 vid card. Anyways, I got her up and running yesterday evening with some OCZ PC7200 SLI ram I bought here in the classies a few months ago and immediately bumped the fsb to 350 for the second bootup and everything went great. I went ahead and installed XP Pro and activated and updated everything then started playing around with it. One really nice feature is that you can decouple the fsb speed from the memory speed and get some really high fsb speeds with cheaper ram. Now the kit of ram I'm running isn't cheap but later I will do some testing of this with much slower ram speeds and looser timings and see how the board will handle this along with a high fsb overclock. But so far this board has been easy to set up and it's fsb overclocking is much better than my P5W DH can do. Right now I'm pushing that e6300 much harder than I was ever able to with the P5W DH and it's presently testing, running small fft's with Orthos at 475 fsb/3325 MHz. So far it's around 30 minutes into this run of Orthos at this speed with no problems.
The only mods I've done so far to the board are that I immediately removed the nb heatsink, cleaned off the grey tim and lapped the sucker flat, as it was way out of level with a few dips in it here and there.
I then reinstalled it with AS Ceramique and also screwed a 40 X 20 mm fan down to it. For the southbridge which is naked, I had some old greenie nb sinks laying around from the old days of the BX chipset so I took one of those and modded it to where it would take the mounting bolt pattern around the sb. This required me to grind a corner of the sinks's fins down a little and drill another mounting hole, since the hole spacing around the sb was narrower than the spacing on the old sink, which was fairly easy to do. I then mounted the greenie as a sb sink using some spare plastic pushpins I had laying around.
The biggest problems I see with the board so far is that there are 2 tallish caps fairly close to the socket area and the mounting bracket of the Tuniq I'm using on it is tight up against them. But there is enough meat in the bracket to where I could remove a little material off the "H" bracket of the Tuniq for more clearance, but I didn't actually need to do this. The other big problem I see with the board is that it has a pretty horrendous vdroop. Right now at 3325 MHz, I have it set at 1.3875v in bios and at idle it is only showing as 1.344v at idle and that drops all the way down to 1.296v with Orthos running and loading both cores at 100%.
Now I've read of Nvidia based systems having problems with raid and such, but I won't be testing any of this since it's a dedicated number muncher and not an everyday use machine. But for this purpose the board looks to be an excellent, cost effective choice. It also looks to be a good choice for a build for someone who wants some bells and whistles but is on a fairly tight budget. The board has onboard 1394 and also has an e-sata port on the back too. And Newegg has now lowered the price of the board down to around $130, which makes it a pretty good bargain for it's features.
I'll be updating things every now and then as I run into them with this system. Also, if anyone has some links to some vdroop mods it would be appreciated. The vdroop is just terrible, but at least they give decent options in bios for both vcore and vdimm. Vcore goes to around 1.6v and also has a .1v booster selection in bios too. And vdimm should be adequate for most overclocking too.
The only mods I've done so far to the board are that I immediately removed the nb heatsink, cleaned off the grey tim and lapped the sucker flat, as it was way out of level with a few dips in it here and there.
I then reinstalled it with AS Ceramique and also screwed a 40 X 20 mm fan down to it. For the southbridge which is naked, I had some old greenie nb sinks laying around from the old days of the BX chipset so I took one of those and modded it to where it would take the mounting bolt pattern around the sb. This required me to grind a corner of the sinks's fins down a little and drill another mounting hole, since the hole spacing around the sb was narrower than the spacing on the old sink, which was fairly easy to do. I then mounted the greenie as a sb sink using some spare plastic pushpins I had laying around.The biggest problems I see with the board so far is that there are 2 tallish caps fairly close to the socket area and the mounting bracket of the Tuniq I'm using on it is tight up against them. But there is enough meat in the bracket to where I could remove a little material off the "H" bracket of the Tuniq for more clearance, but I didn't actually need to do this. The other big problem I see with the board is that it has a pretty horrendous vdroop. Right now at 3325 MHz, I have it set at 1.3875v in bios and at idle it is only showing as 1.344v at idle and that drops all the way down to 1.296v with Orthos running and loading both cores at 100%.
Now I've read of Nvidia based systems having problems with raid and such, but I won't be testing any of this since it's a dedicated number muncher and not an everyday use machine. But for this purpose the board looks to be an excellent, cost effective choice. It also looks to be a good choice for a build for someone who wants some bells and whistles but is on a fairly tight budget. The board has onboard 1394 and also has an e-sata port on the back too. And Newegg has now lowered the price of the board down to around $130, which makes it a pretty good bargain for it's features.
I'll be updating things every now and then as I run into them with this system. Also, if anyone has some links to some vdroop mods it would be appreciated.
The vdroop is just terrible, but at least they give decent options in bios for both vcore and vdimm. Vcore goes to around 1.6v and also has a .1v booster selection in bios too. And vdimm should be adequate for most overclocking too.
