Got M2N-SLI setup exp? Hook me up w/ some plz!

I just put a new machine together and could use a little help from someone with similar hardware. I can see already that this particular mobo is going to be one of those that have a presonality all their own. I'm only a day into this one and have already ran into some of those little quirks that can only be figured out through trial and error and not in any availible documentation. Here's what i'm working with:

Asus M2N-SLI Motherboard
AMD A64 X2 5000+ 2.60GHz Black Edition
Thermaltake V1 Heatpipe Cooler
OCZ SLI 2048MB PC6400 DDR2 (Matched 2x1024 set)
ATi RADEON HD 3870x2
Thermaltake Soprano RS 101 ATX Case
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB Hard Drive (SATA)
Sony Blue-Ray Drive
800-Watt Power Supply

Anyone who can fill me in on what they had to learn the hard way and the settings that they finally found to get it purring like a well oiled machine or at least get me in the ball park would be greatly appreciated.

I know that there are many forum vets out there that hate posts like this (Yes I probably could through days of scouring the net eventually gain this knowlege) but I just wasted an entire day trying to get windows recognize that my cdrom drive does indeed exist because apparently for whatever reason on this particular board must be ahead of the hard drive in boot order. Booting to HDD first (The fastest, safest, and recommend way) results in it disappearing in OS despite being visible in BIOS. A small nugget of info that i will be happy to pass on to the next poor fool that runs into the same situation

Some M2N boards have the problem of only being able to run low voltage ram.
OCZ SLI 2048MB PC6400 DDR2 (Matched 2x1024 set) is high voltage ram.

Crossair ram is generally low voltage and runs fine.
There may be other rams that work fine.

ASUS has very poor documentation of which M2N boards have voltage issues when it comes to high voltage ram.
I use to be a fan of ASUS, but experience has taught me that the M2N boards have multiple DOAs, and ASUS RMA process is painful.
After 3 DOA RMAs, and 2 more which cooked off in a month.
I used my American Express card extended warrenty plan, got my money back, and bought a different board

You could also try underclocking the ram, It is against everything I beleive in but it works.

Do you have the M2N-SLI Deluxe ? If so, the vdimm supports 1.8 - 2.5v so
you can run any ram that's compatible with your board.
You can set boot priority, it's in the manual. I've used "A","C","cdrom" as standard
for ages and always believed that to be normal. But if you want to run MemTest
you can select first boot device (cdrom)) by holding "f" something, can't remember
right off the top of my head, at bootup iirc.
This board is a good clocker with lots of user control for virtually all the
settings necessary for OCing. Mine has run excellently for 2yrs. and booted
right out of the box. (earlier bios's were crappy but they sorted it out)

I have found that my board is very cut/dry when it comes to OC'ing the CPU. anything over 3.15ghz and show wont post, anything under she's great. As far as memory I havn't had any problems, currently oc'd my Corsair & Crucial with 2.1v and 5-5-5-15-30-2t. Overall great AM2 board IMO

Thanks for your input guys I really appreciate you thaking the time. Sorry it took so long for me to get back here but work has been crazy lately. I see from your sigs that everyone is using the deluxe version. I just have the regular one with the 560 chipset. Looking at what i could find on the differences between the two I shure wish this this one came the NB cooler that the deluxe has. Mine seems to sit at about 45c idle at default speeds and in high 50's under load! CPU seems to stay about 10 to 15 deg cooler. This just can't be normal, is it?

those "chipset" temps are fine (not an actual NB ) I had a M2N-SLI deluxe before my board you see in sig.. had very good results with it running everything you see below cept different video card.. but it vDrooped like crazy and undervolted cpu..

The "MCP" temp (i think it is?) runs anywhere from 50-70C on mine, but i dont think that the asus chipset readers or probes are correctly configured.. because both boards i had/have i get totally crazy numbers on chipset temp under system load. If you can stand to touch it.. it's okay

repilce said:

those "chipset" temps are fine (not an actual NB ) I had a M2N-SLI deluxe before my board you see in sig.. had very good results with it running everything you see below cept different video card.. but it vDrooped like crazy and undervolted cpu..

The "MCP" temp (i think it is?) runs anywhere from 50-70C on mine, but i dont think that the asus chipset readers or probes are correctly configured.. because both boards i had/have i get totally crazy numbers on chipset temp under system load. If you can stand to touch it.. it's okay

Click to expand...

Oh yeah, mine droops and undervolts very much as well. Bios says 1.4625vcore, Cpuz and PC Wizard say 1.344v.- good to know that with vid 1.30v. I can run @3.2 Ghz with only .044v. increase. BUT!, due to vdroop, I have to run @1.36xx vcore to avoid mem errors or crashes when running multiple apps. (drops to at least 1.29 -1.31v. from 1.34v.) And damn does that chipset run hot!!

Same here with the vdroop, but I found that my current sweat spot (3.1ghz) it's not to bad, but I can't wait to get my new P5Q-deluxe build going.

idle temp: 32*C
load temp: 47*C