AMD or Intel?

[Jojo99]

New update

Just to update: I RMA'd the board back to MWave. They replaced it with the newer 1.1 revision. Everything is working now and hope to get the OS loaded & configured this weekend.

I thought I was good to go with this board. A new board solved the constant C1 memory errors. I was running stable w/o OC'ing and finishing putting together the system.

Then I discovered that my SATA drive had very poor performance (4MB/sec speed). I only use the SATA drive for mass storage. I have 2 SCSI drives which I boot off of and contain most of my files. After some work, I found that the SATA port I had the drive connected to was bad. I swapped ports and the HD speed jumped up to 60MB/sec at the front of the disk. I haven't tested all of the SATA ports yet but with at least one bad one, I now need to RMA this damm board again.

Additional issues I encountered include the uGuru utility crashing at startup until I installed the latest beta version. Also, uGuru does not read the CPU core temps correctly for (at least) Intel G0 CPU's. The temps are 10-12C under actual. Not sure if they can fix this with a BIOS change or if a physical board revision would be necessary. Also, the erroneous low CPU temp readings screws up the ability dynamically manage the fans through the settings in the uGuru and the BIOS.

Then I've found that those side mounted SATA ports are a real pain to plug anything into (at least with this CM690 case).

I've sent 2 emails over the last 2 weeks to Abit technical support and have yet to receive any acknowledgement or reply. On the Abit forums, there are others with a variety of strange problems with these Abit IP35 boards (and that is of course, only the ones who go to the forum for solutions).

With my experiences so far (and what I have been reading on the Abit forums), I would be hard pressed to recommend Abit the company or the IP35 line to anyone.

I may be stuck with this board or I may be allowed to exchange it for something else from where I purchased it, which I would be leaning to at this point.

If I can exchange it for another brand, can anyone point to other high-end boards which have at least these specific functionalities?

1. The ability to clear the BIOS w/o opening the case
2. Very good OC control from the BIOS
3. The ability to save BIOS versions and reload them as necessary (this board can save 5 versions).
4. Plenty of fan headers (the IP 35 Pro has 6 total fan headers)
5. Good technical support

 

[Evilsizer]

jojo the cpu temps you see are not what coretemp read. if you are using that at all, its a complety different temp. as for uguru crashing was this in vista? which sata port are you using? i know people have problems with various boards, i did with my ab9-pro being stuck with a 380mhz fsb. that didnt make it a bad board it was solid at that fsb. it wasnt the cpu causeing me to be stuck at 380, cause im still using the same cpu. topped out in my board at its fsb wall in the 480's.

as for the features your looking for your gonna be hard pressed to find a equal in that price range. about the only one i could think of at a higher price is a gigabyte P35-DQ6 board.

 

[Jojo99]

This is WinXP SP2, not Vista. I am using the latest uGuru beta. It doesn't even match the BIOS as it's settings go further than what can be achieved in the BIOS.

I wasted another 2 hours this evening testing all SATA ports this evening for HD performance. Only port 3 proved to be bad.

As far as I understand it, core temp is reading the true and accurate CPU temps. From the web site:

Core Temp is a compact, no fuss, small footprint program to monitor CPU temperature.

The uniqueness of it is that it shows the temperature of each individual core in a each processor in your system! You can see in real time how the CPU temperature varies when you load your CPU.

Intel and AMD recently published detailed, public information about the "DTS" (Digital Thermal Sensor), which provides much higher accuracy and more relevant temperature reading than the standard thermal diode sensors do. (How it works).

This feature is supported on all Intel Core and Core 2 series of processors as well as the whole AMD's AMD64 line of CPUs. (for a full list of supported CPUs: (CPU Support List).

http://www.thecoolest.zerobrains.com/CoreTemp/

I boot off of a SCSI drive. Tonight I tried to connect an IDE ATA HD. Despite checking all settings and trying multiple times, this system will not let me boot form the SCSI drive IF the IDE drive is connected. It tries to access the IDE drive 1st and since there is nothing on it (I wiped it as I thought I might get rid of it), I get an NTLDR Missing error.

Frankly, I am just getting disgusted with Abit and this IP35 Pro board. I've wasted a huge amount of time getting it set up and I keep discovering new issues and problems. It's just not worth the time. I would only recommend this board to others who have a masochistic streak and want to torture themselves.