After going thru 4 motherboards trying to find one I liked and that liked my QX cpu and Gskill 4,4,4,5 1000mhz ram… I’m extremely happy to say, I’ve found it.
My recent mobo history,
eVGA 680i
Abit IN9-32max
Abit QuadGT (two of these after I broke one after a week or so and RMA’d it)
The eVGA 680i, ok board. Just cheaply made.
Abit IN9-32max, neat board. Lots of bells and whistles. Coolest bios logo screen I’ve ever seen, I really wish more logo screens looked as nice and full of color… it is like a weird techno dragon thing (the same picture that’s on the box).
Abit QuadGT, LOATH this mobo. Hate this one, HATE IT! I could go on and on about this board… perhaps in a year or two (at the rate they are going) there might be a bios update worth while that makes this board atleast somewhat decent, but I already broke one from losing my patients, I’m done waiting.
All three boards hated my Gskill ram. The eVGA would boot with it if I booted with another stick first and set all the weird timings and voltages for it. The Abit boards… just sucked. Now the QuadGT wouldn’t make up it’s mind if it would use it or not. Some days, it would work just fine, some days it wouldn’t get past the memory check in the bios, some days one stick would work but the pair would not, some days only the auto settings would work, some days only the manually entered settings would allow it to work. Both Abit boards wouldn’t take my QX above 333MHz fsb without not posting. The eVGA would take me to 375 rock solid, 400 ify.
P35-DS3R, love it! Pop in my ram, auto detects the proper factory settings, and just works. Decide to nose around the bios and change the fsb… figured 400mhz should be a good bios resetting laugh… and I am currently typing this message at 400MHz fsb x8… with zero voltage changes.
It is missing a couple things I’ve grown use to. It doesn’t have the LED bios code display that is very handy and it doesn’t have any firewire what so ever, no back panel port and no headers, which is suprising… but I guess for less the 150 bucks, there’s gotta be a couple reasons for the low price. It also has to things that have long lived there life and need to be taken out back and shot… it has a back panel LPT and COM port. Why… I dunno.
It has four backpanel USB ports and 4 headers for 8 more ports.
The bios is different, but not bad… and it has a very interesting bios re-set feature. If you OC something that doesn’t allow it to post, it simple turns the pc off by it’s self and re-sets only the CPU and memory settings back to default. So you don’t have to jumper or flip switches all the time. And it keeps the settings you enter, it just changes two options (one for ram and one for cpu) to auto. Soon as you change it off auto, your settings that didn’t work pop back in there and allow you to make your corrections off of them.
I tried for the hell of it to goto to 500mhz fsb… didn’t work, though I wasn’t surprised, but I really didn’t “try” to get it to work, just upped a few volts and let’er rip… didn’t dive deep into it at all.
The board comes with the world’s worst manual… the thing is garbage. Looks like a cut all manual as it has how to install your video and use an AGP card and socket as it’s pic-to-gram.
Driver installation was easy, the CD has a deal called “xpress install” just runs a program to see if you have the drivers for the board and if not, it installs them.
I am very impressed with this board… enough to pull back out my phase change unit to see what kind of clock speeds I can get (something I stopped doing when I got my hands on the very frustrating abit boards).
My recent mobo history,
eVGA 680i
Abit IN9-32max
Abit QuadGT (two of these after I broke one after a week or so and RMA’d it)
The eVGA 680i, ok board. Just cheaply made.
Abit IN9-32max, neat board. Lots of bells and whistles. Coolest bios logo screen I’ve ever seen, I really wish more logo screens looked as nice and full of color… it is like a weird techno dragon thing (the same picture that’s on the box).
Abit QuadGT, LOATH this mobo. Hate this one, HATE IT! I could go on and on about this board… perhaps in a year or two (at the rate they are going) there might be a bios update worth while that makes this board atleast somewhat decent, but I already broke one from losing my patients, I’m done waiting.
All three boards hated my Gskill ram. The eVGA would boot with it if I booted with another stick first and set all the weird timings and voltages for it. The Abit boards… just sucked. Now the QuadGT wouldn’t make up it’s mind if it would use it or not. Some days, it would work just fine, some days it wouldn’t get past the memory check in the bios, some days one stick would work but the pair would not, some days only the auto settings would work, some days only the manually entered settings would allow it to work. Both Abit boards wouldn’t take my QX above 333MHz fsb without not posting. The eVGA would take me to 375 rock solid, 400 ify.
P35-DS3R, love it! Pop in my ram, auto detects the proper factory settings, and just works. Decide to nose around the bios and change the fsb… figured 400mhz should be a good bios resetting laugh… and I am currently typing this message at 400MHz fsb x8… with zero voltage changes.
It is missing a couple things I’ve grown use to. It doesn’t have the LED bios code display that is very handy and it doesn’t have any firewire what so ever, no back panel port and no headers, which is suprising… but I guess for less the 150 bucks, there’s gotta be a couple reasons for the low price. It also has to things that have long lived there life and need to be taken out back and shot… it has a back panel LPT and COM port. Why… I dunno.
It has four backpanel USB ports and 4 headers for 8 more ports.
The bios is different, but not bad… and it has a very interesting bios re-set feature. If you OC something that doesn’t allow it to post, it simple turns the pc off by it’s self and re-sets only the CPU and memory settings back to default. So you don’t have to jumper or flip switches all the time. And it keeps the settings you enter, it just changes two options (one for ram and one for cpu) to auto. Soon as you change it off auto, your settings that didn’t work pop back in there and allow you to make your corrections off of them.
I tried for the hell of it to goto to 500mhz fsb… didn’t work, though I wasn’t surprised, but I really didn’t “try” to get it to work, just upped a few volts and let’er rip… didn’t dive deep into it at all.
The board comes with the world’s worst manual… the thing is garbage. Looks like a cut all manual as it has how to install your video and use an AGP card and socket as it’s pic-to-gram.
Driver installation was easy, the CD has a deal called “xpress install” just runs a program to see if you have the drivers for the board and if not, it installs them.
I am very impressed with this board… enough to pull back out my phase change unit to see what kind of clock speeds I can get (something I stopped doing when I got my hands on the very frustrating abit boards).
