I bought this motherboard as the first component to begin my upgrade from a Pentium D to a quad core. Starcraft 2 is coming out and I want Alan Wake to run well when it comes out too. Also, I need a blu-ray player and if I wanted one I needed a better graphics card to support a 1080P display. So, I thought, "let's give SLI a try!"
Well, step one in a complete PC overhaul is to pick a new motherboard. My old PSU fried the atx12v header on my P5WD2-Premium. I thought surely Asus wouldn't replace it. Low and behold, a week and a half after I dropped my P5WD2-Premium in the mail I checked the status on my RMA and a replacement was on its way. So I thought I'd hand Asus some more cache (*edit* I'm leaving this spelling mistake in, because I think it's hilarious) for doing me right.
I've been out of it for a while with regards to hardware and my last VGA was an ATI. I don't like to look at hardware unless I'm building something, because I will buy more, even if I don't need it. When I saw that I needed an nVidia board to do SLI I was ****ed.
So I looked at quad core mobo's with SLI compatibility and that took me to the P5N-T Deluxe. I read the reviews on newegg. There were some good ones and there were some bad ones and the bad ones sounded like they were all written by illiterate 12 year olds. I came to the conclusion that illiterate 12 year olds don't know what they're doing and bought the board anyway.
Everything arrived at my doorstep and I frantically put this baby together. I ordered two 9600GTs and was elated at the thought of actually hooking two VGAs together. Two VGAs doing the job of one on a machine with four cores! The future has arrived!
So being an overclocker, I went straight online to check what everyone had their settings set to for a decent overclock. I hit 3.2 Ghz effortlessly. Then I wanted more. The FSB went up and the BSODs came flying at me.
Problem 1) Memory module possibly fried by board
I popped the bad stick out and soldiered on to hit 3.6 Ghz. I ran prime 95 and went to bed. I woke up to find that it was still running after 8 hours. "Ahhh, stable", I thought. "I knew those 12 year olds didn't know what they're doing."
Now to tackle the SLI thing. I enabled SLI, something I didn't realize I had to do before then installed 3DMark06. I ran it and to my horror I got a bunch of flickering. My framerates were good and my score was 15000+. I disabled SLI. The flickering was gone. My score went into the dirt of course. I did some reading and found out that this was a common problem for some people and a good work around is to disconnect the SLI bridge and run the cards that way. I did it. My score was now in the 14000's.
Problem 2) SLI does not $%^%^&% work.
So I decide I'll beg newegg for a refund even though the return policy for these cards is exchange only. Newegg comes through and proves once again why they're the first place I check for hardware. By the time my refund is in my bank account, the 9800GTX has hit the shelves. So I order one.
Well, let's burn a DVD. Oh that doesn't work either! So I hunt around to find the problem. I've got the latest drivers. I check digg and find out that something like 29% of Vista crashes are caused by nVidia drivers. WTF. Why do I have this motherboard? I disabled RAID and low and behold the disc burns. WHAT IS UP WITH THIS COMPANY?!?!?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Problem 3) RAID drivers don't work.
So the days go by and suddenly my computer starts shutting down intermittently. I ran P95 and sure enough the thing won't run for 5 minutes. So, I up the vCore. I run it again. It runs a little longer. I up it again. It runs for 2 hours. I have my vCore up to 1.56 and finally it is stable once more.
The next day the thing is shutting down again. I check my vCore and it has $%%&%$^%%^ dropped on its own. I up it in the BIOS to 1.6 and in windows it is at 1.5 YES .10v of vDrop. I run P95 and under load the voltage drops down to 1.44. YES vDroop from hell. The thing will not get stable again. I played with every voltage I could and nothing fixes it.
Problem 4) Cannot overclock this POS at all
So I drop the FSB down. Still not stable. I drop it more. Still not stable. I drop the processor down to 3.0Ghz and set the voltages to automatic. And finally it will stay running long enough for me to load ocforums.com and type how %^&%^$ disgusted I am with this damned board.
I hate nVidia. Every one of their engineers needs to die in a fire.
Now I'm thinking about getting a 790i, but that means buying more memory because it's DDR3 and crawling back to the ******** at nVidia.
Well, step one in a complete PC overhaul is to pick a new motherboard. My old PSU fried the atx12v header on my P5WD2-Premium. I thought surely Asus wouldn't replace it. Low and behold, a week and a half after I dropped my P5WD2-Premium in the mail I checked the status on my RMA and a replacement was on its way. So I thought I'd hand Asus some more cache (*edit* I'm leaving this spelling mistake in, because I think it's hilarious) for doing me right.
I've been out of it for a while with regards to hardware and my last VGA was an ATI. I don't like to look at hardware unless I'm building something, because I will buy more, even if I don't need it. When I saw that I needed an nVidia board to do SLI I was ****ed.
So I looked at quad core mobo's with SLI compatibility and that took me to the P5N-T Deluxe. I read the reviews on newegg. There were some good ones and there were some bad ones and the bad ones sounded like they were all written by illiterate 12 year olds. I came to the conclusion that illiterate 12 year olds don't know what they're doing and bought the board anyway.
Everything arrived at my doorstep and I frantically put this baby together. I ordered two 9600GTs and was elated at the thought of actually hooking two VGAs together. Two VGAs doing the job of one on a machine with four cores! The future has arrived!
So being an overclocker, I went straight online to check what everyone had their settings set to for a decent overclock. I hit 3.2 Ghz effortlessly. Then I wanted more. The FSB went up and the BSODs came flying at me.
Problem 1) Memory module possibly fried by board
I popped the bad stick out and soldiered on to hit 3.6 Ghz. I ran prime 95 and went to bed. I woke up to find that it was still running after 8 hours. "Ahhh, stable", I thought. "I knew those 12 year olds didn't know what they're doing."
Now to tackle the SLI thing. I enabled SLI, something I didn't realize I had to do before then installed 3DMark06. I ran it and to my horror I got a bunch of flickering. My framerates were good and my score was 15000+. I disabled SLI. The flickering was gone. My score went into the dirt of course. I did some reading and found out that this was a common problem for some people and a good work around is to disconnect the SLI bridge and run the cards that way. I did it. My score was now in the 14000's.
Problem 2) SLI does not $%^%^&% work.
So I decide I'll beg newegg for a refund even though the return policy for these cards is exchange only. Newegg comes through and proves once again why they're the first place I check for hardware. By the time my refund is in my bank account, the 9800GTX has hit the shelves. So I order one.
Well, let's burn a DVD. Oh that doesn't work either! So I hunt around to find the problem. I've got the latest drivers. I check digg and find out that something like 29% of Vista crashes are caused by nVidia drivers. WTF. Why do I have this motherboard? I disabled RAID and low and behold the disc burns. WHAT IS UP WITH THIS COMPANY?!?!?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Problem 3) RAID drivers don't work.
So the days go by and suddenly my computer starts shutting down intermittently. I ran P95 and sure enough the thing won't run for 5 minutes. So, I up the vCore. I run it again. It runs a little longer. I up it again. It runs for 2 hours. I have my vCore up to 1.56 and finally it is stable once more.
The next day the thing is shutting down again. I check my vCore and it has $%%&%$^%%^ dropped on its own. I up it in the BIOS to 1.6 and in windows it is at 1.5 YES .10v of vDrop. I run P95 and under load the voltage drops down to 1.44. YES vDroop from hell. The thing will not get stable again. I played with every voltage I could and nothing fixes it.
Problem 4) Cannot overclock this POS at all
So I drop the FSB down. Still not stable. I drop it more. Still not stable. I drop the processor down to 3.0Ghz and set the voltages to automatic. And finally it will stay running long enough for me to load ocforums.com and type how %^&%^$ disgusted I am with this damned board.
I hate nVidia. Every one of their engineers needs to die in a fire.
Now I'm thinking about getting a 790i, but that means buying more memory because it's DDR3 and crawling back to the ******** at nVidia.
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