Abit IP35-E Review (500MHz FSB board)...$90 @ NewEgg + $6.61 ship

[cleverest]

So after installing windows....I started plugging one drive in at a time to the SATA ports and connecting their power connector...windows picked up my other sata HD great....powered off and connected one other sata optical drive...noticed that windows refused to see more then one optical drive once I checked 'my computer'....so restarted & checked BIOS...it appears there....(all optical drives are set to MASTER btw).....eventually I got everything connected and showing in BIOS just to see if it's correct THERE at least....IT IS.....however windows hangs on the loading logo..although the green progress bar moves just fine.... (big help that bar is)..... it just sits there...forever....when I restart the computer, I happen to notice that my cpu is saying 8ghz again.....I go into BIOS and correct....put my memory on 2.1v (it's actual rating, corsair xms2 6400) (I've also tried 1.9v as recommended in this thread by others)....and I'm sure to set memory to 1:1 and bus speed of cpu to 333mhz (e6750)....I then save settings and restart....now all sata drives are once again NOT DETECTED by bios...no windows booting at all of course....it tells me disk error and wants a floppy disc. (BTW, when I get this particular disk error when none of my drives are detected in the bios, both my reset button and CTRL-ALT-DELETE do not function at all, not sure if that's any help...)

OMFG......Am I cursed? Am I asking too much to be using 3 optical drives with SATA adapters in win MCE? I didn't even try to connect my 400gb IDE drive yet, and quite frankly I'm terrified to bother trying that EVER now.

- Brett

 

[cleverest]

BTW serpentroyal all my hardware is in my Sig....it's the Ip35 Pro Model

 

[cleverest]

Update:

So I cleared CMOS....waited about 15min.....turned on...now my computer sticks on the first screen and shows my drives on sata ports 1-4 (only my burner does not show now, and it should be coming up on sata 5 or 6)....it doesn't give status for 5 or 6 at all....

It says CMOS checksum error - default loaded...press F1 to continue or DEL to enter setup. I would love to just press F1 and it looks like my memory is correct....2gb (ddr2-2046), etc...but the CPU is showing 8.18ghz (23x8, 2 cpu's) even though below that line it detects the correct model (e6750 @ 2.66ghz)

below this line in bold white it says:
C1E Bios Supported
EM64T CPU

I know if I press delete and enter bios all my drives will show, until I fix my CPU settings, etc..then I will restart and no drives will show up...so should I hit F1 or just throw this thing out my 2nd story window? Or of I must enter the BIOS (which apparently I have to, read below), what do I change/load to prevent my drives from pulling a Houdini act??

I'm caught in a VICIOUS Circle!

-----------

UPDATE: I decided to hit F1....it loaded windows.....seemed ok, windows even said it was adding my second optical drive into detected hardware....but didn't show in my computer....properties of system showed correct CPU speed and memory size...., then it started to get unstable...clicks not working....windows delayed, got to START / RESTART...but it hung on desktop graphic.....had to power off / power on.....it tried loading again....windows progress bar moves...no load....stuck....SSIIIIIGGGGHHHH (and I'm supposed to be a technician, this is ridiculous.)

Thanks for reading and helping me!! I'll shut up now and await some help....

- Brett

 

[hokiealumnus]

Have you tried reflashing your bios recently? If not, do so and make sure you use the clear switch when doing so (/wb); see Serpents first post.

If you've flashed recently, try a hard CMOS clear...
Power down & disconnect power cable.
Hit power switch to clear any remaining charge in your capacitors.
Flip your clear CMOS switch and take the battery out.
Let it sit for a while (an hour maybe?).

Put it all back together and boot. Immediately go into BIOS. Load optimized defaults and set any memory settings you need. Don't overclock at all; see if you can get it to read the right defaults (i.e. no 8GHz processor!).

You're not going to want to hear this one, but since you have so many HDDS, maybe copy all the data from one to another and zero-format it. Then, disconnect all but the blank HDD and one optical drive. Try installing XP and see if it works. Maybe Vista just doesn't like your setup? I honestly have no idea if that's it, just taking a stab in the dark here.

Also try the abit forums. Serpent knows what he's talking about, but sometimes folks over there have had problems more similar to yours. I used a combination of advice from both Serpent and folks over there. Together, it has made for a very stable overclocked system (built by someone who's on his first build and has never overclocked before this one).

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Originally posted by: hokiealumnus
Thank you very much for your much needed, excellent advice Serpent. Because of you and the great folks over at the abit forums, I've been able to obtain what I believe is the best I can reasonably expect with the equipment that I've got (until I get a better cooler!).

Quick correction - to those that use an E4400, the default multi is 10x. Do not try running C1E & EIST with anything but a 10x multi to avoid having to re-flash your BIOS like I did (on advice from abit). The E4300 that Serpent has is a 9x multi by default, quite an understandable mistake.

Re: OCZ - Because it looks good? Heh. I actually only paid $25/G AR, so the price was reasonable, and it's rated as DDR2-800 @ 4-4-4-15-2T. It'll run that all day long at 1.9V (actual voltage; 1.95 setting in BIOS). It'll even overclock to DDR2-900 at the 4-4-4-15-2T timings, but you have to feed it some extra voltage (2.2 setting in bios for actual 1.16Vdimm, which OCZ said was fine, but said not to exceed 2.2).

Anyway...thank you, thank you, thank you. All of your help has been immeasurable, to me and all the others that 1. decided to purchase this board in no small part thanks to you and 2. get it working great and overclocking nicely to boot!

No problem. And thanks for the update.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Originally posted by: cleverest
SerpentRoyaL,

Thanks for the help, I was able to only partially strip the board (wanted to try to get it working with a bit less work first since I just experienced an RMA with Giga-BITES defective P35 board...known bad bios chips....UGH)...well I removed all drives EXCEPT my SATA OS drive which is in the Sata1-port...and removing one memory stick....after having it off all night, tried again, now it doesn't give me a 8ghz cpu and it sees my OS drive after I correct those settings in the bios! Yay! Put memory back and connected one of my optical drives...working great so far....

*update, read my posts below....everything is messed up again....but please read the rest of this post - thanks.

Some more questions please...would really appreciate the help....need to plan this clearly as posible...

I have two more hard drives and 3 optical drives to connect....I need all 3 optical drives because they all burn specific media (with hacked firmware) the the other drives cannot burn....anyways all these optical drives are IDE (one is my dvd burner...), but I have the rosewell PATA to SATA adapters on them to allow them to connect to the MB SATA ports...

My two hard drives to connect....one is sata, one is IDE, the ide is 400gb, so I don't want to give that up...

My question is: which ports do I choose for all of these drives and what bios trickery do I have to do to get it all working? I don't care about RAID or AHCI, I'm happy running in standard IDE so that should be possible, correct? I'll worry about AHCI. etc... when I get vista later on...right now I'm using media center 2005 (vista sucks for the midi music thing so far and I do that a lot).

oh, and after windows is installed should I plug each HD and optical drive by itself, one at a time, and power on, check devices in windows, etc...?

(read below, I tried this....)

Thanks for the help buddy.

- Brett

Always connect one HDD and one optical drive when you clean install windows. I'd put the SATA as the boot HDD and one optical drive on the PATA Master connector. Set this optical drive as Master. Install windows. Install Intel chipset, sound, and LAN drivers. Change label of optical drive in windows to "M" drive. Add PATA HDD to the PATA Slave connector. Set this HDD as Slave (make sure this HDD does not contain a primary active boot partition). You may need to zero fill this HDD before use (use an extended logical partition). If windows detects 2nd HDD, then connect 2nd optical drive using adaptor. Once this drive is detected, add the 3rd optical drive using adaptor.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Originally posted by: ArchAngel777
Ok, so here is what I did...

I decided to fuck it and redo all cabling and make it as tighty as possible. I cranked the Tuniq way the fuck down until It heard the motherboard crack! (It was already tight, I just did it for the hell of it, who knows). Then I moved my HDD to the lower chamber, moved my fan up to the end of the HDD carriage so that it blew across on the motherboard and then boxed her up and did another test.

The results were quite pleasing! Again, I really dont want to jynx myself... Seriously, I am almost scared to post that I think things are better, but I am going to post anyway!

As of yesterday, my temps were hitting 85c in Orthos, it hit 90 once and shutdown. I reseated the heatsink, it did nothing. Same thing...

I flashed to BIOS 13 and noticed a bit cooler tempatures, but not by much. I then removed my side panel and noticed a drop of about 10c accross the board, both load and idle.

Then I decided to take it apart and fix my sloppy cabling, move my raptor to the lower chamber and place my third antec intake far farther back in the case to blow air over it. I think things end up quite sucessfull overall.

BEFORE TEMPS

CPU IDLE = 58
CPU LOAD = 90
PWM IDLE = 49
PWM LOAD = 80

AFTER TEMPS

CPU IDLE = 49
CPU LOAD = 70
PWM IDLE = 41
PWM LOAD = 70

Right now I am still making sure my ram is sufficient.

Does anyone know of a small fan I can install on the NB? I am thinking about using a small one to help keep it cool.

BTW, thanks to everyone who has had to deal with my problems and bad attitude... I get upset easily when I blow ~1000 and something doesn't work. Especially since I myself am a tech and things just rarely give me problems. These new Quad Cores and Intel MB chipsets run so damn hot and I am totally not used to it.

70C load @ CPU and MOSFET is fine. I'd strap an 80 mm low speed Panaflo just above the MOSFET heat sink to cool this region. A better solution is to go with the Big Typhoon and upgrade the stock fan with a 120 x 38mm medium speed Panaflo. This fan can crank out serious air flow at full speed to cool the MOSFETs and NB.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Originally posted by: hokiealumnus
ArchAngel, sorry for all the problems you've been having. I wasn't around to really post on them, but Serpent is much better at diagnosing things than most of us anyway!

Those temps look MUCH better, congratulations! I did see that you had a port you angled towards your processor. Answer me this: How far away from the processor is the end of the port? I was helped by Master of None over on the abit forums when I was having higher temps. He gave me a simple, easy and most importantly (to me), cheap way to decrease my temps.

Either cut a 4inch hole, or drill some holes within 4 inches (make it symmetrical, it'll look like crap if you don't, I did a "star" type pattern and it looks nice). Then get yourself a plastic taco bell cup (they're sturdier than others) and either drop it in the 4" hole or affix it to the side of the case inside around the drilled holes. Cut the bottom of the taco bell cup so that it's 1cm or less away from your processor.

Since you already have a port, maybe try using the cup only if it'll fit around it, or extend the port by some other means. The closer it is to your processor, the more cool air gets directly to it and not sucked away by exhaust fans.

I got the cup about a millimeter away from my HSF and my temps instantly, under load and idle, dropped 2-3 degrees. My case didn't have a port before, so that's probably more than you'll see, but every little bit counts! Just a thought. Good luck!

A side vent will allow the CPU cooler to use room temperature air instead of case temperature air to cool the CPU. Easy 3 to 5C drop in CPU and MOSFET temp. A downdraft CPU cooler like the Big Typhoon works exceptionally well with a side duct. I use an Antec SLK3000B case.

 

[harbin]

IP35-E +12v rail gave reading 7.23v from speedfan 4.33, is this normal?

 

[hokiealumnus]

Yea, for some reason nothing reports the 12v rail correctly except AbitEQ and BIOS.

 

[WEW]

Finally I got everythign setup - assembled my Antec P180B case - was able to install Vista -- but one problem. The CPU temperature, I couldn't install the Abit CD application to check the temp, so decided to take a peak at the Bios -- and am shocked to see the temp between 78-70 C.

I had to step away, but just got back and decided to monitor the idle CPU temperature, by botting it up, and seeing what happens, it started in low 20' or 30's then almost every other second, is going up a 1 C -- right now all I've done is just go to the BIOS after startup and the temperature is now at 79 C -- its stayed there and hasnt gone up , but is this normal? The CPU Warning Temp is at 80C which tells me that something might not be right.

The System Temp is 31 C and PWM is 63 C

I have a cooler master heatsink and this is a Pentium 4 D 820 2.8ghz CPU.

Help!

 

[cleverest]

Well good news guys....I guess I can still consider myself a technician, with the understanding that we are all subject to:

USER ERROR

Apparently my psu was routed in a manner that when I unplugged the power from the optical drives (to try them one by one) I was actually killing the power to other optical drives (it's confusing to explain, just trust me...) so I fixed the psu cable routing, and wham everything loads right up....was so surprised and relieved that this appeared to me the main problem....

I have everything loaded and I'm patching my OS now with windows updates....after this is done I'm doing a Acronis trueimage backup! Thanks for all your help guys....good stuff....

Btw my cpu still says (1 cpu, 8.18ghz) when booting up, but then it says 2.66ghz below that....and in windows it shows the correct CPU speed....everything seems perfectly stable (no overclocking, well...not intentionally, lol) I guess this is Okay? I'm scared to try to "fix" it now....

- Brett

 

[ArchAngel777]

I set my CPU speed to 350x9 and everything was running fine for hours, so I started a loop of 3dmark and when I came home I found that it gave some error finding a certain file... So no big deal, but then I noticed it detected the CPU as 266x9... I am curious what would have caused this. I opened up CPU-Z and it confirmed that my CPU was set back to 2.4Ghz. Found it quite strange as temps were not even nearing max with it running...

 

[rbk123]

For my latest update, I can run my 2140 at 3.2Ghz with 1.425 volts. At 1.405 volts, it's only Orthos stable for 15 minutes.

I then went and enable C1E and EIST for my 3.2Ghz setting and found out that it only runs the CPU at a 6x multiplier unless it think you need more CPU power, then it goes back up to 8x. Unfortunately it doesn't think you need the power very often so only the serious CPU apps get the 8x, and even then it's slow to go to the 8x. My benchmarks (3DMark03) actually ran slower at 3.2Ghz with C1E and EIST enabled, then it did with my computer at 3.0Ghz on stock voltage.

This is annoying so I've bailed on both of them as I don't want my overclock to be for just the occasional CPU intensive app. Also, I alternated with just one enabled and the other disabled and they both performed exactly the same. No difference if both were enabled, or just one was enabled.

Note this isn't a gripe about the board, it's just some info on how C1E and EIST work. They kept the cpu 2 degrees cooler at idle, and lower volts, but I'd rather have the better performance.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Originally posted by: WEW
Finally I got everythign setup - assembled my Antec P180B case - was able to install Vista -- but one problem. The CPU temperature, I couldn't install the Abit CD application to check the temp, so decided to take a peak at the Bios -- and am shocked to see the temp between 78-70 C.

I had to step away, but just got back and decided to monitor the idle CPU temperature, by botting it up, and seeing what happens, it started in low 20' or 30's then almost every other second, is going up a 1 C -- right now all I've done is just go to the BIOS after startup and the temperature is now at 79 C -- its stayed there and hasnt gone up , but is this normal? The CPU Warning Temp is at 80C which tells me that something might not be right.

The System Temp is 31 C and PWM is 63 C

I have a cooler master heatsink and this is a Pentium 4 D 820 2.8ghz CPU.

Help!

Check CPU heat sink for proper contact. Those ancient chips also run hot.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Originally posted by: ArchAngel777
I set my CPU speed to 350x9 and everything was running fine for hours, so I started a loop of 3dmark and when I came home I found that it gave some error finding a certain file... So no big deal, but then I noticed it detected the CPU as 266x9... I am curious what would have caused this. I opened up CPU-Z and it confirmed that my CPU was set back to 2.4Ghz. Found it quite strange as temps were not even nearing max with it running...

Unstable overclock which may have corrupted the BIOS. Overclock only in BIOS. Do not auto launch the Guru software in windows.

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Originally posted by: rbk123
For my latest update, I can run my 2140 at 3.2Ghz with 1.425 volts. At 1.405 volts, it's only Orthos stable for 15 minutes.

I then went and enable C1E and EIST for my 3.2Ghz setting and found out that it only runs the CPU at a 6x multiplier unless it think you need more CPU power, then it goes back up to 8x. Unfortunately it doesn't think you need the power very often so only the serious CPU apps get the 8x, and even then it's slow to go to the 8x. My benchmarks (3DMark03) actually ran slower at 3.2Ghz with C1E and EIST enabled, then it did with my computer at 3.0Ghz on stock voltage.

This is annoying so I've bailed on both of them as I don't want my overclock to be for just the occasional CPU intensive app. Also, I alternated with just one enabled and the other disabled and they both performed exactly the same. No difference if both were enabled, or just one was enabled.

Note this isn't a gripe about the board, it's just some info on how C1E and EIST work. They kept the cpu 2 degrees cooler at idle, and lower volts, but I'd rather have the better performance.

That's a poorly programmed benchmark. Garbage in, garbage out. Run Super Pi 1M/32M for a real-world test of CPU crunching power.

 

[WEW]

Argh! I unhooked everything took out motherboard from case - took off heatsink -- cleaned thermal paste, applied the paste again from arctic silver -- and am now checking the temp -- outside the box - while its idle -- what is the temp i should expect as normal?

it climbs up abit but is kind of stabilizing longer in the increment, its at 35C right now.

thanks

 

[SerpentRoyal]

They called those older chips PressHOT. If the CPU is properly seated, then there's nothing that you can do. If it goes POOF, then buy a $60 E2140/E2160 and overclock it to +3.0GHz.

 

[WEW]

Hey Serpent - problem is i installed Vista - it was going good - im not sure if its the temp or my installation zone alarm internet security that caused it to hang or slow down a lot -- sometimes like when i open IE -- it freezes -- and i cant do anything -- not sure if the motherboard is telling the CPU to stop or something.

My concern is - will I damage the motherboard if this thing continues to rise? Thanks. Also, if you recall I was having problem with my Dell E510 stuck at the BIOS screen, so not sure if it was the motherboard or cpu or PS So I replaced all except the CPU.

thanks

 

[SerpentRoyal]

Always clean install windows and check for stability before you load any other program.

If you have loaded the Intel chipset, sound, and LAN drivers, then the PC should run quickly with just the browser. That said, Vista is JUNK. Too many driver issues. Which RAM? Did you run memtest? Go back to my 1st post and follow the instruction at the bottom.

 

[rbk123]

Originally posted by: SerpentRoyal

That's a poorly programmed benchmark. Garbage in, garbage out. Run Super Pi 1M/32M for a real-world test of CPU crunching power.

You're missing my point - unless it's something like Super Pi or Orthos, the C1E/EIST setting feels you don't need all the horespower and so leaves it running at 2.4Ghz. I don't want that, I want it running at 3.2 all the time, not just when I'm running Super Pi.

 

[WEW]

Hey Serpent - I reinstalled the heatsink -- cleaned the thermal pasted good, put some more artic - spread a thin layer around - then went through the hassle to fit it again -- now noticed idle temp is like 35 C when booted for a while.

I ran Vista ultimate again (its a clean install on the HD) -- i dont know of any temp monitoring that would work -- do you know?

actually found speedfan from what I read -- when i was running an anti-virus temp goes from 40-45C

I'm guessing heatsink assembly was the problem.

 

[hokiealumnus]

rbk123, go into the "Advanced BIOS Options" in your BIOS and enter the "CPU Features" sub-menu (from memory, if it's not those, it's very similar). You can disable C1E & EIST altogether there.

 

[cleverest]

Hey guys, is 31c (core 0) 34c (core 1) IDLE temps good for a e6750 core 2 duo cpu? I'm using a Artic Freezer Pro 7 and I have a nice case for cooling (xclio a380bk, it has two 250mm fans [front and side] and 1 120mm exhaust fan, I have these all on LOW/QUIET mode)....I ran orthos for 2min (just a quick test, small FFT) and it went up to 44c (core 0) 45c (core 1)...

honestly, are those decent temps for a non-overclocked system?

- Brett