Thanks for the replies. I purchased the P4C800-E Deluxe this week. Except for no round IDE cables and SPDIF out module, it came with most of the accessories you may need, including SATA power cables. I?m running it with a P4 2.4Ghz 800, 2 x 512mb HyperX PC3500 (unmatched but same batch and revision) in dual mode, Enlight 430W PS, and my old Geforce2 Ultra. The new Geforce FX 5600 Ultra rev2 though looks promising. I had no problems installing Win XP Pro & SP1, board drivers, DirectX 9, Nvidia drivers, and Win XP updates using the default bios settings. I flashed the bios to v1.010 using EZ Flash; download the bios file, unzip it to a floppy, change the name to PC4800ED.rom, reboot, and hit Alt + F2 during post. I suggest you do this first before messing with the bios. If it becomes corrupted, as mine did, you can reflash v1.010 from the floppy. CPU-Z, v1.17, showed the ram timings set by SPD were 2.5-4-4-8. I used Sisoft Sandra Max3 for memory bandwidth benchmarks, buffered and unbuffered.
All ram settings, except 1*, were with dram burst length set to 8, dram idle timer to auto, dram refresh mode to auto, performance (acceleration) mode to turbo (enabled), hyper-threading enabled, and spread spectrum disabled.
Here?s a good guide to bios settings.
Bios Optimization Guide
Results:
FSB---DDR Volts--Bios Ram Settings--Boot to OS--CPU-Z Mem Freq---Mem BW, Mb/s, buff / unbuff
210------2.55V-----------2.5-4-4-8---------------Yes-------------420Mhz-------------4836, 4838 / 2560, 2611
217------2.85V-----------2.5-4-4-8---------------Yes-------------289Mhz-------------3987, 3974 / 1745, 1788
Kingston suggests 2-3-3-7.
210------2.55V-----------2-3-3-7------------------Yes------------ 420Mhz-------------4902, 4930 / 2783, 2815
217------2.85V-----------2-3-3-7------------------Yes-------------289Mhz-------------4061, 4061 / 1955, 1972
I don?t know why but CPU-Z showed 2-2-3-5 as 2-3-2-5 and 2-3-2-5 as 2-2-3-5. Has anyone else observed this?
210------2.55V-----------2-2-3-5------------------Yes-------------420Mhz-------------4987, 4978 / 2898, 2949
217------2.85V-----------2-2-3-5------------------Yes-------------289Mhz-------------4099, 4095 / 2026, 2046
210------2.55V-----------2-2-3-5-4*--------------Yes-------------420Mhz-------------4945, 4961 / 2846, 2926
210------2.55V-----------2-3-2-5-------------Bios corrupted
210------2.85V-----------2-3-2-5-------------------Yes------------420Mhz--------------4987, 4970 / 2850, 2936
210------2.85V-----------2-2-2-5-------------------Yes------------420Mhz--------------5027, 5011 / 2968, 3046
211------2.85V-----------2-2-2-5-------------------Yes------------281Mhz--------------4032, 4031 / 2046, 2072
210------2.75V-----------2-2-2-5-------------------No
As you can see I could get the FSB over 210 but then the ram freq and mem bandwidth suffered. Looks like the best setting is 2-2-2-5 at 2.85V, but how long can this ram handle this voltage. There?s not a big difference between this setting and 2-2-3-5 (CPU-Z showed 2-3-2-5) at 2.55V. I also ran MemTest86 on these, and depending on the ram settings, it picked up 6 to 90 errors in just the first 5 tests.
I?m a little disappointed in this ram. I?m not a heavy overclocker but I expected it to at least run at its rated mem freq of 434Mhz. I will probably RMA these back to Kingston and try to swap them for a matched pair.
Just a few more comments about this board. I don?t think the manual mentions this. It drove me crazy for about an hour. When it first boots up it beeps for every usb device you have connected and turned on. I had my mouse, printer, and scanner on today and when it booted up it beeped 3 times. I thought this was the bios beep code that means ?Main Memory Read/Write Test Error?. I checked each chip individually and even borrowed some Corsair memory from a friend and got the same results. Then I remembered reading about this on another thread.
Also the onboard sound is not bad. I think it sounds better than my SB Live 5.1 Has anyone though gotten Instant Music to work? If yes, how?