Originally posted by: Crusader
Originally posted by: Fraggable
Originally posted by: Crusader
Originally posted by: Craig234
Any other tips on motherboards (and fans) for people who either won't overclock or who are new to it, where 'ease of installation and use' is a factor?
I see the Artic Cooler Freezer 64 Pro recommended, $25 shipped.
I saw the DFI N4 Ultra-D recommended, about $115 shipped, reviews say 'hard to set up, for people who can spend hours, don't expect to work work the first try or two'.
Any other suggestions? My old ECS K7S54 sure can't run it
What? DFIs are easy to setup stock. Hit "optimized default" button and go. Take a quick scan of the screens to make sure the basics are set correctly (HDDs ect) and you're fine?
I'd like to see that rig that took hours to get running. He is either overclocking or making it entirely to hard. Theres no tweaking to get a DFI running at stock like anything else. I've never had a problem with getting any brand up and running the first time @stock.
Just check if the RAM you have will work in the DFI (any specific incompatibilities).. but you should do that with any motherboard you upgrade to.
No other suggestions.. the DFI + Arctic Cooling combo is tough to beat for ease of use and getting the highest quality stuff on the cheap (all Jap capacitors in DFI, heatpipes and as good of a fan setup as you are going to get without piecing together your own, which isnt worth it).
I had endless issues getting the first and last DFI board I bought to work. For some reason when I bought it (10 months after buying my CPU) it was on such an old BIOS it wouldn't work with my CPU without a BIOS update, then my X-Fi wouldn't work with it, and whenever I tried to boot with more than 2 of my 4 512MB sticks of RAM it wouldn't boot at stock speeds. Then the RAID setup was extremely weird an difficult to work with and I never did get it set up right even after following the terribly translated manual step by step.
I had it for 4 days and will never buy their products again. Their support is awful - no phone support at all and to me that is unacceptable.
DFI Street forums blow away any phone support from any company.
I had a DFI board come bashed up in shipping, and they replaced it immediately.
But just as a note to the guy looking at the DFI.. I had my RAID array setup in 5 minutes. I'm not sure what would be confusing, or hard about it.... ?
I'm not a noob, been an enthusiast since the Commodore 64. Built my 286, 386, 486, Pentium 1, Athlon Thunderbird, AXP, A64.. but I still dont think you'd need a couple decades of experience to use a DFI board.
if you have a hard time getting raid to work on a DFI, I'm not sure what to say about that because its so easy.
I've had Asus, Abit, Epox, Intel, Chaintek, and DFI and they are all the same.. DFI just offers a lot more options and better overclocking, if you even want to touch that stuff... which you dont have to.
The basic bios options, such as onboard RAID.. are typically all standard stuff. If you cant get one figured out, you wont Brand X either.
I've been an enthusiast for a long time as well and built my share of RAID arrays, but for some reason the DFI board would not retain my settings after a cold boot and it was not the board's battery. When it did retain the settings on a restart, it corrupted data as it was accessed. Weirdest thing I ever saw.