Good P4PE experience so far

[Regalk]

I never thought I could swap out a board with a new board and get WinXP pro to boot right up. On most occasions I had to do a reinstall.
Migrated from the Sis P4S333 to the P4PE flawlessly. Booted right up and recognized everything real smooth.
This is a super board so far - SiS is no longer an option IMO.
Tip - You cannot populate DDR3 bank with out filling up 1 & 2 first - this caused the board not to boot. I should have read the manual since it is stated clearly there.
PC2100 Crucial - I did not even think I could run this at 144FSB + 33 reliably and also at 183. - real excellent so far and some nice memory scores for this memory.
Latest BIOS is 1002.003 - minor improvements here and there - nothing to write home about.
Only ONE Raid port - should have been 2 - but then it has Serial ATA to compensate.
One awesome board.

 

[Geff]

I am happy too with the Asus P4PE. I have mine running now for almost a week . I have the FSB at 150, mem. freq at 400, and RAM settings at 2-2-2-5. This setup has been running without any problems. I have run Prime95 for 72 hours without any incident. However when I replaced my videocard with the ATI 9700 I had a few problems of my system crashing after playing games. Downloading the latest beta driver and turning off the fast write off under smartgart tab cured the problem.

 

[Regalk]

Seems the Radeon 9700pro is beating up on every motherboard. My Albatron GF4 4200 Turbo is wicked though - well built and looks real solid. Albatron looks like they will be coming on strong. I was waiting on the ABIT OTES but I decided that ABIT quality is always so so.
One thing I noticed and for those contemplating using the Volcano 7+ - may not work since the bracket is not oriented correctly for this heatsink. When I installed mine it actually lifted the heatsink off the cpu and it was not even touching - my temps soared to 69C and thermal throttling got it to 55C!!! Thank god - if it was AMD it would have been toast.

 

[Wingit]

Have mine up and running for 48 hours... looks like a good board. I noticed in another thread that people are adding some additional cooling to chipset... they seem to run a tad hotter than my old 845D. CPU 38 @ idle, 50 ish @ load, Board Temps 29-32. I'm using the serial raid connections with two WD800JB drives and 3ware adapters and can recommend them so far... no problems on install or otherwise. Haven't benched except for a quick 3Dmark2001se with no tweaks, oc, or optimization (12,783) but I am sure that will improve.

System:
P4 2.53 w/ stk HSF, Gainward GF4 Ti-4600 GS, 2x 512 Corsair XMSpc2700, 2x WD800JB Hdd., Audigy2, PC Power&Cooling 425w PSU, Hitachi CM828, bunch of misc. stuff, WinXP Pro (more cooling enroute!)

 

[Rick67]

Geff,

How high did you have to bump your CPU Vcore up to get your system stable at those settings?

 

[Regalk]

The chipset has a monster heatsink - I do not believe you need more than that. However I added a small ram sink to the ICS clock generator since that really gets hot.
My 1.6A is at 2300 but PC2100 is running close to 190 - now that is real fast for this memory (Sandra show 2830s)

 

[Geff]

How high did you have to bump your CPU Vcore up to get your system stable at those settings?

I have the vcore set at 1.60. Temp at idle avg. at 38 and at full load around 47C using Alpha heatsink and Papst 1900RPM , 80 mm fan.

 

[FatClemenza]

I like the P4PE board so far, with the single exception of the on-board Soundmax sound. It doesn't work at FSB settings above 150. It's too bad, since the Soundmax sounds fairly good for an on-board solution. Has anyone else experienced this problem?

 

[ctk1981]

Ive got mine up to 145Mhz FSB. Then I hit a huge break wall. Im not the most experience overclocker I'll admit that. I did rush this quite a bit too due to work and not having many days off.

Radeon 9700 on mine works well, no complaints. My Acoustic Edge 706 has some sound problems in DVD's, switched to a cheap soundcard for now and it loops/hangs...but doesnt lock up, comes out of it within seconds and keeps going. Really weird.

My only beef with this board. I get some pretty low scores in sisoft sandra. Memory bandwidth is like, 2685 or something. I should be well above that. Heres some settings, see if you can figure anything out:

Windows 2000 SP3

145MHZ FSB, 2.61Ghz, 387Mhz DDR. 2-3-2-5T

Let me know if anyone has any ideas or needs more info, I'll supply whatever you need. PM, Email, whatever it takes if you have an idea!

EDIT: 2-2-2-5T timings sorry. Oddly enough, changing the SYSTEM Performance from TURBO to AUTO has gotten me to 2900/2875 scores. Thats a little more to my liking I suppose.

 

[LouPoir]

Hey - when you say one raid port, I assume you mean one connector that upports 2 drives.

LMK

Lou

 

[Wingit]

Lou, the P4PE has one IDE raid port and two Serial raid ports.... you need to use any two of them for raid. If you want raid on this board you will need as least one parallel/serial converter. I can recommend 3ware's product, it works a treat on my board!
Regards...

 

[Regalk]

I pushed mine to 150 and it was OK but my memory or cpu didn't like it for long - so i am not blaming the board. 144FSB and mem at approx 190 is enuff for me.
Correcton you can get the volcano 7+ to fit with a bit of modification. The fan's shroud is sitting on the 4 "towers" of the black "heatsink holder" around the socket. I had to file mine down to get it to fit snugly. Also filed around the 4 outer edges of the heatsink so that it does not sit on the white plastic caps that secure the black holder.
After 2 hours temps at medium speed is 41C idle (was 45C with Intel)