First hats off to
renethx, for such great thread with detailed explanation of all the aspects of the board including comparisions. I have not seen such a detailed best written thread, frankly ever before.
I was tempted and bought this board and X2 3800 after X2 price came down. I will be receiving these tomorrow and plan on building on this weekend.
Now, I have few questions.( Though I built one similar system for my friend for a server 6 months ago).
I was wondering is it possible to Overclock and still have Cool & QUite feature enabled and working? Like I would to set HTT to 240 ( so 2400Mhz) and also keep quite and cool still working, like when there is no load( 5x at 1200Mhz). I heard some DFI boards do support that, ref silentpcreview forums. (I may also try to Undervolt using RMClock, which I have been using on my Turion laptop since last one year.)
second question is about Heatsink, I saw this Freezer Pro 64 for verygood price here
http://www.provantage.com/arctic-acfzp64~7ARCT002.htm $21 including shipping. I heard good things about this heatsink ( eps low noise). Did anyone tried this on this MB? does it fit without any concerns? I do not want to spend fortune for the heatsink. BTW I bought quite few Items from this site before, shipping and service was pretty good.
I see few concerns about NB heatsink getting quite hot, do you guys think is it still a big concern as per the reliability. I do not mind it running it at 50c or 60c as long reliability is not a problem? I do not want install a 40mm fan as it will have high pitched whine. If it is a concern, then anyone tried any bigger passive heatsink?
For reference, my current case is Antec 1650B with Antec SmartPower 350watts, Case fan is replaced with Enermax 120mm with speed controller Fan running at around 1300RPM ( may be 30 to 40 CFM, is this flow enough?), and will have 1 SATA HDD, and one IDE drive and one DVD+RW, 1 TV Tuner, Card reader etc. Currently I am running P4 2.4B@3.0Ghz 1GB Corsair DDR400 ram, and MX440 AGP video card on ASUS P4P800, and cooling not been a problem, though I saw HDDs sometimes reach 40+.