[Bob-san]

A few things in technology.


1) I have a free computer coming. It's a Pentium D 805, an Intel D101GGC board, and 2x256MB DDR-400. But hey, it's $0.00 to me and it's not like I'll pay extra for electricity or cooling in my dorm.
2) I have a free power supply coming. It's a Corsair 400CX. Again, $0.00 to me.
3) My venerable Logitech G3 laser gaming mouse died. It can't track in a straight line and is all out of whack. It's like the lens was knocked off center. I'm using a crappy old Microsoft optical mouse for now. I need to find a new laser mouse that can change DPI settings on the fly, preferably from 800dpi to 2000dpi or the like. I'd actually hate if there were more than 2 settings.
4) I'm looking to buy another motherboard or two. Here's the choices...

Asus P5B Deluxe (free)
Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L ($38+ship)
Biostar TP45 "Combo" ($62+ship)
EVGA _2-CK-NF68-T1 (nForce 680i) ($70 shipped)
MSI G41M4-F ($35+ship)

I'd like to buy both the Biostar TP45 and the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L. Anyone have any input?

In addition to that PD805 that's coming, I've got a Pentium E6300 and Pentium E2140 for CPUs, 3x2GB DDR2-800, and an Abit IP35-E. The IP35-E is a bit flaky. Current thought is to yank that third 2GB stick out of my desktop and pair it with the E2140 while finding another board. If I choose only one, it's probably the Biostar. Otherwise, that Gigabyte board looks good.

[Nuke]

id go with the msi, its a brand ive never had any trouble with. biostar and gigabyte i wouldnt trust as far as i could throw it. dont know about evga, i didnt even know they made motherboards.

[MP-Ryan]

As it happens, I have that very Gigabyte motherboard.... and I've been less than impressed.  The BIOS configuration isn't ideal, Gigabyte's driver distribution system is clunky, and one of the temperature sensors went psychotic after less than 2 years of use.  Pass.

I'll be sticking to Asus, MSI and EVGA boards in the future.  While the Gigabyte boards have a lot of handy features, the overall performance is nothing special.  That, and they have the worst web site for downloads of any manufacturer I've yet purchased from.  It's abysmally slow and clunky.

[FUBAR-BDHR]

Not sure about the others but after P2's I've been unimpressed with Gigabyte.  I've only ever purchased an MSI video card (again less then impressed with support but seems to work well) and never heard of the other 2. 

[Bob-san]

I've an offer for a free Asus P5B Deluxe (P965+ICH8R) that's missing the socket cover. Which is fine, because I have an LGA775 backplate kit from Scythe (replaces push-pins or lets you use PGA478 mounts). The small issue is that it's on the Left Coast of Canada.


I reset the poll. Naturally, I expect everyone to vote for the Asus.

[Nuke]

i didnt change my vote, after having 2 $300+ asus mobos die on me, i decided two things. the first never spend more than $200 on a motherboard, and the second, never to buy asus again.

[castor]

MSI. It's the cheapest, chances are it has the least crap on it.

[Bob-san]

MSI. It's the cheapest, chances are it has the least crap on it.

Since I'll be getting the P5B Deluxe for free, I think I'll should grab the MSI G41 as a another board. Perhaps I could stretch my budget a bit to buy 2-3GB RAM. The extra computers will be crunching WCG 24/7/365 on my university's power bill.

[chief1983]

Same here, never buying Asus boards.  Two have pissed me off as well.

[Wobble73]

I vote MSI, never had a problem with their products, always surpassed expectations. 

[CP5670]

All of the motherboard companies have made crappy boards at some point, and most boards that largely work well still have certain quirks. You need to look at a specific board's reputation instead of the company, as none of the manufacturers have stellar track records.

My current Asus P6T SE has been pretty good, but I've had other Asus boards in the past that were more dodgy.

The IP35-E is a bit flaky.

I used to have the regular IP35. It generally worked well, but it was unstable off a cold boot if the PC had been turned off for a while, and Windows had to be reloaded 2 or 3 times to work properly, which was very annoying. From what I read about it, some batch of the boards had a weird IC that needed to be running above a certain temperature.

[Nuke]

my favoritism towards msi comes from my system building days. after having many biostars, gigabytes, and intel boards flat out fail on us, we decided to try another brand, we bought a case of msi mobos and they all worked, so we orderd a few more cases of them and they worked too. it used to be we had at least one mobo fail per case and sometimes 2 (biostars, meh). i dont think a single one of those systems ever came back with hardware issues. of course then they decided to do a line of economy buisness computers, and we got several cases of intel micro atx boards with everything onboard, so all we had to do is drop in cpu and ram, but the failure rate went back up because of this. the msi micro atx board i bought back in 2004 is still chugging along fine, dispite having been completely abused over the past six years (i let my mom use it).

[S-99]

I'd go with msi. Currently i have a gigabyte and i'm very happy with it, first time i owned anything gigabyte. It's a ma770-ud3. Does as advertised, it is sturdy, i know it's not going to blow up and was made with good parts, and i paid $100 or so for it, it was worth the money and it does great. When i did buy the gigabyte motherboard, i was looking for something in the $100-$120 range with quality and was local.

However for all of the features the bios has, is largely stuff i don't use. But, when it got down to business, i wanted some very basic features out of it most of all, and it doesn't have them. Hopefully in a bios update they added in the ability to set a bios and boot password. But, who'd think you'd end up without a bios that doesn't have at least those 2 features? I'm only *****ing about them because i sort of wanted to use them.

As far as anything else goes, i don't have many qualms with biostar myself. The biostar motherboard i had back in the past worked great and was awesome for compatibility with 2 sata, 2 ide, floppy, agp and pcie (the agp on the board was actually just an agp slot that worked off of the pcie bus). It was a great motherboard. It had a chipset that would handle a dual core athlon 64 and was advertised as being able to do it. I was like cool, i'll upgrade to dual core later, i can upgrade to sata drives when my ide drives die, and if i was still on agp (like i nearly was) i can upgrade to pcie later. It worked great for this.

Yet again, the bios, but was much worse than my current board. It was missing one thing they could have been added in to let me overclock via bios update but never was. Secondly, the board couldn't handle dual core because of something with the chipset. Good news, most manufacturers with the same chipset fixed this in a bios update, except biostar.

Additionally, i consider gigabyte to be better than biostar, but not in anyway following the metaphor "the difference was like going from night to day!". If you end up going with gigabyte, you can be a happy customer like me, but i'd go with msi if i were you.

And yeah, i never pay more than $150 for a motherboard for a slew of reasons.

[Nuke]

my c2q system is currently running on a dfi p45-t2rs, cost me about $160 and runs better than my last asus board. it does have a few overclocking features, but i dont use them. one added bonus is that it has an actual serial port header on the board, which comes in handy for programming microcontrollers. thats not something you see very often anymore.

[Jabba]

You should get the Gigabyte, or as I like to call it - h4x0rbyte!!!

But seriously this is the board I was going to get but on my 'full-hectic' build instead I got another Asus board and regretted it because like others here, it is the second (out of 2) Asus boards that have crapped out on me early one way or another whilst costing over 200 bucks each. Not thanks, I used to like Asus but I know too many people with problems with them. Even though some people have  no problem with them, they are not the brand everyone makes them out to be.

[Hero_Swe]

Logitech MX518, Or G5 if you want the same shape mouse and a bit higher DPI sensitivity, and manual adjusting weights.

[Bob-san]

I've changed around things and written up a plan on how I'll have my computers setup. Here's the current...


Bob-E6300 "Main PC"
--Pentium E6300 @ 3.8+GHz under Scythe Mugen-1A
--Asus P5B Deluxe (P965)
--2x2GB DDR2-800 CL4
--Radeon HD 3850
--WD Caviar SE16 320GB SATA
--WD Caviar Black 1TB SATA
--Corsair TX 750W
--Windows 7 Pro x64

Bob-E2140 "Crunch"
--Pentium E2140 @ 2.67+GHz under stock Allendale HSF
--Abit IP35-E (P35)
--1x2GB DDR2-800 CL5
--S3 VirGe PCI
--WD Caviar 80GB IDE
--OCZ StealthXStream 500W
--Windows Vista Home Premium x64

Bob-PD805 "Server"
--Pentium D 805 @ 2.67+GHz under stock Smithfield HSF
--Intel D101GGC (Radeon Xpress 200)
--2x256MB DDR-400 CL3
--Radeon Xpress 200 IGP
--Maxtor 8.4GB IDE
--WD Caviar Blue 320GB SATA
--Corsair CX 400W
--Windows Server 2003 R2 x86
--Rosewill 802.11b/g WiFi card


After swapping around parts last night, I have "Bob-E2140" up and running and prepped my other two cases for "Bob-E6300" and "Bob-PD805". The PD805 should be here within the next week while the E6300 will be delayed a until the 2nd or 3rd week in September. I can survive on the E2140. I did get the overclock back up to 3.2GHz on the stock HSF and I was getting load temperatures in the mid-70s to low 80s Celsius. It's a bit high for comfort. I'm looking for a job again in Providence so that I might have money to upgrade a bit more. First priority is a pair of aftermarket HSFs, then more RAM for my main, and then a new graphics card (after AMD releases new hardware).

All of the motherboard companies have made crappy boards at some point, and most boards that largely work well still have certain quirks. You need to look at a specific board's reputation instead of the company, as none of the manufacturers have stellar track records.

My current Asus P6T SE has been pretty good, but I've had other Asus boards in the past that were more dodgy.

The IP35-E is a bit flaky.

I used to have the regular IP35. It generally worked well, but it was unstable off a cold boot if the PC had been turned off for a while, and Windows had to be reloaded 2 or 3 times to work properly, which was very annoying. From what I read about it, some batch of the boards had a weird IC that needed to be running above a certain temperature.

+1
Mine is usually stable when running, but I ran into a ~FSB406-FSB408 wall when overclocking both the E2140 and E6300. It doesn't play well with anything faster than 450mhz RAM (DDR2-900). It also takes some rather hefty volts to get a Wolfdale above 3.5GHz. My Wolfdale wasn't stable at 4GHz, either, and heat wasn't an issue. I'm curious if a new board will fix it. It also dislikes when BIOS settings are changed and is prone to simply not POSTing or reporting a memory error. I'm guessing it's a bad capacitor somewhere or another, but I haven't seen any obvious culprits.



Anyways, more good news! I found the issue with my Logitech G3. Apparently a hair or something somehow got stuck inside the mouse and decided to come out by the laser. After a closer inspecting in high light, I found the hair and was able to fish a few inches of it out. There's still a small bit in there but I pushed it off to the side. The mouse seems to be tracking normally again, so I'll tentatively call it fine.

[Bob-san]

The Pentium D 805 (and Intel D101GGC and 2x256MB DDR-400) has shipped. I also have a Windows XP Pro license to go along with it.

The Corsair 400CX has also shipped.

The Asus P5B Deluxe is set to ship next week.



My first chassis (XClio Propeller) is sitting empty with the Corsair 750TX in it. It's going to get the E6300 and P5B Deluxe.
My second chassis (XClio 188AF) is sitting full with the E2140, Abit IP35-E, and the OCZ SXS 500W in it.
My third chassis ("Old Beige") is sitting empty. It's going to get the PD805 and the Corsair 400CX when both arrive.


I'll post pictures here after I move and get all the computers put together.

[Liberator]

I've got a bad taste in my mouth over MSI from years back, they had a P4 motherboard that you just couldn't get a good one of, for like 1/2 a year all we got of this board was garbage.  That said, I love me some Gigabyte and Asus is always a good standby, even if they are too strict on their timings sometimes.

[Bob-san]

Corsair 400CX arrived and put into "Old Beige". The rest of that computer is set to arrive tomorrow. I'm arguing with myself over exact setup, but I think I'm closer than before. I need to find my IDE cables.