Unfortunately one of the things you have to learn about forums is not to take out personal problems on other forum users. It's a trap I've fallen into, and like to think I've learned a lesson about. Also, just because you have a bad PSU doesn't necessarily mean your overclock will work when you put a good one in.
I can't see that overclock remaining stable personally. About Asus, there are some die-hard fanboi's out there trust me. I run my own custom PC business, we make pre-built systems but also make custom spec PC's to whatever the customer wants. Most of the time we send them what we call a "Tech Sheet" which is an in depth file with all the components and spec of those components. And the amount of times i've had the response "I want an Asus motherboard please" annoys me, because yes they make some good boards, but some gigabyte and XFX board are superior, and some just as good for cheaper. I have the Asus P5K which i think is a great board. But i have also had the unfortunate pleasure of using the P5N-E Sli, my god what a terrible board. I think this is a hugely popular board because of it descent spec and that it is SLi, also the price is good £55+. But asus was complacent with this board i think, try installing Vista on it, 9/10 of those boards it is not going to happen. It will reject RAM for absolutely no reason, and sometimes the board just will not boot. I've have worked with 15+ of these boards and hate them. There like a spoilt kid! Oh and by the way sammorris, i saw a post where you said if there is a place that does competativly prices custom PC's then to let you know. Well message me and i can give you a sample Tech Sheet with out price on, i think you will be suprised! (this is not advertising btw, just communicating with a fellow AD user)
Very kind of you nick, but are you from the US? Ibuypower certainly are... As for the boards, welcome to the party, I chose the P5N-E SLI over a GA-965P-DS3 and regretted it for almost its entire 9 month life. Still, we all make mistakes, I just try to keep people from making the same mistake. I mean so unstable it can't run Vista, what a bloody joke.
hi sam. We are based in the UK so feel free to message me if you want a sample Tech Sheet Yes the P5N-E is quite possibly one of the worst boards, for a time we used to sell on ebay, the problem with the was that there are alot of companies on there that sell Quad-Core PC;s for like £300! We soon realised how they achieved these prices, Poor Motherboards i.e Biostar - We hadn't even heard of them until we saw them on Ebay. Poor RAM, none branded value RAM that we claimed as beein branded, and poor quality cases. AND 80% of the quad-core PC's used the P5N GGGRRRR lol. I love the gigbyte s-series motherboards. And im a big fan of XFX!
Rightly so really, XFX seem to offer far superior quality to EVGA, and Gigabyte S-series boards are excellent. As for Biostar, they're not THAT bad, they're just cheap.
i suppose Biostar are OK for Budget quad supporting PC's, we've never really heard of them, i had heard about them about 5 years back, and i think that was when an AMD CPU exploded on one lol. We stick to only gigabyte, Asus, XFX and Foxconn motherboards. We where thinking about look at DFI but none of us have much experience with thses boards, they look pretty good. Have you had any experience with these boards sam?
another thing ASUS products aren't that bad but not worth it for the price the real problem is the rma and you can be sure that you are gonna need an rma with asus i have had 5 ASUS motherboards and 4 of them needed rma -im1992
I haven't personally, but my friend here theonejrs used one for a while and IIRC had good success with it. My housemate Nick uses DFI boards and they're meticulously designed and detailed with very powerful BIOSes but they're not for the average gamer, you really need to know what you're doing - they're picky with connectors and offer loads of options in the BIOS that if used wrongly will cause you more harm than good - take for example the 4V RAM jumper on the NF4 Ultra D. 4V instead of the usual 2.7... Can you say electronmigration? lol im: You've RMA'ed four and they're not that bad? Two of my three have failed. The third is too young to say yet.
lol, when they are working... they are wonderful what i have noticed with ASUS motherboards is that every 8-10 months the motherboard dies, i dont know if they are manufactured to do that?
Yes Asus board can be a bit Hit and Miss of late, maybes it because they are market leaders and dont really care about skimping on cheaper components a bit like dell And about DFI thanks for that sam, we will think about it, the boards my be a bit complicated for out customer base, which is office users and gamers (gamers that dont know anything about the insides of a PC or can't be arsed to build their own lol)
If they were they'd do it AFTER the warranty had expired - they're just not very well made. This doesn't go for all Asus boards, some of them are very good. Others of course, enough said. Nick: I think your clientele are the exact sort of folk who shouldn't have DFIs. The sort of people who know enough to tinker, but not enough to think about what they're doing. I'd stick with Gigabyte to be safe!
lol yeah, we had one client who once asked use how he could download some more RAM for his computer, i had to mute the phone while i had a little laugh so i think we'll avoid DFI for now We never really get people who know what they are doing when it comes to PC's because alot of people nowadays prefer to build their own, well alot of the younger generation anyway. I think we have had about 3 clients that have sent us exactly what they want and we have actually said that this person definately knows what they are going on about. We have massive demand for the AMD Phenom 9850 Black Edition aswell, and in the current climate of Intel vs AMD (intel winning) we are pretty suprised with.
i guess ppl dont look at the performance differences OR they just like AMD. Back in the day of Prescotts, i still bought P4 even though they got beat by AMD chips just because i have always had intel cpus and didnt want AMD chips no matter how much better they were.
i actually quite like the Phenom 9850, we ran it again and equivalant Intel chip (i wont say which because i dont want to start a fight) and the AMD Phenom was actually faster for us. I don't think it's a bad price either.
but i know a lot of ppl (everyone else in my family + friends) who dont want to rma and just go and buy a new motherboard.
I'd be surprised too, the 9850s are naff. Trouble is people think 'big number, it must be faster' - it's obviously paying off. About time AMD got involved with nvidia style idiot exploitation. Well no it isn't, but it's about time they did something to boost their sales. It'll be the Q6600 and you won't start a rucus. Mhz for mhz the 9850 doesn't do great against the 6600, but in a few apps it undeniably beats it. The higher price and lack of overclocking plus motherboard compatibility issues sees it well below the Q6600 on my list though.