The (new) Official PC building thread!

firstly, OcUK were brilliant for me for RMA and return of money.

secondly, ues i do stand up for Asus, but only becuase people on AD put them down alot, just recommending GB, regardless of budget.

and, im sorry, but i cant answer that question about asus, as i am a recent Builder. only fr the last 2 years. aka p956/x957/650i/680i onwards

 

oh and the p5n-e being rated the highest....HAHAHA

there are some idiots out there.... xD

 

Unfortunately, the average poster on here doesn't often have several thousand dollars to spend, and that's the sort of budget I would want to have before being willing to spend double the amount on a motherboard to get a few more mhz out of my CPU.
Asus get put down a lot because the products they sell that cater to the usual crowd really aren't that good. If it's down to X38 level stuff that costs in excess of 100 quid, the Asus boards are seemingly just as good (again, assuming it's an Intel chipset), but that doesn't mean I will switch what I recommend to people, as you can surely see how someone would recommend what they've tried and know works rather than something they've no personal experience with, no matter how highly commended it is.
I'm not at liberty to say that high end Asus boards are bad, because not only have I not tried them, but I also don't think it's true (again, unless you have an nvidia chipset), but right now, having had three midrange boards from them I've about as much experience as anyone who isn't a regular system builder, enough to say that midrange, they're best avoided, no matter the chipset.

The day Asus comes out with a rock solid 5 star board for £60-70 or so that overclocks almost as well as the big giants, they'll be back in my good books.

As for the last post, indeed.

 

aye sam, fair enough. i could post about the ATI chipset as id had no experiance with them, and the time i had had GB it was sh!t for me, and the times i have had asus (intel chipset) have been superb. so i am to goign from my personal experiance.

and BTW the p5k-e that i have right now is £85.

 

Which Gigabyte board did you go with? I remember they used to be 'not so great' shall we say, and indeed a couple of years back when somebody chose one, me of all people asked them why they risked that instead of going with an Asus... :O

The P5K-E is £85 now? Interesting. Nonetheless, the P35-DS3R is sub £70 at a fair few places now.

 

i had the P35c-DS3R

 

What was bad about it? As you know my board was faultless.

 

two DOAs and 3rd one wouldnt finish ANY OS install (98/xp/vista) before crashing half way through, where as on the same HDD and cable the p5k-e worked w.o a glitch.

thats the reason i dont like GB. its a good chipset, so this could be blamed on the board / bad luck, but with first time asus being good then.... my mind was made up

 

Exactly the same experience for me with Asus. Difference is though, sometimes companies have dodgy batches of a product. I tried three entirely different products. I was also considering trying out an MSI board.

 

I don't want to get into all this again but one reason I stick up for asus is because there are so many pro gigabyte ppl here and asus mobos have performed stellar for me and ppl I know personally.

gigabyte does build quality mobos. its just that their bios's are lacking. unless a person has used an upper end asus, they just don't know what they are missing. asus bios's are so much more user friendly. it's not just the extra features but the choices of settings and way you set them. If a person can afford an upper end asus mobo (intel chipset), they will be pleasantly suprised when they enter the bios.

I guess instead of saying I prefer asus mobo's over gigabyte mobo's, I should say I prefer asus bios's over gigabytes bios's. it's not that gigabyte mobo's won't OC as well as asus mobo's it's just easier with an asus mobo because of the way their bios is layed out. I have been spoiled and can't revert back now. is that a fair assesment?

 

Were too hardcore to go for the puppy user friendly Asus BIOS! lol I'm joking.

Honestly it comes down to cost. The lower-end gigabyte motherboards are priced low and they perform very well. My next motherboard (for my self, not for selling) is going to be an Asus. I really like Gigabyte, but I just want to try it out.

 

It's a fair assessment that Asus treat overclocking a little more seriously. More user friendly? I'm not sure. Personally I think being able to pull vast overclocks off with three simple settings is about as user-friendly as it gets, but yet I know what you mean. There's something about the Asus BIOSes I used that I preferred to the Gigabyte one, and yet I can't put my finger on it.

 

Did you overclock it?

 

when i was in the GB bios, it had nothing compared to the asus BIOS.

there were alot of Voltage options that wernt there, and the sleection for NB was between 4. auto, 1.25 1.4 and 1.55

 

creaky, see most of us need motherboards that overclock. Sure some of us don't use highend Asus motherboards but still our boards can OC very well. That is a big consideration when buying a motherboard. So it may run very stable at stock settings, but if it can't OC it's worthless.

Although I remember reading somewhere that is overclocks pretty good, so I guess it's a moot point.

 

I'm not your typical overclocker, I leave all the voltages at auto, always, or at least I can now. I'm very aware the Asus boards provide more options in that department though, but creaky-style I've left my overclock alone since I got it working. It works at 3.15Ghz first time, every time.

 

I was astonished by all the ram freq choices of my rampage formula due to your choice of 4 different fsb straps (200, 266, 333, and 400). all but the 200 fsb strap gives you 3 different ram frequency choices. the 200 fsb strap gives you 2 choices. all are dependant to the cpu freq and change instantly as you increase or decrease the cpu freq. that's 11 different choices for memory freq alone. no memory multpliers/dividers to mess with.

my P5W DH is the same way but no choice of fsb strap. all the memory freq choices are under the memory freq header. again, no memory multipliers/dividers to mess with.

my cpu vcore increases by increments of .00625v from 1.10000 to 2.40000. too many choices to count.

my NB voltage increases by increments of .02v from 1.25 to 1.85. too many choices to count.

my DRAM voltage increases by increments of .02v from 1.80 to 3.40. too many choices to count.

my SB voltage increases by increments of .025v from 1.050 to 1.225. too many choices to count.

my FSBT voltage increases in increments of .02 from 1.20 to 2.0. too many choices to count.

I'm not going to get into CPU PLL voltage choices, SB 1.5 voltage choices, CPU GTL voltage referance choices, NB GTL voltage referance choices, DRAM controller voltage referance choices, DRAM channel A voltage reference choices or DRAM channel B voltage referance choices. there is also an auto setting for all of these as well.