INTEL CORE 2 DUO 2.93 EXTREME AND P5W DH DELUXE

  • Thread starter Thread starter hotrod
  • Start date Start date
H

hotrod

WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW!
ive built alot of pcs in the past for gameing! the last one built was a
athlon fx-62 with all the good stuff! its was freaking fast until the 2.93
extreme showed up with the p5w dh and 4 gigs crucial pc2-6400 my koolance
water block for the cpu and my 2 x1900xtx 512 crossfire ati cards and my 4
10,000 rpm 74 gig wd raptors in stripe 0 i cant explain the speed of this
chip with my water tower it runs at 82 deg f . ghost recon advanced
warefighter turned up as high as it can go doesnt even scip a beat its
fluid like water. WOW AMAZING I CANT DICRIBE THE SPEED MAN OH MAN GREAT JOB
INTEL AND ASUS!
 
hotrod said:
WOW WOW WOW WOW WOW!
ive built alot of pcs in the past for gameing! the last one built was a
athlon fx-62 with all the good stuff! its was freaking fast until the 2.93
extreme showed up with the p5w dh and 4 gigs crucial pc2-6400 my koolance
water block for the cpu and my 2 x1900xtx 512 crossfire ati cards and my
4
10,000 rpm 74 gig wd raptors in stripe 0 i cant explain the speed of this
chip with my water tower it runs at 82 deg f . ghost recon advanced
warefighter turned up as high as it can go doesnt even scip a beat its
fluid like water. WOW AMAZING I CANT DICRIBE THE SPEED MAN OH MAN GREAT
JOB
INTEL AND ASUS!
Click to expand...
Hotrod:

I've been getting ready to upgrade my system and have been looking at this
sort of combination for the last two months.

Currently I have an Antec Sonata tower, with an ASUS K8VSE Deluxe, AMD 3200,
1gig ram, an ATI 850 pro driving two 19" LCD's, 250gig sata HD, two DVD
burners, floppy/flash readers, tuner card, Modem, and WAN. Win XP / Linux
Suse dual boot.

Since I have to go PCI-E, I have to go mobo, cpu, ram, and vid. A big chunk
of change. I am trying to do it for less than $1k. So far, this is what I
see as the best deal for sweet-spot performance:

MB - Asus P5W DH $225.00
CPU - Intel Core 2 E6600 $315.00 (might go E6400 and save $)
Mem - DDR2 800 2gig $250.00
Video - ATI X1900GT256 $220.00

Total $1,007.00 prices quoted from
Toms Hardware.

I plan to buy a system around the end of the year, catching any other price
drops and sales for Christmas. I hope to save another one or two hundred by
then. One drawback with the Asus P5W DH is I have an old HP4P laser printer
that I have had for years (beautiful 600+ dpi) with little use on it that is
a parallel hookup, which the P5W does not have. I will have to purchase an
I/O card to keep using it.

I'm holding back a little on the video card due to cost, and the up coming
DX-10 out in '07 with Vista. (Next Christmas upgrade.) I noticed that ATI
recommends a 550wt power supply for this board. That much????? I don't
know what my Sonata tower has in it. I might have to upgrade the power
supply too. Damn, more money.

HAY - what do you think of QUAD CORE. How about 80 core desk top computers.
It boggles the mind.

William
 
the quad core is nasty indeed! and my friend has the exact same rig you are
going to build and its about 20% slower than mine which is really nothing
considering how damn fast they are and the lower speed core 2s are very
overclockable we have his @ 3.2 while raising the voltage abit! nice set up
you will have!
 
water block for the cpu and my 2 x1900xtx 512 crossfire ati cards and my
4
10,000 rpm 74 gig wd raptors in stripe 0 i cant explain the speed of this
Click to expand...
A 4 disk raid 0! So any one disk goes and you've lost the lot!
 
I would not drop to the E6400 ... the E6600 has 4MB of cache, the E6400,
in addition to being slower clock speed, only has 2MB of cache ... it's
not as good a chip.

There will likely be an Intel price reduction on the E6600 in the next
60 days, it will probably put the E6600 down to below $300, maybe even $250.

There are other motherboards to consider, there are some very good
motherboards in the $150 range including the Asus P5B and the Gigabyte
GA-965P-DS3. There is even a good motherboard from MSI for $95 to $110
(the MSI P965 Neo-F). They don't support dual video but might meet all
of your other requirements. I'm using the Gigabyte board, which is
fine, and my son has the P5B. That's a better way to save $100 than
dropping from the E6600 to the E6400.
 
Barry Watzman said:
I would not drop to the E6400 ... the E6600 has 4MB of cache, the E6400, in
addition to being slower clock speed, only has 2MB of cache ... it's not as
good a chip.

There will likely be an Intel price reduction on the E6600 in the next 60
days, it will probably put the E6600 down to below $300, maybe even $250.

There are other motherboards to consider, there are some very good
motherboards in the $150 range including the Asus P5B and the Gigabyte
GA-965P-DS3. There is even a good motherboard from MSI for $95 to $110
(the MSI P965 Neo-F). They don't support dual video but might meet all of
your other requirements. I'm using the Gigabyte board, which is fine, and
my son has the P5B. That's a better way to save $100 than dropping from
the E6600 to the E6400.
Click to expand...
Barry:

Thanks for the info. I'm aware of the difference of the E6400 and E6600,
and why I would prefer to go with the E6600. Glad to here that the price
might drop around Christmas time - hope so.

I'm not happy with the mobo selection offered at present. The P5WDH is over
priced as far as I am concerned and would be a better value below $200
compared to other boards. (Wishful thinking). It bugs me that it has no
parallel port, though I know that this port is almost a dinosaur now days.
I'll take a closer look at those boards you suggested and see if either of
them will do the job for me. Question: Why does this board have a serial
port? What perpetual uses serial i/o now days. (UPS?) The last time I had
something that used a serial port was a Hazeltine 1420 terminal. (Those of
you who know what that is have been around a while.)

90 days is forever, I bet things will look much better for Christmas.

William
 
William wrote:
The last time I had something that
used a serial port was a Hazeltine 1420 terminal. (Those of you who
know what that is have been around a while.)
Click to expand...

I left Hazeltine in 1973, while the 2000 was still the hot ticket.
Incredibly slow engineering staff to adopt programmable logic and
non-magnetic memory;-0)

I don't think I've seen the name or given them a thought in a few
decades. Thanks for memory jog.
 
Actually, the primary reason why I got the giabyte board instead of the
Asus board is that it has the serial port on the rear panel. The Asus
P5B has a serial port, but no connector for it. There is a header on
the motherboard for the port, but not only does Asus not include the
DB-9 on the rear I/O shield, they don't even give you an expansion
bracket for it.

If it was up to me, I'd buy a motherboard that still has:

-Parallel port (more about that below)
-TWO serial ports (both with connectors on the back)
-TWO IDE ports (4 devices)
-Floppy controller that supports TWO floppy drives

And frankly, I'm pissed that so far NO ONE makes a board with that
feature set.

As to the parallel port, if the P5W-DH doesn't have a parallel port, it
is the only board that I've seen that doesn't have one. So far, all of
the Conroe (C2D) boards that I've looked at do still have the port
(note, it's possible to have the port without having the connector in
the I/O shield area ... that's what Asus did on the P5B, they have a
motherboard header instead .... but then they need to give you the
bracket to mount a connector in an unused expansion slot.

I still have a lot of devices that use serial ports. Serial ports are
not dead. In fact, a brand new, current model JVC 1080P HDTV set has an
RS-232 serial port for control / communication with a media center PC.
Other devices that use serial ports include GPS receivers, modems, some
scanners, some printers, some UPS', lots of high-end Ethernet-backbone
class routers and other network equipment, and I have a few other
devices, not terribly common I agree but the point is .... RS-232 has
been around for 40 years, and there are still a huge number of devices
floating around that use RS-232, and it's even still being used in some
new designs (e.g. the JVC HDTV). Anyway, Asus, if you are listening,
your decision not to put the DB-9 serial port connector on the P5B cost
you selection for my systems. I'm using Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3's (and
it's as good a motherboard as the Asus P5B).

In my view, all of the manufacturers are moving too quickly to do away
with legacy stuff that some of us still need (in fact, I still need two
floppy drives, a 3.5" and a 5.25" [ok, one of my hobbies is "antique"
computers .... in fact, I'd like to have a way to connect an EIGHT-INCH
floppy drive to my PC ... I know that's very unusual, but look at the
list above, there are still a lot of relatively common devices that do
use serial ports].
 
Bill's News said:
William wrote:


I left Hazeltine in 1973, while the 2000 was still the hot ticket.
Incredibly slow engineering staff to adopt programmable logic and
non-magnetic memory;-0)

I don't think I've seen the name or given them a thought in a few decades.
Thanks for memory jog.
Click to expand...

The first program I wrote that brought me fame and fortune was on an Ohio
Scientific circa 1978. I wrote a customer invoicing and tracking system for
a sales and service company. It had a triple processor board that you
could choose between: 6502 - Z80 - 8086. Pre MS DOS and Basic. Eight
terminal time share cluster system. Had a HUGE 10" platter holding 20meg.
Two 8" floppies. Unfortunately the backplane was a forever headache for
cold joints developing. It kept you busy soldering and soldering to keep it
going. I bought a single-user system for myself to develop on, spent over
$7 grand on it. The Hazeltine was a beautiful terminal to work with.

Replaced that system with an IBM PC in 1984 ($4,500.00). I think I'm on my
7th or 8th pc by now. Surprising, the prices haven't really changed all that
much over 20+ years, they just do more now days.

William
 
first off your correct put the mobo has a backup raid utility on its very
cool and all i play is games nothing else on this pc so any lose is well
not a big thing! ive run raid all my life and never had a single issue ever.
guess im lucky!
 
Barry Watzman said:
Actually, the primary reason why I got the giabyte board instead of the
Asus board is that it has the serial port on the rear panel. The Asus P5B
has a serial port, but no connector for it. There is a header on the
motherboard for the port, but not only does Asus not include the DB-9 on
the rear I/O shield, they don't even give you an expansion bracket for it.

If it was up to me, I'd buy a motherboard that still has:

-Parallel port (more about that below)
-TWO serial ports (both with connectors on the back)
-TWO IDE ports (4 devices)
-Floppy controller that supports TWO floppy drives

And frankly, I'm pissed that so far NO ONE makes a board with that feature
set.

As to the parallel port, if the P5W-DH doesn't have a parallel port, it is
the only board that I've seen that doesn't have one. So far, all of the
Conroe (C2D) boards that I've looked at do still have the port (note, it's
possible to have the port without having the connector in the I/O shield
area ... that's what Asus did on the P5B, they have a motherboard header
instead .... but then they need to give you the bracket to mount a
connector in an unused expansion slot.
Click to expand...

I thought this might be the case, so I went to Asus' web site and looked at
the specks on the P5W-DH. Could not find any information on a parallel port
header on the board. Surprising, Toms Hardware lists the board having a
parallel port. But I can find nothing on a port being their from Asus's
literature. No picture showing such thing.
I still have a lot of devices that use serial ports. Serial ports are not
dead. In fact, a brand new, current model JVC 1080P HDTV set has an
RS-232 serial port for control / communication with a media center PC.
Other devices that use serial ports include GPS receivers, modems, some
scanners, some printers, some UPS', lots of high-end Ethernet-backbone
class routers and other network equipment, and I have a few other devices,
not terribly common I agree but the point is .... RS-232 has been around
for 40 years, and there are still a huge number of devices floating around
that use RS-232, and it's even still being used in some new designs (e.g.
the JVC HDTV). Anyway, Asus, if you are listening, your decision not to
put the DB-9 serial port connector on the P5B cost you selection for my
systems. I'm using Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3's (and it's as good a motherboard
as the Asus P5B).
Click to expand...

The good old stuff. RS-232 can go a 100 feet with no trouble over a single
twisted pair. USB is good for 20 feet tops without repeaters. I forgot
about routers. I got a Zip Drive around somewhere I used to use that uses a
parellel hookup.
In my view, all of the manufacturers are moving too quickly to do away
with legacy stuff that some of us still need (in fact, I still need two
floppy drives, a 3.5" and a 5.25" [ok, one of my hobbies is "antique"
computers .... in fact, I'd like to have a way to connect an EIGHT-INCH
floppy drive to my PC ... I know that's very unusual, but look at the list
above, there are still a lot of relatively common devices that do use
serial ports].
Click to expand...

Their is quite a concern about the archiving of historical documents and
records, and the on-going access of said material on old computer systems.
I too, have used 8", 5 1/4", 3 1/2" floppies. I kept some old programs I
wrote on 8" for decades, until I finally realized that their was no way I
could access that information any longer and threw them away.

I have the same problems in Video Production. I go way back to open
real-to-real 1/2" tape, 3/4" cassette, 2" quad, 1" helical scan, 1/2"
component, 1/2" digital, HDTV helical scan, 8mm, solid state modules, and
direct to HD-DVD. And now we are talking about 3D holographic recording for
video in a few years.

I know that libraries are scrambling trying to find ways to carry forward
information recorded on past formats. (Tape goes bad past 10 years of age -
absorbs moisture and turns into a sticky goo.) Film fades away. Paper dries
out and crumbles.

When I was a young lad, I worked on a few wire recorders circa WWII. What
would you do if someone came to you and asked you to transcribe that format
to something useful today?

William
 
William said:
I'm not happy with the mobo selection offered at present. The P5WDH
is over priced as far as I am concerned and would be a better value
below $200 compared to other boards. (Wishful thinking). It bugs me
that it has no parallel port, though I know that this port is almost
a dinosaur now days. I'll take a closer look at those boards you
suggested and see if either of them will do the job for me. Question: Why
does this board have a serial port? What perpetual
uses serial i/o now days. (UPS?)
Click to expand...

I'm using both my parallel printer port (HP Laserjet 1100) and my serial
port, the latter one for my Garmin Etrex Vista GPS device. For me, these
dinosaurs still do the job...
 
Barry:

Thanks for the info. I'm aware of the difference of the E6400 and E6600,
and why I would prefer to go with the E6600. Glad to here that the price
might drop around Christmas time - hope so.

I'm not happy with the mobo selection offered at present. The P5WDH is over
priced as far as I am concerned and would be a better value below $200
compared to other boards. (Wishful thinking). It bugs me that it has no
parallel port, though I know that this port is almost a dinosaur now days.
I'll take a closer look at those boards you suggested and see if either of
them will do the job for me. Question: Why does this board have a serial
port? What perpetual uses serial i/o now days. (UPS?) The last time I had
something that used a serial port was a Hazeltine 1420 terminal. (Those of
you who know what that is have been around a while.)

90 days is forever, I bet things will look much better for Christmas.

William
Click to expand...

I've recently built an E6600 rig with P5WDH, and very nice it is too.

There are a few things I don't like though -

1) The onboard wifi won't connect to a Wlan with hidden SSID (hope
future driver will fix this)
2) The Asus tune up app with all it's curvy design and beeps is just
annoying, I still have to reboot to get the clock changes accepted so
I just do it the old fashioned way with the bios.
3) The first board had a faulty LAN2. I suspect it was a solder joint
problem, so they might be having some issues with the new RoHS solder.
My supplier exchanged without any problems.

A friend (who works for a magazine) had an E6700 in for testing, so we
did some benchmarks between the too... No shock that the E6700 won, so
I just turned up the FSB from 266 to 300 and then I came out tops
again. I didn't even have to change the Vcore.

I turned it back down again afterwards as even at standard clock it's
still the fastest PC I've ever owned.

Very happy with it.

The constant source of amusement is that the motherboard temperature
is generally higher than the CPU, unless I've given it a really
serious bashing, but even then it's hardly more than 2 or 3 degrees C
higher!

Nice work Intel (about time!)

Dodgy.
 
Thomas said:
I'm using both my parallel printer port (HP Laserjet 1100) and my serial
port, the latter one for my Garmin Etrex Vista GPS device. For me, these
dinosaurs still do the job...
Click to expand...
Thomas:

I assume, and hope a little $20.00 expansion card will do the trick. I'll
be mad if their isn't one available. Maybe I'll get to use one of those
PCI-E X1 slots they have on the board.

You know, this is a problem. I got a sound card, tuner card, and a modem
card. (I hardly use the modem card now that I have access to a wi-fi port.
But it's nice to have for backup. ) That uses up all three PCI slots in the
P5WDH. I now only have one PCI-E x16 and one PCI-E x1 available for using
as an i/o expansion card. Hope they make such a thing. Maybe I'll like the
on-board sound and forget the sound card and use one of the PCI slots for
the i/o expansion card. I know they have them for little of anything.
 
Dodgy said:
<snip>

I've recently built an E6600 rig with P5WDH, and very nice it is too.

There are a few things I don't like though -

1) The onboard wifi won't connect to a Wlan with hidden SSID (hope
future driver will fix this)
Click to expand...

I'm currently using a Hawking USB directional antenna/transmitter for my
wifi connection. The extra 6db gain gives me a strong connection where an
uni-directional transmitter did not. I am worried about the antenna that
comes with this board. It might not work the way I need it to. I wonder if
their are options on the antennas I can use with this board?

2) The Asus tune up app with all it's curvy design and beeps is just
annoying, I still have to reboot to get the clock changes accepted so
I just do it the old fashioned way with the bios.
3) The first board had a faulty LAN2. I suspect it was a solder joint
problem, so they might be having some issues with the new RoHS solder.
My supplier exchanged without any problems.

A friend (who works for a magazine) had an E6700 in for testing, so we
did some benchmarks between the too... No shock that the E6700 won, so
I just turned up the FSB from 266 to 300 and then I came out tops
again. I didn't even have to change the Vcore.

I turned it back down again afterwards as even at standard clock it's
still the fastest PC I've ever owned.

Very happy with it.

The constant source of amusement is that the motherboard temperature
is generally higher than the CPU, unless I've given it a really
serious bashing, but even then it's hardly more than 2 or 3 degrees C
higher!

Nice work Intel (about time!)

Dodgy.
Click to expand...

I read an article on Intel's upcoming Quad-core that is supposed to be
coming out in -07. I hope it uses the same mobo socket that is used for the
dual-core. I hate to have this mobo obsolete in less that one year again.

William
 
Thomas:

I assume, and hope a little $20.00 expansion card will do the trick. I'll
be mad if their isn't one available. Maybe I'll get to use one of those
PCI-E X1 slots they have on the board.

You know, this is a problem. I got a sound card, tuner card, and a modem
card. (I hardly use the modem card now that I have access to a wi-fi port.
But it's nice to have for backup. ) That uses up all three PCI slots in the
P5WDH. I now only have one PCI-E x16 and one PCI-E x1 available for using
as an i/o expansion card. Hope they make such a thing. Maybe I'll like the
on-board sound and forget the sound card and use one of the PCI slots for
the i/o expansion card. I know they have them for little of anything.
Click to expand...

Maybe you could try something like this?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812107912

Bill
 
Barry Watzman said:
Actually, the primary reason why I got the giabyte board instead of the
Asus board is that it has the serial port on the rear panel. The Asus
P5B has a serial port, but no connector for it. There is a header on
the motherboard for the port, but not only does Asus not include the
DB-9 on the rear I/O shield, they don't even give you an expansion
bracket for it.

If it was up to me, I'd buy a motherboard that still has:

-Parallel port (more about that below)
-TWO serial ports (both with connectors on the back)
-TWO IDE ports (4 devices)
-Floppy controller that supports TWO floppy drives


WTF.....







And frankly, I'm pissed that so far NO ONE makes a board with that
feature set.

As to the parallel port, if the P5W-DH doesn't have a parallel port, it
is the only board that I've seen that doesn't have one. So far, all of
the Conroe (C2D) boards that I've looked at do still have the port
(note, it's possible to have the port without having the connector in
the I/O shield area ... that's what Asus did on the P5B, they have a
motherboard header instead .... but then they need to give you the
bracket to mount a connector in an unused expansion slot.

I still have a lot of devices that use serial ports. Serial ports are
not dead. In fact, a brand new, current model JVC 1080P HDTV set has an
RS-232 serial port for control / communication with a media center PC.
Other devices that use serial ports include GPS receivers, modems, some
scanners, some printers, some UPS', lots of high-end Ethernet-backbone
class routers and other network equipment, and I have a few other
devices, not terribly common I agree but the point is .... RS-232 has
been around for 40 years, and there are still a huge number of devices
floating around that use RS-232, and it's even still being used in some
new designs (e.g. the JVC HDTV). Anyway, Asus, if you are listening,
your decision not to put the DB-9 serial port connector on the P5B cost
you selection for my systems. I'm using Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3's (and
it's as good a motherboard as the Asus P5B).

In my view, all of the manufacturers are moving too quickly to do away
with legacy stuff that some of us still need (in fact, I still need two
floppy drives, a 3.5" and a 5.25" [ok, one of my hobbies is "antique"
computers .... in fact, I'd like to have a way to connect an EIGHT-INCH
floppy drive to my PC ... I know that's very unusual, but look at the
list above, there are still a lot of relatively common devices that do
use serial ports].


Barry:

Thanks for the info. I'm aware of the difference of the E6400 and E6600,
and why I would prefer to go with the E6600. Glad to here that the price
might drop around Christmas time - hope so.

I'm not happy with the mobo selection offered at present. The P5WDH is over
priced as far as I am concerned and would be a better value below $200
compared to other boards. (Wishful thinking). It bugs me that it has no
parallel port, though I know that this port is almost a dinosaur now days.
I'll take a closer look at those boards you suggested and see if either of
them will do the job for me. Question: Why does this board have a serial
port? What perpetual uses serial i/o now days. (UPS?) The last time I had
something that used a serial port was a Hazeltine 1420 terminal. (Those of
you who know what that is have been around a while.)

90 days is forever, I bet things will look much better for Christmas.

William
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
I'm currently using a Hawking USB directional antenna/transmitter for my
wifi connection. The extra 6db gain gives me a strong connection where an
uni-directional transmitter did not. I am worried about the antenna that
comes with this board. It might not work the way I need it to. I wonder if
their are options on the antennas I can use with this board?
Click to expand...

Well it seems to be the standard screw fitting (no idea what it's real
name is) that the antenna on my router have.

The standard antenna with the P5WDH seems to work pretty well, it's
certainly better than the one built into my laptop.

A nice touch is the base of the supplied antenna has a couple of
magnets to hold it in place on your case... If only I didn't have an
aluminium/aluminum case... lol!
I read an article on Intel's upcoming Quad-core that is supposed to be
coming out in -07. I hope it uses the same mobo socket that is used for the
dual-core. I hate to have this mobo obsolete in less that one year again.
Click to expand...

Who knows... Don't forget the Duo used the same socket as the later
P4's, but the earlier chipsets and power modules on the P4 boards
couldn't support the Duo. I wouldn't be shocked if the same thing
happens with the Quad.

Even if is does work, who's to say that DDR3 memory isn't out by then,
so of course you'll want that, and oh, that's a new chipset, so new
RAM, new motherboard, new CPU... Here we go again!

Dodgy.
 
I read an article on Intel's upcoming Quad-core that is supposed to be
coming out in -07. I hope it uses the same mobo socket that is used for
the dual-core. I hate to have this mobo obsolete in less that one year
again.

William
Click to expand...
Was doing a little window shopping today and the 975 chipset will support
all processors from the EM64T to the not yet released Core 2 Quad
processors. I believe it was in the Asus S775 product section.

Ed
 
Back
Top