C
Cliff
Hi All,
Just a word of thanks to everyone in the group. Been researching here since
last February. Decided to wait to see how the Springdale boards faired, and
with the great reviews of the P4P800 finally committed myself and installed
it last weekend.
Apart from some case issues, the board has been a great success. No
problems at all to report.
The old P3 650 was fast enough for most things, but it was painfully slow in
photo editing and mpeg2 encoding. This new machine is brilliant...real time
mpeg2 encoding - blows me away!
Haven't dabbled with overclocking, but at this point I don't feel a need
to - it's fast enough for me
I never build a PC before, so I was little anxious about it all...would it
work? It all turned out fine. It was a great confidence building exercise.
To anyone thinking about it, just give it a go...it's just a big meccano
set!
My only word of warning would be to check out how the motherboard will fit
in your case. I found that the 20 pin power connector stopped me from using
two HDD bays (didn't find that out until I had already bolted them in).
Also, the RAID connectors are at the bottom of the board, so if you have a
full tower you may find the supplied IDE cables wont reach to the top drive
bays (once again, I didn't find that out until I had bolted them in). The
reach of the IDE cables is also affected by the use of the slave connector
on the cable (I had to drop out a fourth drive I wanted to use as a slave
because of the reach issue).
Finally, I'll drop in my specs here. It's always reassuring to see that
someone has had success with the same components that you are using/thinking
about...
Case Aopen HX08, Full Tower, Noise Killer.
PSU Antec TruePower 480W
Motherboard: ASUS P4P800 Deluxe Revision 1.02
BIOS 1005
CPU Intel P4 2.4C 800FSB
Cooling Stock
RAM 2 x Kingston ValueRam 256MB - KVR400X64C25/256 (Winbond
W942508CH-5)
Graphics Matrox G400Max Dual Head / Part No. G4+MMDH4A32G / Serial
GAM66600 / BIOS 2.1 b35 / Driver 5.88.061
Sound SoundBlaster Live! Platinum
TV Tuner Leadtek Winfast TV2000XP Deluxe
DVD Burner Sony DRU-510A (IDE Secondary, Master)
DVD ROM Pioneer S105A (IDE Secondary, Slave)
HDD1 Seagate Barracuda IV / ST360021A / ATA100 / 7200 RPM /
60G (IDE Primary, Master) - System Drive
HDD2 Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 / 6Y120P0 / ATA133 / 7200 RPM /
120G (RAID Primary, Master) - Data Drive
HDD3 IBM Deskstar 75GXP / DLTA-307030 / ATA100 / 7200 RPM /
30G (RAID Secondary, Master) - Page File Drive
DirectX 9.0a
OS Win98SE / WinXP SP1a (dual boot)
Overclock NO
Cheers, Cliff
Just a word of thanks to everyone in the group. Been researching here since
last February. Decided to wait to see how the Springdale boards faired, and
with the great reviews of the P4P800 finally committed myself and installed
it last weekend.
Apart from some case issues, the board has been a great success. No
problems at all to report.
The old P3 650 was fast enough for most things, but it was painfully slow in
photo editing and mpeg2 encoding. This new machine is brilliant...real time
mpeg2 encoding - blows me away!
Haven't dabbled with overclocking, but at this point I don't feel a need
to - it's fast enough for me
I never build a PC before, so I was little anxious about it all...would it
work? It all turned out fine. It was a great confidence building exercise.
To anyone thinking about it, just give it a go...it's just a big meccano
set!
My only word of warning would be to check out how the motherboard will fit
in your case. I found that the 20 pin power connector stopped me from using
two HDD bays (didn't find that out until I had already bolted them in).
Also, the RAID connectors are at the bottom of the board, so if you have a
full tower you may find the supplied IDE cables wont reach to the top drive
bays (once again, I didn't find that out until I had bolted them in). The
reach of the IDE cables is also affected by the use of the slave connector
on the cable (I had to drop out a fourth drive I wanted to use as a slave
because of the reach issue).
Finally, I'll drop in my specs here. It's always reassuring to see that
someone has had success with the same components that you are using/thinking
about...
Case Aopen HX08, Full Tower, Noise Killer.
PSU Antec TruePower 480W
Motherboard: ASUS P4P800 Deluxe Revision 1.02
BIOS 1005
CPU Intel P4 2.4C 800FSB
Cooling Stock
RAM 2 x Kingston ValueRam 256MB - KVR400X64C25/256 (Winbond
W942508CH-5)
Graphics Matrox G400Max Dual Head / Part No. G4+MMDH4A32G / Serial
GAM66600 / BIOS 2.1 b35 / Driver 5.88.061
Sound SoundBlaster Live! Platinum
TV Tuner Leadtek Winfast TV2000XP Deluxe
DVD Burner Sony DRU-510A (IDE Secondary, Master)
DVD ROM Pioneer S105A (IDE Secondary, Slave)
HDD1 Seagate Barracuda IV / ST360021A / ATA100 / 7200 RPM /
60G (IDE Primary, Master) - System Drive
HDD2 Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 / 6Y120P0 / ATA133 / 7200 RPM /
120G (RAID Primary, Master) - Data Drive
HDD3 IBM Deskstar 75GXP / DLTA-307030 / ATA100 / 7200 RPM /
30G (RAID Secondary, Master) - Page File Drive
DirectX 9.0a
OS Win98SE / WinXP SP1a (dual boot)
Overclock NO
Cheers, Cliff