ASRock 4Core1600twins P35 not bad !
PSU and Arctic Freezer 7 Pro installation a mess!
I agree with the last poster who says that the motherboard power connectors are in a stupid place! I struggled with the thick power cables from the PSU (which I barely squeezed in), and I tried my best to secure them with cable ties, a plastic mounting thing from the case kit, and some black insulation tape. The tape didn't stick for very long but the cable tie seems to be holding well, which is a relief. But the cables are still directly in the path of the Arctic Freezer and the rear case fan, which can't be an optimal position at all. It doesn't seem to be going beyond 50C at full load though, and it's fairly stable with Quiet Fan aiming for 50C and the CPU fan set to level 5 target speed.
But I'm having major RAM problems, which is frustrating as it's my X-Mas treat to myself. I bought a Kingston 4GB HyperX PC2-8500 DDR2 kit but I've just returned it for a refund as, thankfully, one of the DIMMs was faulty and it wouldn't complete POST with the beep -- otherwise it might've been down to me, because I didn't realise that it required optimal timings of 7-7-7-20 @ 1066 MHz and this ASrock motherboard only has manual settings of up to 6-6-6-15.
Now I'm using Transcend Axeram 2x2GB PC2-8500 and I've set the correct timings of 5-5-5-15 with a voltage of 1.96 (it needs 2.0v but my only options are 1.96 or 2.02 -- it seems to crash when loading Vista on the higher value). But I'm still getting random "stop" errors after a while, and no matter how many times I try to change the DRAM voltage in the ASrock OC Tuner (which I think is yet another hideous piece of motherboard vendor crappiness, at least regarding the GUI), it won't reflect the value of 1.96v that I saved in the BIOS config. Have I bought incompatible memory again? :S Please help. The chipset seems to keep reverting back to 1.79v.
Strangely, I've just downloaded CPU-Z and it gets the RAM part ref right (TX1066QLU-4GK), but it reckons that the max bandwidth is PC2-6400 (400 MHz). I paid for PC2-8500, and the same program lists the EPP settings as 5-5-5-15 @ 533 MHz, so it's obviously a software bug it seems. It does say that it's using the latency timings I set in the BIOS though, which is a relief. I just need to get the voltages to stick... Or is 1.96 too far below the stated value of 2.000? Perhaps 2.02 would be better, with a slight latency adjustment? I wish the damn motherboard had a 2.0 setting, though... In the memory tab it's reading a DRAM frequency of 492.2 MHz and a ratio of 2:3, which I think must be down to the 1.79v that I can't get rid of. Or is that within a normal operating threshold?
I read the manual and set the FSB2 jumper to short pins 4+5, which it says is needed for a 1333 MHz FSB (I have a C2D E8400) with 1066 (533) MHz DDR2 memory. I disabled Spread Spectrum just in case, along with XD mode, SpeedStep and Thermal Throttling. I've also tried setting the OC mode to "manual" with and without changing the FSB, but the DRAM voltage still doesn't change in OC Tuner.
I'm running Vista SP1 64b and I've enabled the memory remap feature in the BIOS, so now it recognises 4094 MB of total RAM in TaskMan, and 4096 at POST (but the Vista system performance wizard always reported 4 GB anyway, which I thought was strange).
I've got a Palit Geforce 512MB 9800GTX+ with the latest drivers installed, and I had to set the SATA mode in the BIOS to IDE emulation in order to complete Windows installation without it stalling at the AHCI driver stage (HDD is Samsung SpinPoint F1 640 GB). But I don't think that it's anything other than a memory and/or CPU issue at this stage... Maybe I'm wrong? And the BIOS already seems to be the latest version, P1.40, unless there really is an M-series Intel firmware available online that could provide more options?
