Well...it took a bit longer to get things going than I thought it would. Between taking breaks for family time, my server dying on me, and some initial teething time with the new hardware, things went slowly.....but NOT poorly.

The new equipment:
P4C 3ghz
IC7-G
2 Seagate Baracuda V SATA Drives

Blending with what I had on hand:
2 256 Corsair XMS 3500 C2
9700 Pro
Quiet Power modded with 226w/80w CPU/GPU Tecs

The new stuff:



The board:



The box comes totally loaded with goodies:



First time I've seen a mobo with a TIM on the NB HSF :

Looks effective but I replaced it with ASIII anyway.


The P4C 3Ghz nestled inside waiting for some TEC luvin:



To be completely honest, getting this thing up and running was a bit of a pain in the ass.

First, my Corsair XMS 3500 had compatability issues with the board. BSODs everywhere. Couldn't get the OS loaded without BSODs raining on the parade. Changing DIMM slots, voltages, or memory settings did nothing to help.

Second, I was having trouble getting both of my new Seagate Baracuda V SATA drives to be consistently recognized off the Intel southbridge. My stripe kept breaking.

But, just as I thought I was about to puke, I went to the Abit forums and saw that Abit had already released an updated BIOS. Wow...that was real quick I thought. It fixes a bunch of stuff including memory issues and the ability to adjust the mem settings manually (which many other users had trouble with...the board seemed to set its' own timings).

For me, all my problems went away with a single flash. Now it is a solid as a rock and flying high. The only downside to the new BIOS is that those using Serrillel adapters were screwed up by the new SATA portion of the BIOS. I'm sure Abit will get those guys worked around soon.

Results?

Well here is a shot of where I am at today. And this is NOT just a bansi run. This is 24/7 stable stuff here. It can run Prime and loop 3D all day long at this point.


Wow....4Ghz from this thing. I'm likely not going to give it any more voltage and just see how high the 1.7v takes me. That's .015 over stock and far enough for an Intel chip.

Anywho, I'll report on as I push things up further