Update: P5B Vanilla (16Feb2007)

[ziddey]

This should be good news for anyone looking for a cheap(er) board that'll fair pretty well. In the past, as I understand it, p5b vanilla only supported vdimm up to 2.1v, limited vfsb, no vmch, etc.

However, I just got a new p5b vanilla from newegg. It allows vdimm up to 2.45v, vmch up to 1.77v, vfsb up to 1.45, has voltage adjustments for vcore southbridge (pcie/sata), vich. Great news! Means way less modding to have to do on the board.

Still, vdrop and vdroop need to be worked on with pencil. Setting 1.40v in bios results in 1.35v at idle and 1.30v at load. This seems to be the only issue. Also, it seems that leaving vmch at 1.25v results in occasional inability to recover from a cold boot (p5b does cold boot every time it seems). Also, pcie for g71gs was stuck at x1. I'm not sure, but after I made the switch up to 1.55v vmch, pcie went right up to x16.

This board is so much less of a headache to work with than the ds3 ever was. The only thing I'm a little bugged is that posting seems to take longer than the ds3, for the initial screen to come up.

Also, the board has support for ahci with just the ich8! However, I don't have a floppy drive and don't feel like slipstreaming drivers right now, so I haven't tested it.

I'm currently using kvr667 while I rma my d9gmh's, so I can't climb that high on fsb. I am currently at 8x400 with ram 1:1 5-5-5-15 @ 2.15v. Can't get cas4 at all with these. Hopefully, once I get better ram, I'll be able to do more testing and hopefully settle at either 8x450 or 7x500 (now that nbcc has been disproved, no?).

Good buy!

edit: Also, it should be noted that the cpu reading is way higher than what it actually is. Coretemp reports about 47'c under load for me, which is about what it's been with two other boards I've used. Meanwhile, asusprobe reports 62'c.

Also, anyone know where I could get a bracket with the lead for the serial port header on the motherboard? I would have rather had a serial port instead of esata.



Update: Looks like it was too good to be true. Vdimm set to anything above 2.1v doesn't seem to operate correctly. I'll be getting a new battery for my dmm soon so I can see exactly what's going on. Hopefully, I'll be able to at least verify that vmch and vfsb settings are true.