ASUS P5B-Deluxe; Problems & Fixes

[unclewebb]

mine: What speed and voltage were you running your Apogee memory at? The P5B has a strap change at 400 MHz so it is a lot easier to run stable at a FSB of 401 MHz than it is to run at 400 MHz, especially with a Quad. I assumed you tried using lots of voltage for the northbridge, etc. to try to get your computer stable. What sort of temps do you get up to with Prime small FFTs?

The P5B isn't exactly top priority for the bios writers at Asus these days but they seem to keep making some slow progress with each release. My E8400 - C0 is pretty happy on the P5B Deluxe now. It needs more chipset voltage than my original E6400 ever did but whatever makes it happy, I give it.

With lots of FSB MHz for my E8400 - C0 I was having trouble in the bios with it locking up while I was making adjustments but 1.65 volts for the northbridge sure cured that! If you plan to replace your board then don't be afraid to give it some juice. Slower, more conservative, memory speeds with CL4 timings works more reliably for me than DDR2-1100+ speeds and CL5 timings. With the tighter CL4 timings, the performance loss is minimal.

I also pulled off my northbridge heatsink a long time ago. It wasn't sitting squarely so I bent the heatpipe a little and used some AS5. If a person was serious and didn't mind some extra noise then bolting a small fan to it would probably be a good idea too.