Conroe woes

Soldato
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So I read some threads about the Asus and I think, yep, that's the board for me. Then I read some other threads, and I think, ok, maybe not.

So I read some threads about the DFI and I think, yep, that's the board for me. Then I read some other threads, and I think, ok, maybe not.

So I read some threads about the BadAxe and I think, yep, that's the board for me. Then I read some other threads, and I think, ok, maybe not.

You get the picture. What's more confusing is that for the bulk of the problems that each board has, there are a fairly large number of people who do not seem to have said problems.

Bleh.

I have all but given up on lumping in a mobo with my Conroe pre-order. Just gonna get the CPU's then see how the next week or so pans out with other people. :(
 
Soldato
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Im in the same boat m8,when i think that one board will do a thread comes on the forums saying they got problems with it :(
Im sitting here on my kids old PII 350 as ive sold my Amd system for the conroe.
Think im going to wait a little longer to see what happens.
 
Associate
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Yep, that pretty much sums it up. I'd go for the DFI if it had more than a lousy 4 sata ports, I'd go for the Asus if I had an old P4 to flash to the latest conroe compatible bios (what were Asus thinking :rolleyes: ) & I'd go for the badaxe if I didn't have to do a hardware mod to unlock the overclocking options.

What to do, what to do. :confused:
 
Soldato
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It's great that the launch has been brought forward but It'd be nice if the mobo manufacturers had done the same...the nforce boards are the ones I'm interested in, especially the DFI.
 
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I was the same so I've just decided to get the ASrock conroeXFIRE-eSATA2 at £55 for the time being. All the other boards are expensive and seem to be buggy, and I don't like the idea of risking £170 on a dud board or one that might not work with Conroe. The ASrock might well need upgrading in a few months but by that time the prices will have droped & it'll be a lot clearer as to what the solid boards are. Saying that the ASrock might do just fine, in which case I'll have saved myself over £100+
 
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I have just recievd the DFI board, I will post my results with my Conroe E6600 here.

ATM the known issues are:

1) the fsb max is around 370, so it's suited better for E6700 Conroe's if you want to overclock to over 3.5ghz. Though a bios fix should resolve this.

2) It does only have 4 Sata ports, which is not a problem for me personally as I only use 2 of them for Raid 0.

There are no outstanding boards for every purpose just yet, though the Asus seems pretty good once you get the right Conroe supporting bios.

Regards
Raja
 
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raja said:
I have just recievd the DFI board, I will post my results with my Conroe E6600 here.

ATM the known issues are:

1) the fsb max is around 370, so it's suited better for E6700 Conroe's if you want to overclock to over 3.5ghz. Though a bios fix should resolve this.

2) It does only have 4 Sata ports, which is not a problem for me personally as I only use 2 of them for Raid 0.

There are no outstanding boards for every purpose just yet, though the Asus seems pretty good once you get the right Conroe supporting bios.

Regards
Raja
Hi Raja , nice one , which memory did you go for out of interest ?
 
Soldato
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Arcane said:
It's great that the launch has been brought forward but It'd be nice if the mobo manufacturers had done the same...the nforce boards are the ones I'm interested in, especially the DFI.
Same here i always stayed away from DFI in the past but if the intel board is as good as the DFI SLI-DR i`ll be happy :D
 
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Jimbo said:
Same boat here too. Although Im leaning towards the Asus P5B, and surely that will be garunteed to work with conroe out of the box.

No, you have to flash to the latest bios to get conroe support. See OCUK's description of this board for details.
 
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The motherboard situation is giving me a headache too. I'm convinced I want a Conroe now after reading the nice spread in PCF this month which arrived in the post yesterday. However the DFI one mentioned above seems to be for ATI Crossfire. The shoping cart at OCUK is so old and out of date, it's lack of comparison features make it hard to compare products.

I'm looking at the Intel Core 2 DUO E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) but I don't want to spend £150 on a motherboard. I have always been an AMD user and have no Pentium chip with which to Flash a brand new out of date Asus motherboard (always used Asus and would have like to have stuck with them).

I'm an Nvidia man through and through. After reading the review in PC Format of the 7950 GX2 (which is great value for money and beats most SLI set-ups) I was dissapointed to see I won't benefit from it as I'm running default 1280x1024 17" TFT resolution but perhaps the new Conroe will alleviate the bottleneck. However I'll be sticking with Nvidia even if its the 7900 GTX.

So with only AMD chips in my house, a penchant for Nvidia GPU's and a budget of say £120 for a motherboard, which one do I go for? :confused:
 
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I agree the dfi one seems like the best one to go for, and it will improve with newer bios updates. Also it has 8 sata ports i think which most conroe boards dont seem to have. Does it only have 1 ide slot though? and why is there a 4pin header for cpu fan???
 
Soldato
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I don't use IDE so it's not an issue for me luckily, I'd heard that most of the newer 775 boards were phasing it out, I'm sure that'll kick up a stink for those still using it. The four pin Fan Header is standard Intel iirc, I remember buying an Asetek Micro cooler and it shipped with the wrong fan header for my s939, I broke the side off the header and plugged it in anyway, I'm guessing one of the extra wires is for fan sensing or something similar.
 
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Jay_t said:
Yep, that pretty much sums it up. I'd go for the DFI if it had more than a lousy 4 sata ports, I'd go for the Asus if I had an old P4 to flash to the latest conroe compatible bios (what were Asus thinking :rolleyes: ) & I'd go for the badaxe if I didn't have to do a hardware mod to unlock the overclocking options.

What to do, what to do. :confused:


Get the DFI, you can always get an extra Serial ATA Raid card. Do you actually use more than 4 SATA Drives though ?!
 
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Thanks guys, that'll do me fine. I have one optical IDE drive so (DVD-RW) so not a problem and SATA RAID will be nice.

I see OCUK doesn't stock this board, I take it its new?

Is it called the DFI NF590 (from the photo)? From what I saw online its an AMD AM2 board?
 
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