Giga-Byte 8KNXP User First Impressions

[JoeFrat]

This is my first foray into Giga-byte land, as I've been a stalwart Asus supporter for almost 6 years now. The recent quality issues, coupled with stunningly poor support have forced me to look elsewhere and I think I've found an excellent board that I hope is stable and performs well. Here's a few pics of what comes in the box.




Here are some screenies of where I am so far. I just built this machine last night using the following specs:
P4 2.8c, 800mhz FSB w/ hyperthreading
1 gig Corsair XMS PC2700 DDR
Giga-byte 8KNXP non-ultra, Intel 875 chipset, SATA, ICH5R, IDE Raid, CSA Lan, Onboard Sound, and everything but the kitchen sink.
2 x 36.7 WD 'Raptor' 10k rpm Serial ata hd's, running off the serial connection but not in a raid array
48x24x48, 16x Plextor CDRW-DVD Black Bezel drive
Removable HD tray w/ 12 gig Fujitsu for Mandrake 9.0 Linux
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, 128mb DDR
Soundblaster Audigy2 Platinum
USB keyboard, mouse, Zip250, Sidewinder FF2 stick
Lian-Li pc-61 Black Aluminum





As you can see I've not done any overclocking as of yet, my main goal last night was to get it installed and running. As far as the install went, it was pretty straight forward. Some things I noticed during the install were:
1. The writing on the lower half of the board is upside down. If you look at the pci slots they are marked correctly, just the writing is upside down. I found that odd, but it didn't hamper me in any way.
2. The memory slots are very close to a row of caps, close enough to raise a bit of concern with the corsair memory I'm using as the heat spreaders are quite close to the caps in the first mem slot.
3.The DPS2 module has a unique clamp, you can see it in the pics above. My concern here is that the slot the module goes in is a tad on the lose side and the weight of the hsf on it allows it to learn towards the processor heatsink. Mainly my concern is with shipping a completed pc with the module installed.
4. This is more of a nitpick than anything else, but most of the recent Asus boards have a clip or slider that locks the video card in place, this board doesn't have one. I personally think this is a good feature that all board makers should use. Again the main concern here is shipping and not having the card work it's way out.
5. The DPS2 fans is annoyingly loud. It seems to spin up and down during intensive activity. It also glows blue, which for me is a waste as I don't look inside unless something's broken.

Overall my first impressions are good. It certainly runs smoothly and these Raptors are amazingly fast. The XP install took less than 20 minutes from start to finish, not bad I say. So far in the first 18 hours of running it's been flawless. I have a rather busy next 5 days coming up, but I hope to have some time Sunday to run benchies and play with clock speeds. I have to learn Easytune and the bios a bit more before I start pushing it too hard. I did have it up to 3150 for about 2 hours while I was playing with Easytune last night.

Speaking of Easytune, last night while I was playing around, I had set the FSB to 225 and the divider to asynch. About an hour later I got a hardware error and lost the video. When I looked at Easytune it had switched, by itself, back to linear and d@mn near fried my radeon. I've started a discussion thread here

[CrowdAds]

[alien resident]

this may come a long delayed post BUT I am glad I read this post. You mentioning the DPS2 running up & down. Whew!!!!.I spent many a day clenching my chest thinking one of components was failing. I just could not isolate the sound. Finally I know . thank you.

now if I could just figure out that bloody clicking noise from my Raptor .....

[Paladine]

Yes thanks for the post JoeFrat, but I have two questions for you.

1. What Revision is your board? 1.0 or 2.0?
2. Is your RAM 2 x 512 Sticks or 4 X 256? And how close are they?

Thanks again!

[JoeFrat]

Originally Posted by Paladine

Yes thanks for the post JoeFrat, but I have two questions for you.

1. What Revision is your board? 1.0 or 2.0?
2. Is your RAM 2 x 512 Sticks or 4 X 256? And how close are they?

Thanks again!

LOL talk about old posts hehe. To answer your questions:
1. Rev 1.0 with the original bios, haven't had any issues requiring an update, but I just replaced the ram with corsair XMS 3500 and I can't oc at all, so it might be time to update.
2. Both the 2700 and 3500 are 2 x 512 chips. The 2700 will run flawlessly @ 354, 215 fsb 1:1. The 3500 is giving me crashes at anything over stock. Working on that issue right now.

Not sure what you mean by close...you mean by the caps or matched pair?