Great Motherboard, I bought 2!!!!
This board is awesome, I am running Vista 64-bit, with 8G RAM, and 2 1T drive, the board can handle up to 6T I believe. All Sata, has IDE if you need that for your CDROM. All has VMWARE accellartor which you can turn on in the BIOS. If your machine boots slow, you need to know how to upgrad the BIOS. Mine is a MEDIA MACHINE< which records shows 24x7. It is also a Video Encoding machine, running 64bit, QUAD-CORE. It has optical output, 6 UBS, and 2 FIREWIRE. It also has External SATA link, and Network built on. I run an NVIDIO 500M card, the graphics are incredible, This is my DVD which I record shows, and encode them, burn to DVD with added Huadgepauge card. No more spending 10$ a month for Tivo or such. Intel board and chip is a great combo, ... Read More
There are better options.
Short version: Intel treats its motherboards as reference designs for other vendors to polish into real products. It shows.
The BIOS has few options for tweaking, and is unusually slow to detect drives on boot. It takes more than half a minute to POST even with the "quick post" enabled.
This board will only accept 1.8v RAM modules. Unlike other boards, there's no way to increase the memory voltage or fine tune the timing to accommodate some modules.
There is no DVI connection for the integrated graphics, only has VGA. This would be a non-issue if the display weren't inexcusably blurry compared to VGA output of a typical graphics card. To get an idea what you system will look like with Intel Integrated ... Read More
Don't Do it. Get an ASUS
This is the fifth computer I've built and the first and last with an Intel board. This is what I had to do to get XP installed. All of this was learned the hard way doing install after re-install after re-install.
1. Create a "slipstream" XP installation disk with Raid drivers so windows can find the hard disk and video drivers.
2. Install with no more than one gig of memory to avoid freeze during installation.
3. Disable LAN during installation to avoid freeze.
4. Repair installation. Switch the DVD drive when Windows freezes during repair. (no amns file found)
The machine still pukes a blue screen occasionally and if I don't shutdown gracefully; on the next start up the Raid driver goes through a ... Read More
Core 2 Quad Motherboard from Intel that enforces big changes.
This is quite a compact board and an essential for Core 2 Quad processors like the almighty Q6600. However this board has new standards that many users may find hard to agree with. The first is that it forces you to drop PS/2 connections (unless you get adapters) and the 3.5" Floppy is officially extinct with it. While it can handle IDE this is really built for SATA drives. So quite simply if you have already found your 3.5" Floppy disks gathering dust and your PS/2 connecting hardware in disuse and no need for IDE anything and if you want to go with the latest cutting edge Core 2 Quad processors and don't mind experimenting with a bios to get your SATA drives up and running then this is really the next phase in motherboard evolution that is built ... Read More
Stable no-frills Performance
I have had this board running every day for over 9 months now (Enermax 720W, E6850, Mushkin DDR2-800, evga 8800GTX, Vista Premium 64, SATA RAID) and it's a real nice setup. Went together well. No overclocking, no major hassles. Sometimes I wish I had bought the D975BX2 instead so I could crank up my CPU. But that's just when I play Crysis ;)
The SATA driver at Vista install is a pain. The driver comes on floppy, and the mobo has no legacy floppy support. If they put drivers on a CD it would help a lot. I had to jump a few hoops to extract the driver files onto USB drive, which works for install. If you have an external USB floppy drive that should work too, I think.
The only "issue" with this board is the DirectSound driver ... Read More
