Asus P5W DH or Bad Axe 2?

[Guest JustinSane]

Ive got the itch again. I need to upgrade. I am trying to find the board for me. Right now I have it narrowed down to the P5W DH or the BX2. I was reading some reviews of the P5W and tomshardware was saying they were having some probs with it. Can anyone recommend one or the other or maybe something different? I am gonna be getting an E6600 and 2 gigs of Buffalo Firestix.

[Coors]

Have you looked at the Gigabyte boards? My DQ6 is an awesome board. Some people have had problems with the DS3...and some have not. But my experience with Gigabyte has been problem free.

[Guest JustinSane]

Have you looked at the Gigabyte boards? My DQ6 is an awesome board. Some people have had problems with the DS3...and some have not. But my experience with Gigabyte has been problem free.

 

Yea I was looking at that one earlier and it just slipped my mind. Thats another I am debating on. BTW, you have a Opteron 170. Is it a big difference between the 170 and the core 2 duo?

[Coors]

For everyday tasks and programs that don't use much cpu cycles...not really. Even gaming isn't really effected that much. But it definately shows when unzipping files, F@H and other things like that. If you want the cheapest possible upgrade you could just get a new GPU and your 939 setup will be able to get you by for quite sometime. But if you got the itch to go all out and you have the money to burn...well C2D is a very good choice.

[Uber-Noober]

I'd like to throw in my $0.02. I agree with Raiderfan. The Gigabyte board I have has been rock solid. I had a minor driver glitch with my sound card, but everything else has been running smoothly once I got that fixed. I only have the DS3 but I think the DQ6 is worth it because of the Intel Matrix Raid and heatpipe technology. I had to "mod" my motherboard by putting on an aftermarket NB cooler. You won't have to do that with the DQ6. I wan't sure the mod was necessary but I did it the moment I bought my board just to be sure it would not slow me down. Alot of people do awesome with stock heatsink. I just love modding things. Its fun.

 

Incredibly easy to Overclock. It makes OC'ing the DFI Lanparty NF4 UT @ Venice 3200+ look like rocket science. Then again, some people like the challenge and complexity of overclocking the A64. I did not. I like to max out my chip and get back to gaming. The Venice / DFI / OCZ Plat Rev.2 caused more than one gray hair on my head, thats for sure. This took me 30minutes to get to the overclock in my sig (before Orthos testing).

 

Anyway, I have a OCDB entry for my system combination and you could probably get a higher overclock if you bought better ram. My OCZ will not budge past 925 MHz no matter what. Damn Kingfisher, he took the last of the good OCZ chips! :mad:

 

I definitely notice a performance increase in all aspects; especially games. The most pronounced difference I notice is games like Rome: Total War (arguably the coolest game ever made) or RTS like Supreme Commander or Company of Heroes. Night and Day man I 'm telling you. Also my rig now is much quieter than the DFI one because the VC-RE was very audible even with a fan controller.

 

Finally, people have complained about the cold boot issue with the DS3. Maybe I have been lucky, but I really love the Gigabyte's mechanism (the cold boot) for correcting blunders with bad BIOS settings during overclock. Basically, what happens is if you screw up your BIOS during an OC (I did it a few times) the system cold boots once, shuts down and automatically re-boots back in the CPU's default setting. Only once did it cold boot twice in a row where I had to physically power off the PSU to get it to boot into BIOS for corrective measures.

 

It does this by changing the BIOS setting "CPU HOST CONTROL" to "DISABLE" on a cold boot whereby it still keeps the BIOS settings you made in the background that will only "reactivate" when you set the CPU HOST CONTROL to ENABLE again (enable allows overclocking). No CMOS jumpers. No battery removal. Fully automated. I like it; especially when you're tinkering with a system already strapped into your case where battery removal is easier said than done.

 

Now some people have had recurring cold boot problems, but I am being 100% honest with you: I really like the Gigabyte "cold-boot" system for OC mistakes and it has not been a problem for me. Much preferred to CMOS jumpers because I have big meat hooks for hands. Don't know about the DQ6; maybe Raider can help you there.

[Coors]

I haven't had any cold boot problems. It does the thing you just mentioned...but thats it.

[Kingfisher]

Since cold boot problems are a feature on 965 chipsets, it may be the individual makers who can make this a subtilty rather than an annoyance. It could be I was too green and made too many mistakes. Maybe my board was defective. I still disliked the layout and RAID limitations.

[Uber-Noober]

Never meant it as a criticism of others or their overclocking abilities. My apologies, King. Reading Anandtech and OCforums you certainly were not alone with frustrations over cold boot. I just happened to get the Rev 3.3 f10 version that in all probability had most of these wrinkles ironed out.

 

Regarding the 'feature' crack; I just find it hard to believe that the BIOS would not intentionally do what I mentioned above were it not designed by Gigabyte to do that intentionally.

 

I would agree the ASUS P5N is definitely a superior motherboard; and has proven to OC faster than the Gigabyte clock for clock. I just have had numerous previous bad experiences with ASUS products and had never tried Gigabyte before. Best $110 ever spent imo. If Justin is getting a e6600 and not using RAID I see little reason to get the ASUS. However, if you decide on the ASUS P5N Deluxe, I hope you get the e6320 (April 22nd - Real Conroe) and some G.Skill HZ ($169) for an easy and ungodly 100% OC on air.

 

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=11549

 

Do whatever you want Justin. I'm just telling you there's a reason these DS3's are flying off the shelf.

[Coors]

I definitely notice a performance increase in all aspects; especially games. The most pronounced difference I notice is games like Rome: Total War (arguably the coolest game ever made) or RTS like Supreme Commander or Company of Heroes. Night and Day man I 'm telling you.

 

Are you using the same video card with your C2D as your old rig? What was your old CPU?

[Uber-Noober]

Same video card; 7900GTO. My old rig was basically:

 

DFI Lanparty NF4-UT

Venice 3200 @ 2.5 Ghz

OCZ Plat. Rev. 2 1:1 250 Mhz 2.5-3-3-7 2x512mb

 

However, I'm sure most of the performance gain was due to the addition of 2x1gb sticks (2gb ram). FPS aren't really that much better (although the Bluegears sound card is definitely a phenomenal improvement over the Audigy) with the exception of Quake 4. Quake 4 either loves the core duo or the extra ram, but it certainly is a noticeable improvement. Like I said earlier, Rome: Total War and Company of Heroes just purr right now.

 

I was really happy with my old rig, I just had a chance to sell it to a friend (with case, HD, DVD-Ram, etc.) with my old 6800GT for $600. That means I got rid of my old vid card and made the sys in my sig for a $600 extra (that includes the Razer Deathadder, case fans, cpu cooler, etc.)

 

There's no question that if the DFI 965P was out, I would have gone with that.

 

I also wanted to try out the Intel chips and finally break 3GHZ; my venice was not up to the task.....

[Kingfisher]

What is so special about the DFI board that you would need more than what your current impressive numbers are?

370 x 9 or 3000000.2 x 9, or staying at stock speeds, a C2D machine performs quite well.

I can't notice other than benchmarks and video card upgrades, the performance gains from C2D compared to my old 939 X2 PC.

Sure, my super Pi scores put the 939 to shame easily, but in reality if I didn't watch the tests run, I could not notice the difference in general PC usage.

[Coors]

Venice 3200 @ 2.5 Ghz

OCZ Plat. Rev. 2 1:1 250 Mhz 2.5-3-3-7 2x512mb

 

Yeah, those are probably why you noticed a difference. You went from a single core with a gig of memory to a dual core with 2gb of memory.