Hello all,
I built my current rig a year ago, and been suffering lack of stability ever since. With Vista's nifty memory tester (I know it's not the best around, but it's good enough for detecting more serious problems like what I was getting), I saw that the weird boots or no boots, as well as blue screens were being caused by "bad" memory. After returning my OCZ kit, I got crucial ballistix tracers. No problems, until a couple of months later. RMA'd them, got a new set of tracers that were stable for a bit longer. Then they started failing also (more BSODs, weird freezes, pc occasionally not booting). Unable to beleive that I'd get 3 sets of bad ram in a row, I investigated further and found that this mobo (Gigabyte P35C-DS3R rev. 1.1) does a piss poor job of telling you the actual RAM voltage. Turns out the 2.2V it showed me both in BIOS and in EasyTune were actually... 2.4V! No wonder my RAM wasn't lasting. (FYI nominal volts for tracers is 2.2V.)
Now I'm having a hard time booting with all 4 sticks of RAM, I have to randomly swap them around and remove 1, or 2, or 3... kinda frustrating, especially when today's bad ram stick is tomorrow's only good one. (I did reformat more than once, even on a clean install things would go south).
Some other gripes:
- RAM slots are way too close to each other: there's less than 1mm between the heat sinks of each stick. Even (truly) undervolted, they're too hot to touch, even with a RAM cooler.
- CMOS clear jumper is under the graphics card. Worst. access. ever.
- Poor manual. It was 2007 when I bought it, and it's boot diagnostics is still done with cryptic beep sequences, many of which are not in the manual (although I somehow managed to get very familiar with some during some endless RAM swapping sessions).
So I'm just fed up with it and I want to get another board. Not looking to replace RAM at this point unless tests show they've become FUBAR.
My previous board was an ASUS and I regret not having stayed with them this time...
What's a good performance board out there today? Reliable, don't really need any fancy stuff but must handle tracers running at least at 1066, normal timings. Hopefully with decent component locations. My 8800GTS is quite large... and so is the CPU fan (Tuniq Tower 120). The Q6600 is running at stock speed, might overclock if platform feels solid...
No RAID or SLI required.
I built my current rig a year ago, and been suffering lack of stability ever since. With Vista's nifty memory tester (I know it's not the best around, but it's good enough for detecting more serious problems like what I was getting), I saw that the weird boots or no boots, as well as blue screens were being caused by "bad" memory. After returning my OCZ kit, I got crucial ballistix tracers. No problems, until a couple of months later. RMA'd them, got a new set of tracers that were stable for a bit longer. Then they started failing also (more BSODs, weird freezes, pc occasionally not booting). Unable to beleive that I'd get 3 sets of bad ram in a row, I investigated further and found that this mobo (Gigabyte P35C-DS3R rev. 1.1) does a piss poor job of telling you the actual RAM voltage. Turns out the 2.2V it showed me both in BIOS and in EasyTune were actually... 2.4V! No wonder my RAM wasn't lasting. (FYI nominal volts for tracers is 2.2V.)
Now I'm having a hard time booting with all 4 sticks of RAM, I have to randomly swap them around and remove 1, or 2, or 3... kinda frustrating, especially when today's bad ram stick is tomorrow's only good one. (I did reformat more than once, even on a clean install things would go south).
Some other gripes:
- RAM slots are way too close to each other: there's less than 1mm between the heat sinks of each stick. Even (truly) undervolted, they're too hot to touch, even with a RAM cooler.
- CMOS clear jumper is under the graphics card. Worst. access. ever.
- Poor manual. It was 2007 when I bought it, and it's boot diagnostics is still done with cryptic beep sequences, many of which are not in the manual (although I somehow managed to get very familiar with some during some endless RAM swapping sessions).
So I'm just fed up with it and I want to get another board. Not looking to replace RAM at this point unless tests show they've become FUBAR.
My previous board was an ASUS and I regret not having stayed with them this time...
What's a good performance board out there today? Reliable, don't really need any fancy stuff but must handle tracers running at least at 1066, normal timings. Hopefully with decent component locations. My 8800GTS is quite large... and so is the CPU fan (Tuniq Tower 120). The Q6600 is running at stock speed, might overclock if platform feels solid...
No RAID or SLI required.