1. Posted: Aug 22 2008

   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 graphics, take a screenshot apply a 3x3 Gaussian blur in Photoshop, GIMP, or the editor of your choice. Yes, it really is that bad. As you should expect, there are no options to overclock your system, if you're interested in such. This board gets two stars because my system boots. You can make it work -- use only 1.8v DDR2 RAM, update to the latest BIOS, and get the number of a good exorcist in your area. If you're more the DIY type, be certain that your Latin pronunciation is spot-on before attempting to power your system on, and skip any steps involving the sprinkling of holy water. Seriously, however, I cannot possibly recommend this product. Consider instead a quality board from another vendor, such as ASUS or Gigabyte.

2. Posted: Aug 18 2008

   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 full verify and repair cycle which takes over an hour and slows down the machine quite noticeably. In addition the Intel monitoring program reports false positives about something non-specific being out of range for the CPU. It also says the L2 cache is inactive. If I had to do it all over again, I would have paid a little more for the ASUS board. I've never had problems with ASUS boards.

3. ( 1 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: Jun 17 2008

   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 to run systems designed for high end activities such as gaming on Microsoft Windows Vista (DirectX 10) with lots of memory, fast SATA drives, the Q6600 processor and a GeForce 8800 PCI-e or better. While some components are a tight fit (some memory is millimetres away from the wiring with some cards in the PCI-e slot, so get the memory in before the video card) and some cards are literally going through a little more than a gentle force to flush with the case (this depends on the ATX case design though) it is still a robust fine choice for anyone who just wants to go with a brand new cutting edge PC. In this respect those who want to port IDE drives and hardware over a year old to this motherboard should expect a seriously hard time with lots of problems especially if it also concerns an XP installation which simply won't recognize the SATA drives without a driver that can only be installed via 3.5" floppy that this motherboard doesn't support. Avoid that nightmare, keep your old PC as it is and just try to go with new gear. If you do your rig will run like lightening and you will be playing games like Crysis and Bioshock on high settings in no time.

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