intel server motherboard

Overall Rating: ( 11 reviews )

1. ( 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.

2. ( 1 of 1 found this review helpful ) Posted: May 30 2008

   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 sometimes won't reinitialize after sleep. That means no sound at all. I returned the first board due to this. It still happens sometimes, but a reboot fixes it. I'm running Vista64. My buddy has Vista32 and hasn't had the sound glitch on his. Overall a good board for a solid system without any monkeying around with overclocking or wasted hours tweaking. Just buy good 1.8v DDR2-800. BTW I get OK ping but am always first to login to gameservers during mapcycle.

3. Posted: Apr 8 2008

   If you are building a system, don't get this board if you are planning to use XP (any flavor) or need/want a floppy drive on the system. Give me a break Intel! This board doesn't support such ancient technology as a floppy disk drive!! What I found really funny is that the board comes with the raid drivers supplied on a floppy. Intel made my system build a little more difficult. 12 USB ports is nice, guess I'll be using a lot a them!

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