Legit Reviews

Well I went from the P5K-E to a P5KC to take advantage of some DDR3 that got kicked my way. Of course the P5KC with the Q6600 on it defaults the ram to 1066 at stock and all.

So I dropped the multiplier to 8 and jammed the FSB to 400 to get 3.2, stabilized the CPU ran Orthos for a couple of hours. Kicked the ram up a notch at a time until I hit 1600. Running stable and life is good.

So I start connecting other drives and nothing I connect to the black sata ports is recognized.

Newest Drivers, newest Bios, power cables are good, sata cables are good, drives are good (connected them to the red ports they run). Every thing sata in BIOS is enabled and set to IDE.

I blew the Theme out of XP while clocking and stabilizing so I went ahead and reinstalled XP, newest drivers, and installed the raid drivers. Still nothing recognized. Is there some incantation I have to chant or am I missing some thing obvious? Or option 2 it's an RMA waiting to happen.

Does it still not recognise anything back at stock?

Provided the controller is enabled in the BIOS I can't think of anything that could otherwise disable it.

Dan

Me either, read a couple of places their picky about some drives. I'll switch the drives around, then get a sata card if it doesn't work out.

Are you having any problems with this board Methious? I am thinking about getting it, but the Newegg reviews kinda scare me.

No I figured out the Sata problems, it wasn't the board it was a couple of faulty drive enclosures. I've had the FSB on it up 435 no problem, but I hit 438 and either the board or the Q6600 has a FSB wall. Active cooling of the NB doesn't help at that point.

There aren't a lot of ram timing adjustments unless their hidden in one of those hit this key to reveal the good stuff spots.

I've had the Q6600 up to 3.4 on it no stability problems and even though that board and the Q6600 are only supposed to tun the DDR3 12800 at 1066 I've been running it at 1600, took some effort to stabilize it but it runs good.

There's really no RAID unless you want to run one Internal and one External e-Sata drive but other than that its been a well mannered easy to set up and run board. I can go from the OCZ Reaper ddr2 to the Mushkin 12800 seamlessly.

I wouldn't listen to the guys on NewEgg most of them are full of it. A lot of reviewers use the board for DDR2/DDR3 reviews which is how I found it and were not known to use boards that are going to cause us a lot of headaches. It's a good swing board to ease into ddr3 but like I said at higher frequencies it's a little picky. You can cruise over to PcFrags.com and check out my review on the Mushkin 12800 and you'll see I ran the ram on it at every speed between 800 and 1754. On a non integrated memory controller I hit 8 G/s bandwidth on the ram and if it were just a little better board I could hit more, but not enough more to spend the extra $200.

I've still got the P5K-E I was using and sold some computers since I got it and could easily replace it but it's doing the job so I'm gonna run it for a while. If your gonna run it with DDR3 at the frequencies I'm running at I suggest active cooling on the NB, kinda like Bio-Hazard has on his Cube, hang a fan over the NB ram and run it like you own it.