Wow, thanks a million for all that info. That's exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for.
On my current A8V board, the VS memory tops out at 207mhz at 2.5-3-3 and does about 220 at 3-4-4, but underclocking it to 183 allows 2-3-2, which is what I have it at right now. The only possible concern is that these are two VS512MB400s, not a kit. They were bought about a year apart as I mentioned before and actually look slightly different. Although I have heard that even the VS kits don't necessarily have identical memory anyway.
I'm not too concerned about memory performance anyway, just want to have it stable with dividers for CPU overclocking.
i agree with rise4310, installing an nv silencer 5 on your gpu will lower chipset temps substantially, as the hot air won't be exhausted onto the dfi cooler. and if that doesn't suffice then you can get an Evercool VC-RE. a number of people on the dfi-street forum have replaced the stock cooler with it and their temps went down ~5-10 degrees, with less noise. i ordered one last week and hopefully i'm gonna get it tomorrow. i would stay away from this new asus x16 sli board because of the slot layout. if you want to sli and also have a sound card, there will be no way to use dual slot coolers on the cards and still get sufficient airflow, unless you have a side panel fan. if you really must have a socket939 mobo now (m2 is coming soon), i would get either the regular asus sli board (good layout), the new dfi expert, or the soon to be released msi diamond plus (sli 16x like asus but much better layout).
I basically want a board that is under $150 or so, has a good layout, overclocks well and is relatively stable (after whatever tweaking is needed) and the DFI seems to be the only one that fits all the criteria. I most likely won't need SLI support, although that will depend on how video card prices look a few weeks from now.
That new A8N32-SLI is getting good reviews as far as the overclocking goes, much better than the other Asus boards, but it's nearly double the price of this board and as you said the layout isn't the best. And I haven't had a great experience with my last two Asus boards anyway.
The latest rumors are that M2 will arrive sometime next summer, which is far enough away that I want to get something in the meantime (mainly so I can upgrade my video card), but still close enough that I don't want to spend a lot of money on the board or new DDR1 memory at this point. Sort of a bad time to be upgrading the motherboard, I suppose.
its not as loud as everyone says. well, it is if you run it as full blast 7000rpm but if you have decent case air flow there should be no reason to do so.
my 2 dfi's chipset fans run at ~2700 and ~3800 rpm which i control through ITE smartguardian supplied on the driver disk. both have load temps ~48c and idle ~41-42c. adding more rpms doesn't matter at some point. at those rpm's i can't hear them at all.
some people position an 80-92mm low rpm fan to blow over the area and cool it more quietly that way.
i would assume you'd still get the 3.10 bios as the 6.23 didn't become official until august iirc but you may get lucky. there are plenty of modded/beta bios' about that may help you with the corsair so i wouldn't sweat it. you maybe one of the fortunate ones
if not it'll spur your 2gig purchase
Those rpms don't sound too bad. It's mainly the Asus fans that I have heard all the complaints about, actually. I could try 6.23 or that 7.04 one cobbler referred to.
I'm ready to spend some time messing with the settings to see if I can get it to work, although I suppose I will be out $20 if I have return it and pay restock fees.
Facebook
Twitter