- Jan 11, 2001
- 28,830
- 17
- 81
After my bad run in with the DFI LT P35, I decided to go back to what I knew. My old MSI P35 Neo2-FR treated me well so with the P45 Neo3-FR at newegg for $99 AR, I decided to give it a shot against popular opinion.
Upon arrival, it seems to be the basic no frills motherboard right out of the box. Generic cables, I/O shield, Manual and Driver disks for XP and Vista. (We can trash the vista one!
)
Layout of the board seems ok, though I did notice upon mounting it in my case that the PCIe slot is a bit lower than usual. This may be an issue for some as it was for me. I had to reorganize my layout to fit everything in since I now had less space under my video card for my MCP655-B water pump. No bigie, I just moved my HDD up and slid the pump under it instead of the vid card.
After assembly, I bled and fed the water loop and fired it up! Went into bios and poked around a bit. Easy layout as opposed to the DFI. This board lends itself to the more simple OC which I prefer. Nothing really out of the ordinary within the bios. Plenty of voltage options for over and under voltages. Pretty much what you need for a simple OC. It also has an "auto OC" option but we know I won't mess with that!
Got the board fired up stock settings with a E8500 (ES) that's on loan for testing. Got everything loaded up in windows and decided it was time to play. First run was 400x9 for 3.6GHz which was pretty much a given.
Now it's time to push it a little but I started to feel let down when I went for 450x9 to get this chip up at 4GHz and it was a no go no matter what voltage I threw at it. I kept upping the core and VTT voltage but no matter what it would hang in windows. For the heck of it, I figured my P35 Neo2-FR did 500fsb easily, lets give this P45 Neo3-FR a shot! Went back into bios and only changed the fsb to 500, left the core volts at 1.41 and the VTT at 1.35 and BAM, right in at 500FSB!
I guess I need to start tweaking and see what all I can get out of this board now! I'm hoping this chip will go north of 500FSB so I can really push the limits of the board and my ram!
Here's the LOOP!
The results so far!!
Upon arrival, it seems to be the basic no frills motherboard right out of the box. Generic cables, I/O shield, Manual and Driver disks for XP and Vista. (We can trash the vista one!
)Layout of the board seems ok, though I did notice upon mounting it in my case that the PCIe slot is a bit lower than usual. This may be an issue for some as it was for me. I had to reorganize my layout to fit everything in since I now had less space under my video card for my MCP655-B water pump. No bigie, I just moved my HDD up and slid the pump under it instead of the vid card.
After assembly, I bled and fed the water loop and fired it up! Went into bios and poked around a bit. Easy layout as opposed to the DFI. This board lends itself to the more simple OC which I prefer. Nothing really out of the ordinary within the bios. Plenty of voltage options for over and under voltages. Pretty much what you need for a simple OC. It also has an "auto OC" option but we know I won't mess with that!
Got the board fired up stock settings with a E8500 (ES) that's on loan for testing. Got everything loaded up in windows and decided it was time to play. First run was 400x9 for 3.6GHz which was pretty much a given.
Now it's time to push it a little but I started to feel let down when I went for 450x9 to get this chip up at 4GHz and it was a no go no matter what voltage I threw at it. I kept upping the core and VTT voltage but no matter what it would hang in windows. For the heck of it, I figured my P35 Neo2-FR did 500fsb easily, lets give this P45 Neo3-FR a shot! Went back into bios and only changed the fsb to 500, left the core volts at 1.41 and the VTT at 1.35 and BAM, right in at 500FSB!
I guess I need to start tweaking and see what all I can get out of this board now! I'm hoping this chip will go north of 500FSB so I can really push the limits of the board and my ram!
Here's the LOOP!
The results so far!!
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