Fattysharp
Member
I bit the bullet and decided I wanted a challenege. I picked one of these up and of course there was some glitches. This more of a fyi/review then anything else but if you have some input on the issues I had feel free to let me know.
My rig is a Sonata II case, 3800 x2 chip, 1800xl, WD 250gig sata II and 1 gig of OCZ platinum rev1. Can't forget the Pure Innovation's Motherboard.
The bundle left alot to be desired just as every review has said.
First boot frightened me. The Sapphire logo was all messed up. Looks like it was drawn with 16 colours. Still not sure if this is the 1800xl or the mobo. This is still happening but the display in windows is fine.
So into the bios we go. The manual reccomend to load the fail safe settings for initial startup so that is what i did. Save and exit, and the it hangs on post. Reset cmos, try failsafe again, another hang. Ironic that Failsafe settings in bios fails.
Reset Cmos again, and go to install windows. The SATA II ports are not on the southbridge so they require a drivers disk. Sapphire did not include a drivers disk or any sort of instructions on setting up booting from the sata II. If this had been the first computer i setup, i would have been screwed. I get the drivers off their support site (they are also buried on the install disk) and off i go to install windows. A real breeze and it completed the install amazingly fast. I should mention the onboard raid controller was not exactly the "smartest" Utility out there.
The installation cd worked fine, installed chipsets and drivers. The onboard audio shines. I was amazed at the level of ease this was to setup. It recognizes and has a popup window when you plug in your speakers. Nothing to it. The Marvel Lan driver setup is actually going to device manager, update driver, and search the cd. Nothing big for someone who knows what to do, but not friendly for the majority of people.
Everything is up and running, time to play with the bios. There are more options here then any bios I have seen. After playing with some very basic settings that should never cause any trouble, the pc would hang on post. When i say basic, I mean basic. I changed boot sequences and turned off the boot logo. That was all i changed to cause it to hang. I reset cmos, tried one more thing after reseting it. I used the optimized settings. This one worked great. Not only did it work great but it now boots faster then any pc I have ever seen. It also seems to have made the board more stable.
Overall I am happy with the board but I am waiting for a less flakey bios to come out to play around with overclocking. I do not think it is worth its asking price, but it was one of those impulse buys where i talked myself into it.
If anyone has any idea on why the boot logo seems to have a corrupted display let me know.
My rig is a Sonata II case, 3800 x2 chip, 1800xl, WD 250gig sata II and 1 gig of OCZ platinum rev1. Can't forget the Pure Innovation's Motherboard.
The bundle left alot to be desired just as every review has said.
First boot frightened me. The Sapphire logo was all messed up. Looks like it was drawn with 16 colours. Still not sure if this is the 1800xl or the mobo. This is still happening but the display in windows is fine.
So into the bios we go. The manual reccomend to load the fail safe settings for initial startup so that is what i did. Save and exit, and the it hangs on post. Reset cmos, try failsafe again, another hang. Ironic that Failsafe settings in bios fails.
Reset Cmos again, and go to install windows. The SATA II ports are not on the southbridge so they require a drivers disk. Sapphire did not include a drivers disk or any sort of instructions on setting up booting from the sata II. If this had been the first computer i setup, i would have been screwed. I get the drivers off their support site (they are also buried on the install disk) and off i go to install windows. A real breeze and it completed the install amazingly fast. I should mention the onboard raid controller was not exactly the "smartest" Utility out there.
The installation cd worked fine, installed chipsets and drivers. The onboard audio shines. I was amazed at the level of ease this was to setup. It recognizes and has a popup window when you plug in your speakers. Nothing to it. The Marvel Lan driver setup is actually going to device manager, update driver, and search the cd. Nothing big for someone who knows what to do, but not friendly for the majority of people.
Everything is up and running, time to play with the bios. There are more options here then any bios I have seen. After playing with some very basic settings that should never cause any trouble, the pc would hang on post. When i say basic, I mean basic. I changed boot sequences and turned off the boot logo. That was all i changed to cause it to hang. I reset cmos, tried one more thing after reseting it. I used the optimized settings. This one worked great. Not only did it work great but it now boots faster then any pc I have ever seen. It also seems to have made the board more stable.
Overall I am happy with the board but I am waiting for a less flakey bios to come out to play around with overclocking. I do not think it is worth its asking price, but it was one of those impulse buys where i talked myself into it.
If anyone has any idea on why the boot logo seems to have a corrupted display let me know.
