Advice appreciated

Skinnyboy

Skinnyboy

Skinnyboy

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Joined
7 Oct 2008
Posts
4
Hey all :)

I built myself a PC last year which has been running great on Vista 32:

Asus P5N32-E SLi
6300 Core 2 Duo (OC'd to 3gig)
Artic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro
2 gig Geil Ultra PC6400
BFG 8800GTX OC
X-Fi Fatality
Ageia PhysX
74 gig WD Raptor HD
320gig WD HD
OCZ GameXStream 600W PSU

Recently I was gifted a nice budget to blow on parts so upgraded to:

Q9550 Quad Core
8 gig Corsair XMS2 PC8500
OCZ 64gig solid state HD
Samsung Spinpoint F1 750gig HD
Creative G15 keyboard

When I clocked the ram to 1066MHz system wouldn't post or would then crash. I read on Crucial forums when running all 4 modules on the board the ram needs to be clocked at 800MHz - tried this and all well.

Due to the ram increase, made the jump to Vista 64 Home Premium. Installed this on the SSD and everything was fine though not as quick as I was expecting. Later read Vista is not optimized for SSD's so changed my primary drives around:

Raptor with two partitions (C for Vista, D for general applications)
OCZ SSD with two partitions (Set page file to small partition, rest for games)
750gig drive for general storage.

This started off fine but after a few days, noticed Vista was taking a long time to boot, much longer than 32bit version on original system. I get the green sweep bars ok, then the Vista logo shortly after but the Welcome screen stays on for a good 20 seconds followed by a black screen with my mouse arrow for a good 20-30 seconds after that. Once Vista actually starts its another 20-30 secs until everything calms down and becomes useable.

This just didn't happen with the old rig on Vista 32. Have I made a glaring error with my HD configerations?

What I could really do with is some advice on the best way to configure this PC to get the most out of it. Are there any specific bios settings that need fiddling with to use the SSD? Should I be using it to host Vista or keep it on another drive like I have?

Any comments most welcomed as right now, I'm considering pulling 4gig of ram out and going back to Vista 32.
 
Last edited:
Oops forgot to mention that bit. When I first installed the Q9550 I got a message saying unknown CPU, might need a bios update to get the most out of it so I updated to the latest version on Asus website.
 
Two issues:

1) SSD these have good read speed but stall during rapid sequential writes. By all means install a game or so on it, but don't use it as aswap file. As above it will wear quicker and will not respond well to the rapid paging of data. Move the page file to another drive.

2) Mainboard is N680i It doesn't officially support the 45nm Quad chips and none of them are listed on the ASUS homepage as certified. While it may work, they haven't certified them for a reason. I don't know of a single 680i board which is 45mn Quad certified. If you don't need SLI then a P35 or p45 intel board, preferably one with a stock 1600FSB will allow you some headroom. If you really need SLI then there is little choice though I do have a n750i Asus with 2 x 16 PCI-E which seems to be doing nicely with a Q6600 so it's up to you if you splash for the 780i. 790i not an option since it is DDR3.

AD
 
Thanks for the replies fellas, will move my page file off the SSD. I forgot to mention the drive is an OCZ version 2, not sure if that makes a whole lot of difference.

Never thought about the motherboard not supporting the CPU as once the bios update went in, all seemed to be fine. Bugger, didn't wanna swap out the motherboard as I really like this one. No real need for SLI, just bought it as it has dual 16x PCI-E slots incase I wanted to install a second card.
 
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