Please Help Before I Take A Hammer To My New Rig!

[wellmad]

cool, which ASUS or ABit boards in the £100-£150 range would people here recommend?

[Thorsson]

Two popular boards are:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=605522
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=591501

If you don't need WiFi or are a heavy LAN user (for some reason the ABit is about 20% slower on the Gb LAN, but that's still more than fast enough for an internet connection) the ABit is better value.

[wellmad]

Thanks for the info
I'm liking the Abit one a lot, the slower GB Lan shouldn't make a difference to me at this stage as my router only has a 10/100 switch anyway....

It'll be hard to switch from gigabyte though, even after the problems I've had recently. Every single PC I've ever built has been based on a gigabyte board of some description....old habits are hard to break!

What are your thoughts on the striker extreme?

[Thorsson]

Don't let Clunk see those words! The Striker has had problems. Not worth considering IMO unless you are going to go 8800 Ultra SLI.

[wellmad]

ok, I'll forget about that one then, slightly out my price bracket anyway...

The P35-DQ6 is DDR2 so I'll probably go for that, it's slightly better than the 965P-DQ6 and its on Scan for just 118 quid

I just hope there's a jumper to clear the CMOS like there is on the 965P-DQ6...

[iranu]

Have a look at Clunks overclocking guide. It should help you.

[wellmad]

thanks, after reading his PK5 overclocking guide I think I'll go with that board after all

[wellmad]

Well, I finally got some of my money back today for the gigabyte board, 35 days later...

Although I bought the board from an ebay shop (called compubid2), the ebay shop was part of a real bricks & mortar shop called 'ASL Web'.

I just want to let everyone on this forum know, not, under any circumstances, to buy anything from this company. It's taken ages to get a refund, they refused to refund the cost of them posting it to me (!) or me posting it back to them, even though both they and gigabyte confirm that the motherboard was faulty.

This company simply doesnt even know how to spell 'customer service' let alone provide it and they even made me send them an email stating that I would not pursue the postage costs before they would give me the partial refund.

Yeah I'm just blowing off steam now but also trying to help others that may be tempted to buy from this joke of a company

[Thorsson]

Always useful to know. What was their EBay rating? (I suppose these sort of problems come too late to affect their score though).

[wellmad]

their rating was ok, 98.6%

it would have been ok if the board hadn't been faulty...I'm going to pursue the postage though, it's only £30 but thats not the point. I'm going to report them to trading standards, and they've got some kind of accreditation (like the FSA but a different one for retailers) so I'm going to complain to the accreditation firm too...