Asus 8800GTS + ASUS P5K Premium Warning

Hi All,

I've just built my new system around an ASUS P5K Premium & Asus EN8800GTS and thought I would just warn any people who are looking at this setup in the future. First off it's a great combination and it allows me to play TF2 at 2560x1600 (gotta love 30" gaming) with no slowdown yet (only played for 15 minutes yesterday).

HOWEVER and I wish I had thought about this before I bought it, the ASUS EN8800GTS has a stupid black cover on the heatsink which covers 2 SATA ports completely which means they are completely unusable, even with right angle sata connectors. If I had given it a little push, I would have broken the connectors, of that I have no doubt. It's annoying because there's a completely unnecessary part (imo) of the black cover that hogs the space which could quite easily have been removed and the card would fit without a problem.

Combined with the fact that this board only has 6 SATA connectors (compared with 8 I had on my A8N) means you could run out of connectors very quickly. I have 5 HDDs as it is so I couldn't really afford to give up the connectors.

So, you options are thus.

1) Remove the black cover. This was easy to do and it's only about 5 or 6 screws (one is hidden under the large sticker btw) but I'm not sure where you stand on warranty if you do this. I needed to get the machine up and running so I didn't really have a choice.

2) Give up 2 (possibly 4) SATA ports. Not a great option, but it IS an option.

I suppose you could actually cut into the black cover and remove the offedning part if you were desperate to keep the pretty cover, but that's almost certainly your warranty down the drain. Personally, I don't think ASUS have put the SATA ports in a very sensible place because 2 slot cards are going to cause a problem.

Anyway, I'm not really expecting any repsonses to this post, I just figured that it was worth warning any future searchers about the potential issues.

Why not just buy a SATA PCI card, rather than void a warranty by cutting the graphics card to bits? They can be found pretty cheap.

there are some post on this issue i can not seem to find the link thought. People tend to go for the Abit IP35Pro as the SATA ports are side inserts.

Yup, I'm inclined to agree about the Abit, I just prefer to stick to brands that I've used and gotten on well with. The Abit boards I've had in the past tended to die after 18-24 months (think this was the era when there was a problem with the caps).

My ASUS A8N Deluxe was a fantastic board but I'll pay closer attention to this kind of potential problem in the future. This was really just about warning people who were searching for 8800GTS or P5K, I did a few searches last week and didn't see anything obvious (not to say there isn't anything, I just didn't see it).

I'm going to get myself a cheap SATA PCIE card over the next few weeks but I really needed my new machine up and running yesterday as I work from home. Removing the cover was the easiest choice at the time as it was only a few screws.