Well, its up and running now
Seems very nippy!
Vista seems to like the new system a bit better
More pictures updates to come later
Your setup looks pretty nice, indeed.
The Corsair was the best way to go, IMHO. Lately the prices have been great with rebates. I purchased 8 GB of the Dominator TWIN2X2048-8500C5D for about 240 USD and popped on the included fan and all runs smoothly.
I was torn between going Corsair or Mushkin but the fan and design of the Corsair got me this time. The Corsair is a larger but even with the fan it fits just fine in my mid-tower case although there isn't much clearance between it and my Vendetta 2 HSF. Either company is good to deal with if you encounter any problems.
I'm just curious about something, however. I recently built this new system using the ASUS Rampage motherboard and ended up running into a problem that took awhile to track down. Have you run into any oddities where a BSOD pops up?
I had one single program that would cause my system to drop. I tested my memory and no issues. My PSU was also fine. I tested everything and couldn't find any issues. If I ran 3DMark06 or 3DMark Vantage my display driver would fail to respond and I'd either bluescreen or come close and be told that the display driver failed to respond but recovered. This had me pulling my hair out and I almost RMA'ed the motherboard. I'm running an EVGA GeForce 8800 GT 512 Superclocked, btw.
After extensive testing and simply using logic to follow the trail of bizarre symptoms I came up with the cause and solution. The problem was the X48 chipset with a RAID setup and also using an IDE optical drive. Apparently there may be an IRQ steering issue. To solve my problem, I left my SATA drives on the motherboard and moved the IDE optical drives to a SATA/eSATA/IDE addon PCI-e card. The second I moved the IDE optical drives off the motherboard the problem vanished.
One might say I just had some bad luck but I didn't. Myself and a friend had both grabbed the MSI X48C Platinum board which had major issues with RAID & IDE optical drives. We could find no workaround and MSI was extremely hard to deal with so we gave up and RMA'ed the boards. We both switched to the ASUS Rampage and while our symptoms were different we both ran into issues running the optical drives off the motherboard when using RAID. The solution was to move the IDE drives off the motherboard.
Anyway, I figured I'd post to see if you had encountered any such oddities as well as give you a possible warning so that if you notice anything crazy you can try to see if what I've mentioned helps resolve the problem.
I'm dual-booting XP Pro SP3 32-bit and Vista 64-bit with a Q6600 and the system runs smooth and stable. I can't believe how I managed to get by with my older system.
Good luck with that system!
