ASUS, Gigabyte or ABIT P35 board for Q6600?

continuum · Post by **continuum** » Sun Aug 12, 2007 1:23 am

I'm waiting for a review of the Asus P5K Premium as well as the Blitz Formula /Blitz Formula Special Edition... I've seen a few but nothing with power consumption numbers yet.

Drexl · Post by **Drexl** » Sun Aug 12, 2007 8:28 pm

krille wrote:3) Frankly, I don't even know what Quad BIOS or DualBIOS Plus is supposed to mean. Again, does it matter / justify the price difference?

It's a second, backup BIOS in case the first gets corrupted or fails to boot (quad being 3 extra, I suppose). It would come in handy in case of a bad flash.

rpsgc · Post by **rpsgc** » Mon Aug 13, 2007 1:21 am

Quad BIOS is a feature unique to GIGABYTE that includes DualBIOSâ„¢ and Express BIOS Rescue Technology. This combination delivers a safety assurance mechanism that sports a total of 4 copies of BIOS distributed between the Flash ROM, hard-disk and driver CD. This feature helps to reduce the affects of virus attacks or firmware damage and provides multi-layer BIOS protection that assures greater PC platform stability.

http://www.gigabyte.com.pt/FileList/New ... rk_dq6.htm

krille · Post by **krille** » Mon Aug 13, 2007 10:44 pm

Yeah, well. I've decided on the Abit IP35 Pro (due to, and only due to, its fan controller). Now I gotta decide on the rest of the system.

Tsorovan · Post by **Tsorovan** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 1:00 am

The IP35 Pro has dual gigabit NICs hanging off the PCI (not PCI-E) bus. That's inexcusable in 2007 if you ask me, but I guess it's not important for some.

The Asus PK5 Deluxe has one PCI-E and one PCI controller, whereas the Gigabyte has one PCI-E.

nick705 · Post by **nick705** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 2:16 am

krille wrote:Yeah, well. I've decided on the Abit IP35 Pro (due to, and only due to, its fan controller). Now I gotta decide on the rest of the system.

Sorry to muddy the waters again, but if the fan controller is the *only* reason, don't forget you could get a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R *and* a T-Balancer BigNG for the price of the IP35 Pro - any future builds could inherit the T-Balancer and you could then just choose whatever mobo you like. As long as you don't mind the extra cables for the sensors, and the time and effort installing and setting it up, it's actually a more sophisticated and flexible solution.

Tsoravan wrote:That's inexcusable in 2007 if you ask me, but I guess it's not important for some.

In practice, I'd say it's "hardly important to anyone," unless they're constantly streaming huge files from one RAID-0 array to another.

Tsorovan · Post by **Tsorovan** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 2:27 am

Good luck getting decent performance (and no audio drop-outs) with a gigabit LAN connection to your file server, 15/15 Mbps internet connection, and a PCI sound card on that board as soon as you start copying some files over the LAN (and maybe streaming the music from the file server?). The PCI bus will be hammered whereas the PCI-E bus is just sitting there idling.

Just an example (based on my setup). Not a particularly uncommon workload today.

nick705 · Post by **nick705** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 2:46 am

Well, even if you're simultaneously maxing out your 15Mbps Internet connection, copying files at the maximum speed the HDDs can physically manage *and* streaming uncompressed PCM music files, you still won't hit the limits of the PCI bus. I'm not convinced that's a particularly common scenario in any case.

I agree it's not an ideal solution, but with only 6 PCIe lanes available on the ICHR9, something has to give - the second x16 slot has 4 lanes, the JMicron has 1, and the x1 slot has 1. The Gigabyte boards disable all the x1 slots if you use a second graphics card, so it's just a different allocation of limited resources rather than "inexcusable" on Abit's part.

You can always use a PCIe NIC in the x1 slot anyway if you really think you'll need the extra bandwidth.

Luminair · Post by **Luminair** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 2:42 pm

TechReport liked the Gigabyte the best except for the old ports on the back and the fancy heatsinking. The new 2.0 revs of the Gigabyte boards fix both of those problems.

sunefred · Post by **sunefred** » Wed Aug 15, 2007 7:02 am

ryboto wrote:I just helped a friend build a system with the GA-P35C-DS3R, DDR2/3 support, and a Q6600. It works great. Fan control was strange. I'm fond of Abit's uguru controls. Even though they're limited to 8v min, if you already have decent low speed fans, it shouldn't be an issue. I vote for the Abit.

ryboto, would you mind explaining in a bit more detail how the fan controller on gigabyte motherboards work? The downloadable manual is no help, so it would be very valuable for me, as I'm also looking at the excact same boards as krille.

What I'm used to from my old Asus motherboard with Q-fan 1 is the ability to set an upper and lower temperature aswell as upper and lower voltages. This is in my opinion the easiest and best way. My board is limited to CPU and one CHASSI FAN though. I have noticed that updated bioses on from Asus removes this manual ability, so if someone knows how Q-fan 2 works I would be interested in that aswell.