HI all , I hope you are all in the best of health and making the most of your life. Anyway today we (me & super cool 8) Damian) are showing you our new toy. We have both purchased this board and know quite a few guys that have also purchased this board. We will cover the problems regarding this too in my short review.

Anyway before I start I would like to thank a few people that help me or make it easer for me. First of all www.scan.co.uk , your staff have enchouraged me and put up with me , thankyou for that , www.hexus.net , www.hardocp.com, www.xtremesystems.org ,www.forumz.tomshardware.com , www.cpcff.co.uk.Thankyou all for putting up with my posts, great place and great communities. ALso Mygood freind Damian Wright from http://overclock247.com

I would also like to dedicate this review to the founder of the site Grant Ambling who passed away last week. He was a great enthusiast and helped a lot of fellow enthusiast out on a daily basis , from the pictures of Australia you can see the love he had for animals , Grant may you rest in peace and your website keeps on growing more an more. May the love and the legacy you left carry on for many years to come.

Again like all the reviews I have done I have to thank www.scan.co.uk and the staff which make it what it is. The lads that always answer your thread at Hexus scan support David.M ,Pands,WesleyAldred,Lee and if there is any I have forgot then dont worry I will get you on another review ;D , thakyou guys for being there when things are going wrong at our end.

When I was buying this product I did a price check to see whats the best place for it and to my surprise once again it was Scan , I then emailed Mubs and he rang back and helped me place my order.He also gave me a discount. So remember people for all your PC needs www.scan.co.uk

Now we can carry on with the review , well a so called review that is.



Looks all Blue and conservative , has a picture of a few sharebrokers with four screens together



This shows all the good things about the board , the features and what have you.



Now I have opened the box and this is all the wires ,books and CD's you will need whilst installation

This picture shows with all the goodies spaced out so you can see what you will get when buying this product.



Now we are getting to the motherboard and it comes in a antistatic bag.




This is the whole motherboard in its full glory



The other half is further down after three posts

Could the moderator for this forum move this to a review section , I couldnt find the right area to post this.

Thankyou

How about links to htm pages rather than screengrabs?

I wish I knew it would take ages for the page to open.

Last time I did a review there were moderators complaining cos I put a URL at the end after couple of picks that took you to the actual review , so I did it this way but I didnt know this would be the out come.

What I am ging to do is delete half and continue the half after this post.

The other Half

This motherboard I first time saw at XS forums which was a world exclusive at the time , now even people like me own , what is the world coming to ?

Andre Yang (nice chap) who is always bring us great products week after week http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums


Another close up , still learning with the camera but the whole camera thing on the whole is getting better , Zak33 from hexus is a good camera guru. Big up Zak33



This is with the Scythe Infinity mounted on , However I would like to point out one thing about this HSF and that is that it hits the capacitors , I had to mount it this way and also had to sand a bit off so it could dissipate heat and sit properly.

There is a advantage about mounting it this way and that is that it helps with the cooling of the northbridge , the reason being is the fan is directly over it. I am using the golfball fall fan by sharkoon , which is good but is quite load that I have to say

This is the close up of the socket and ram area of the board



Now looking at this you can see why you might have a problem with mounting some HSF,s , howeever if they all follow the way traditional SKT775 Push Pin on the four corner way (the hsf you get with the retail and the principle that uses) then there wouldnt have been a problem.



This is a small picture and the reason for that being is that its not so clear , anyway you should roughly make out what everything is , I can see what went wrong with this photo and that is the camera went out to focus something else.

Anyway , afterthat installed rest of the PC components and then I could carry on doing the rest of the review.

After I installed WindowsXP (Microsoft your the best) went on to install the drivers and rest of the software needed for the PC components I used. After that I carried on to the best part of what I love about new PC's is OVERCLOCKING. Overclcoking is something you should only do if you know what you are doing because you stand a great chance of destroying your components. Overclocking does create a lot of heat and as long as you can get rid of the heat then you should be able to get a good overall increase from what you had before.



check temps , onload


Idle

Thats it ,done it , yipeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Cpu :E6600
OC :3780mhz
Stepping :B2
Week :L623
Code :A790
Vcore :1.4725V
Cooling :Air
Model :Scythe Infinity
Motherboard 5W64-WS Quartet
Bios :0119
Ram Brand :Supertalant DDR800
Ram Speed C6400
latencies :4 3 4 10



This is the close up of the socket and ram area of the board



Now looking at this you can see why you might have a problem with mounting some HSF,s , howeever if they all follow the way traditional SKT775 Push Pin on the four corner way (the hsf you get with the retail and the principle that uses) then there wouldnt have been a problem.


After this overclock I tried to see if I could go any further and I could boot in to windows till 4060MHZ but only mange to tun 1meg PI and it showed that the CPU was throttling.

There has been a lot of people in the forums complaining about the temps and what should be a safe temp to have your CPU running at . I have mine at 3500mhz on day to day running ,also it runs at 48C Idle and 56C load . Another weird thing about this board that it reports both ai booster temp and Core temp the same , so this makes me think that the temps reported are right but they are the Cpu Core temperature which is usually about 20-25% more than the outer temp.



http://users.erols.com/chare/elec.htm



Now this is the sheet with the recommended temp given by the manufacturer to the PC builder , anyway looking at this sheet there is one thing that made me think and that was why is the thresholds for the laptop far higher than the the desktop CPU's?

I had taken good precautions for dissipating heat so why was I getting temps recorded by Aibooster so high . I did more investigation on this and I saw more and more forums with P5W-64-ws fellow owners reporting the same thing about there temperatures.

Well after that I stopped worrying , did a few tests on them and left it at that. Damian Wright also owns the same board with a Coolit and if that reports high temps then you know there is definately something wrong with the sensor.

My conclusion of the board is this that its a very strong board , a very serious looking board boasting a lot of support.

It can take up to 8 monitors , I am running a 7950GX2 on it which runs flawlessly on it. The board comes with good software bundle , also a lot of cables .

Price isn't that bad considering the 3 year warranty Asus provides you. I did have a problem with the mounting my HSF but that would be more my HSF's fault than the boards fault.

Overclocking on this has been for me the easiest board I have used for the job. Has a good range in options and I can see it get better as time goes on. I was quite surprised to get the higest official overclock using this board. It was more than enough which helped me get a good FSB and put me top as the official retail E6600 here :-

http://www.hardforum.com/showthrea [...] 792&page=1

nooh ;D



On the board there are a lot of 965 chipset boards and this is a new 975X chipset board which landed in our PC retail srtores about middle of september 2006 , It has definately matured (975 x chipset I mean) and I hope it gets better for the future. For me this board has been a godsend I was waiting for a board and it would have been a P5N32-SLi Premium which I pre-ordered and then waited for it for 6 weeks then finally gave into this devilishly looking board.

For the people looking into buying a board for Core 2 Duo and have the money for it then this is the board , I am hoping that there will be good Sli suport for this board in the future or crossfire becomes cheaper , either way I am ready for both and a physics card.

This gets the 24/7 overclock award ................er ......we still have designed the award yet but once we do we will update this thread ;D

Thankyou all at Toms hardware for your support for the last 'so called review' I did ,also Damian Wright from overclock 24/7 who put me up to this.