ASUS P5N-E SLI 650i Thread

[BIGWORM]

Originally Posted by dpawl31

My P5N-E is my first RMA, ever

My old XFX 7600GS was my first RMA. Newbi-Clocked the PCI bus to 120Mhz, frying the RAM. LOL! That was a few years ago.

[VULKAR]

Question - i was cleaning the northbridge and was able to get the surface of the chip squeeky clean with arctic clean. but i'm having a major problem removing the remaining factory compound junk from the sides of the chip. do i really need to be a perfectionist and clean it up or can i just go ahead and apply the AS5 compound and move on???

thanks!!!

[eminded1]

when i replaced my northbrigde heatsinkand fan i didnt celan off the paste. i jsut stuck in the new **** works fine. keeps it cool too.,

[BIGWORM]

Wait!!

For shiggles, as Bob Sagat would say, I stuck back in the supposedly dead stick of Ballistix Tracers, and my system booted up!!! What could it have been preventing me from booting up before? I didn't change my clocks or anything when the BSOD happened (0x8E). What happened right after the BSOD was I went to the BIOS, verified memory timings/voltages, and restarted. It restarted, and froze on POST. Well, in the middle of verifying the "dead" stick, I cleared the CMOS FULLY, i.e. pull the battery, flip the CMOS jumper, power down PSU/pull the power cord, hit the power switch several time, then reinsert everything back to normal. Then my system fired up. Though I don't remember if the system refused to POST right after the CMOS clearing.

Whatever the case, this system will be on MemTest86+ while I'm gone RMAing these Black Dragons.

[VULKAR]

thanks eminded1!!!

[Blizzie]

Originally Posted by eminded1

when i replaced my northbrigde heatsinkand fan i didnt celan off the paste. i jsut stuck in the new **** works fine. keeps it cool too.,

No.. you want to get it as clean as possible. Also AS5 is conductive. Do not have it contact anywhere but the NB core itself.

Originally Posted by BIGWORM

Wait!!

For shiggles, as Bob Sagat would say, I stuck back in the supposedly dead stick of Ballistix Tracers, and my system booted up!!! What could it have been preventing me from booting up before? I didn't change my clocks or anything when the BSOD happened (0x8E). What happened right after the BSOD was I went to the BIOS, verified memory timings/voltages, and restarted. It restarted, and froze on POST. Well, in the middle of verifying the "dead" stick, I cleared the CMOS FULLY, i.e. pull the battery, flip the CMOS jumper, power down PSU/pull the power cord, hit the power switch several time, then reinsert everything back to normal. Then my system fired up. Though I don't remember if the system refused to POST right after the CMOS clearing.

Whatever the case, this system will be on MemTest86+ while I'm gone RMAing these Black Dragons.

Did you set the timings, frequency, and voltage for the Ballistix?

[BIGWORM]

Yeah, I had done that before-hand.

Stock is 4-4-4-12/2.2v/800Mhz

I don't know what's going on at this point. I just ran MemTest for 2 hours (278%), and got 0 errors. I think it was just a glitch in the system, haha. I'm already in the process of RMAing both sets of RAM--already mailed back the Black Dragons (where I just got back from doing so), and told Crucial I wanted to cross-ship my Ballistix instead of the wait-to-retrieve method. We'll see what happened. I'm still looking forward to testing the mixed pairs when the RMAs are complete.

[dpawl31]

Not too shabby with the RAM worm!

As for cleaning off old paste etc... AS5 as blizzie said will conduct electricity, and short things out. I use ceramique mostly because of that. But if it is stock thermal paste/tape, it won't conduct, because they use generic crap. lol.
But definately try to get as much off as possible. Shouldn't be too hard with a cu-tip and some rubbing alcohol.

PS - AS5 stands for Arctic Silver 5. Silver being the main point, is a metal that conducts electricity, hence, what I said above!

[BIGWORM]

I just forgot about adding something else that was previously wrong with my system, which I think was pretty significant:

I have a WD 640GB SATAII. I had partitioned 75GB of it through Vista's disk management. I would've partitioned it through PartitionMagic 8, but sadly it wasn't supported in Vista. Anyway, I was getting stability problems mainly in TF2--I literally couldn't play for more than 2 minutes before it'd hard-lock, not my entire system, but freeze on-screen, forcing me to C-A-D. Went back to XP, still having the same problem. Reinstalled XP SP3 no less than 3 times within a 2 day period. As I discovered a few days ago, for whatever reason, the primary partition was no longer recognized as the boot partition. Somehow Vista's disk management messed it up. Unfortunately, to solve this problem, I had to delete both partitions so that the drive could be repartitioned into one.

Just to add on to it, a weird thing I noticed during XP's setup was it was showing ANOTHER partition on top of the actual existing partitions. A random number, literlly 41365645MB. O_o PartitionMagic 8, after I had reinstalled XP, said that there was a disk error, and gave me error 117 and error 109, saying that partitionmagic couldn't pick up a drive letter, and one of my partitions end after end of disk.

Whatever the case, reallocating that partition made all the errors go away, and I was able to partion SUCCESSFULLY through PartitionMagic. =D

P.S. man that was a lot of partitions LOL!

[e-t172]

Follow-up.

I installed the Thermalright HR-05 IFX on the northbridge (with a 80mm fan). It fits perfectly. (to dpawl31: you can add it to the compatible coolers).

My new MAX FSB is now 445, which is MUCH better than with the stock NB cooler (previous max: 380).

However, I was limited by my CPU my MAX CPU frequency was 3.69 ghz (405 * 9).

After further investigation, I noticed I got horrible vdroop values (with 405 * 9: 1.60 IDLE, 1.49 IDLE, 0.11 vdroop!). I tried the vdroop pencil mod to get rid of the vdroop. It worked perfectly: now I don't get any measurable vdroop AT ALL, even at max vcore.

So, my new maximum is 425 * 9 = 3.825 Ghz, which is good (though not exceptional). Details:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600@3825 (stock speed: 2400)
FSB: 1700 (425)
Multiplier: 9
VCore: 1.54375 V + 100 mV (probe: 1.76 V, no vdroop)
VNB: 1.393 V (go figure...)
Core IDLE: 33C
Core LOAD: 75C
Vdroop pencil mod