I'll let the captions under the pictures guide you.
Laying out the goods
Installing the CPU
I did install the heatsink, but forgot to get a photo of it
Ram and Ram Cooler installed
Video Card Installed
Hooked up the drives, power, keyboard and mouse
Now for the POST test to begin!
Thanks to the handy power and reset button, I didn't even need a screw driver to turn it on. One of the many great features of this mother board!
So POST Success! It took me a few tries to get at the BIOS setup. I wanted to make sure nothing was setup too terribly wrong, and wanted to make sure things were being detected properly.
CPU detected properly!
There was a few things I changed.
First was the boot order, I personally like Optical drive -> Hard Drive -> nothing. There was an option for USB devices, but I have had that screw up with certain USB devices in the past. Also I would boot from a USB device maybe once or twice ever, so I'll just go to the boot menu if need be.
Second thing to change was turning off express gate. It is a cool function and all, but when I'm testing and planning on installing windows it can be turned off for now. I will probably play with it later.
Next was the ram. Now, this was kinda screwy, as 2133mhz was not on the list of available speeds, the quickest ram allowed was 1600mhz. That's nearly 600mhz slower than what the ram was advertised to run. Now I enabled D.O.C.P. as the "Ai Overclock Tuner", which gave me the option for 2133mhz. However after I set the ram at this speed, the motherboard would post, but get stuck at a screen giving me an error that one of the drive controllers could not detect a drive attached. I am pretty sure I need to play with adding voltage to the Dram to make it stable, but for now I decided to just keep it at 1600mhz.
After getting that all straightened out, I decided to install Windows 7 Professional (64-bit) onto the solid state drive. One of the nice things about Windows 7 is it takes about a half hour at most to install on conventional drives. With the SSD, I setup all the settings it needed, and went and made myself a snack (sandwich, had some pudding, and other goodies) as it started installing files. Not even 10 minutes later I'm back and it's done! Nice!
Time to check it out. I cracked open the device manager, and was pleasantly surprised everything was detected and had drivers installed. Who knows if anything is out of date, or not functioning, but at least I'm not needing to find drivers for the NIC, and having to try to find more drivers off the internet.
Lets try the Windows Experience Index. I don't usually hold any sort hope that this is an accurate measure of the computer, but I was interested to see what it had to say.
You will probably have to click the image to see details
You can probably see the overall score of 7.2
Not too shabby in my opinion. I was secretly hoping for this to score over 8, but 7.2 is about 50% higher than my computer just previous to this. Apparently the graphics card and hard drive is holding this back. Not much I can do about the hard drive, but once the water cooling loop is installed, I'll see what I can do about the graphics score, and the cpu score. The memory score should also increase once I get the ram up to its rated speed as well.
Now for some Futuremark Tests. I ended up getting PCMark05 and 3DMark05. Why? Because they are free, and one of the forums I lurk on uses it them. Once I have the liquid cooling running, I will benchmark with some newer tests.
3DMark05: 23,000pts (Even)
PCMark05: 12,794pts
Well, these look promising. Again, miles better than my previous setup. Remember, this was absolutely no tweaking, no windows updates, stock speeds (exception to the ram being under clocked), and stock cooling. Wait in a week or two to see the updated scores once everything is setup.
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