Interesting Xeon Mod for socket 775

[DaveLembke]

Yeah...LOL   

I figured I'd give a heavily discounted ECS board a try, but I got what I paid for!    Another $25 more could have been a better board such as a Biostar, although I rate the boards best to worst for low budget builds as:

BEST

ASUS
Gigabit
Intel
Biostar
Zotac
----------------------------------- I avoid buying brands below this dotted line due to defects
Foxconn ( integrated audio chipset died as confirmed with o-scope ) - Added USB Audio adapter, still running as kids system.
MSI        ( Plugging/Unplugging USB devices caused hard reset. Not PSU, Not USB Port, NOT ground issue in case )
ASRock  ( Friends system died after 2 weeks. Further inspection lots of tiny solder balls all over the board and some falling off.)
ECS       ( Died after 6 months of 24/7 use as file server. Bad Caps )

WORST

*In addition to notes above to brands, I have seen other issues with Foxconn, MSI, ASRock, and ECS that strengthen the need to avoid those brands. Although my daughters Foxconn system is running ok now with the replacement USB sound setup. This system has run for about 8 years now since it was built and audio died at the 5 year mark.

Not sure if this follows what everyone else feels about brand quality, but my personal experience sets it in this order of preference and avoidance..LOL

[patio]

I personally wouldn't give any of those MBoards a 2nd...or 3rd chance...
Been there...done that...got no t-shirt.

[Calum]

Heh, sure, it was worth a try, shame it didn't work out for you in the long term.

I tend to take some manufacturers as I find them, Biostar and Foxconn aren't always junk but some of their models are so you have to take care.
Most Asus and Gigabyte boards are at least decent, it's not often they make a board that's prone to major problems above and beyond the expected failure rate.  Intel boards are also usually fairly solid although lacking in features and can be quite expensive for what they are.  Zotac make some good niche boards.  MSI, Asrock and ECS I would never buy under any circumstances due to past experiences with their products.

[Calum]

Just a quick update - the Frankenshuttle is now running a Xeon E5430, equivalent to a Core 2 Quad Q9450.  The Q9450 generally costs around £60 used, the Xeon was £15.  Temps are fine at around 55C under load, overclocking will commence after I've ensure it remains stable over the next week or so.

I have a few more boards to test, just need to pick up a few more Xeons!

[DaveLembke]

Sweet on your success.... also like the Frankenshuttle name as for I have named a HP Pavlion system Frankenstein in the past since it was created as the result of a lightning struck system that was given to me.

It needed a new PSU, Hard Drive, and Motherboard, yet the CPU and RAM were good. Threw away the 56k modem that was arc flashed with burned traces. Added motherboard from an eMachine, swapped the eMachine 2Ghz Celeron CPU out for the Pentium 4 2Ghz CPU from the lightning struck HP, added PSU from a Dell tower, added 160GB IDE HDD from an IBM Desktop, and added the 512MB stick from the HP and 512MB stick from the IBM to have 1GB max memory on this system. System ran well, but was showing its age back in 2007 when I built Frankenstein up. Now I just have the motherboard from frankenstein in storage as for its so aged and limited still with the P4 2Ghz and 1GB RAM in case I ever need to make a file server etc.

Just before putting Frankenstein up into storage, I tested Windows 7 32-bit on the Pentium 4 2.0Ghz with 1GB of DDR266 and it ran, but was not a multitasker with the single core Pentium 4 pegged at 100% almost constantly and this wasnt even SP1 yet either....LOL   Also ran into issues trying to get 1024x768 graphics out of the Intel 845GL integrated chipset, had to force Windows 7 32-bit to operate on Windows XP drivers for GPU.

Never tried Windows 8 yet... I doubt it would run 8.