Motherboard recommendations for a Q6600 needed

[Harrison]

Re: Motherboard recommendations for a Q6600 needed

Can anyone tell me the length of a Sapphire Radeon 4870 1GB graphics card?

I need to check one will actually fit in my case before I order it. I already ruled out the nVidia cards because they are ridiculously long and would hit my drive cage.

Also, what are your opinions of the Asus P5Q Deluxe vs the Asus P5Q Premium motherboards? I've decided to get one of those two, and I can get them for the same price. The Premium might be a bit of overkill with 4 PCI-E slots for quad GPUs, 10 rear USB2 ports, and 4 rear Gigabit Lan ports, but for the same price is it worth it over the Deluxe motherboard?

Finally what do you think of the Coolermaster Realpower Mudular PSU range? I will probably be using an existing 600W PSU for the moment with the new system build, but I would like to get a modular PSU at some point to remove the unused cable clutter, and these seem good for the price. Have any of you used this range of PSU?

 

[imnogeek]

Re: Motherboard recommendations for a Q6600 needed

it is on amazon usa with dimensions

Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 3.5 x 11.5 inches ; 3 pounds

 

[Harrison]

Re: Motherboard recommendations for a Q6600 needed

Cheers. So 11.5". Now to find the measuring tape...

hmm... I did some measuring and a 4870 will be right up against the removable drive cage in my Thermaltake Tsunami case.

However I've done some more searching and I've now found a lot of hardware forums where people are stating the cards are only 9" long, which is much better and will easily fit.

According to one good source most cards are currently 9" long, with the exception of the HD3870X2, HD4870X2, 9800GTX and all GTX 200 series cards, which are all 10.5" long. So it looks like the 11.5" length was wrong.

 

[Harrison]

Re: Motherboard recommendations for a Q6600 needed

The new system is now fully built and up and running.

Final specs are:

Q6600 CPU
Arctic Freezer 7 Pro CPU cooler
Asus P5Q Deluxe Motherboard
8GB Corsair DDR2 Ram
XFX HD 4870 "XxX Edition" 1GB Graphics card (factory over clocked)
Thermaltake Toughpower modular 750W PSU
16x PATA DVD-RW (might change this for an SATA drive at some point)
120GB Seagate SATA Boot HDD
2x 1TB Samsung F1 SATA HDDs
Thermaltake Tsunami Dream Case
Vista 64bit SP1

Future additions I might add:

XFi sound card. However the onboard HD Audio seems pretty good at the moment.
SATA BD-RW.

The system is running very nicely. At the moment the processor (at stock speed) is idling at 14-16 degrees and the most I have got it up to under load is 24 degrees! So it is running very nice and cool and ready to be overclocked!

I do however have one issue with the system. When I supply power to the PSU all of the system's fans spin up and stay running. This includes the case, CPU, GPU and PSU fans. The system is however still switched off and the HDDs are powered down. Pressing the case's on button powers up and boots the system as normal.

Then when I shut down the system Vista shuts down correctly and the HDDs spin down, but the case fans are all still spinning. The only way to shut them down is to turn the PSU off directly, or at the wall.

Anyone got any ideas what could be causing this?

I've been looking around some forums trying to work this out, but so far without success. A few forums are all mentioning the Marvell SATA controller the motherboard is using, and stating that if you have a PATA DVD-RW connected and set to master this can cause this to happen. I therefore changed it to slave as suggested, but it was no different.

I've also looked though the BIOS power settings but can't see anything in there. Any ideas what it might be in the BIOS?

Other than that it has to be something physically connected to the system causing it. But what?

 

[Harrison]

Re: Motherboard recommendations for a Q6600 needed

I've done some futher testing, but it is still doing the same thing.

I've cleared the BIOS and restored it to default settings (when yo clear the BIOS on this motherboard, it wipes it, and then when you boot up the next time it copies a clean copy of the BIOS back across from a second BIOS on the motherboard). That didn't help. All it did was reset the setting I had to allow the front panel audio headphone socket to work so I had to set that again.

I've also completely disconnected the PATA DVD-RW to see if that was causing any problems as mentioned by many people in other forums, but that made no difference.

Next I'm going to try disconnecting all of the SATA and PATA drives and see what happens when the system is supplied power. I was working correctly in that setup when I was building it, before I connected the SATA drives and installed the OS. If it is the SATA drives I'm not sure what could be done to fix that.

 

[rkauer]

Re: Motherboard recommendations for a Q6600 needed

Use an "external" fan controller with heat sensors.

 

[Harrison]

Re: Motherboard recommendations for a Q6600 needed

How is that going to fix my problem? The CPU, PSU, case and graphics card fans are all spinning without the system booted. I tried disconnecting the case fans but the CPU, PSU and GPU fans still sit their spinning madly until I remove power from the PSU directly. So a fan controller isn't going to help.

It has to be an issue with something connected to the motherboard.

I know it isn't the graphics card because the 4 disgnostic lights on Radeon 4870's are showing everything is fine with the card.

When I'm not using the system later tonight I'm going to disconnect all things connected to the board such as external ports, drives etc and see if it then works correctly. If so I will then reintroduce each and see if I can find the cause.

 

[Harrison]

Re: Motherboard recommendations for a Q6600 needed

Further testing and I still can't get the PSU to power down unless I switch it off at the back or at the wall socket.

After disconnecting everything but the CPU, ram, GPU and PSU and it still doing the same I tried one final test. I unplugged the 24 pin motherboard power connector from the motherboard, then supplied power to the PSU, and it powered up. Now with this disconnected am I right in thinking that the PSU should not power up at all unless the power on pin is shorted with a ground using a paper clip? If so then I think I might have a faulty PSU. Would you all agree?

Quite annoying if this is the case. Means I have to dismantle everything in the case to get the PSU out again due to its size.

 

[cosmicfrog]

Re: Motherboard recommendations for a Q6600 needed

I would tend to agree about the power needing to be grounded on the right pin but I`ve come across so many powerpacks which come on without this happing

I know this might sound daft but the only thing that i can think of is usb or stand by/ suspend to ram
usb annoys me as its on all the time so my mouse is always glowing blue

 

[Harrison]

Re: Motherboard recommendations for a Q6600 needed

Not sure why, but I was using the system for a long time yesterday. About 10 hours. And then I shut it down, and the PSU shut down correctly, with the fans stopping and just the power and reset lights on the motherboard lit (as it should be). And this morning it powered up again correctly. Not spinning the fans when I switched the power to the PSU on, until I pressed the front case power button. So it has suddenly been working correctly. Very odd.

I've heard others saying about the problem with USB mice and other USB devices still being powered even when the system is shut down, but I've never encountered that on any of my systems. When they shut down the mice and other USB devices switch off too. Maybe it is only with specific motherboard and PSU combinations?