DescentBB

Yup I was completely expecting it after all the love everyone in DBB was giving the brand.

So with a decent tax return expected, I went out and splurged.

I got:

CPU: AMD64 3200+
MOBO: ASUS A8N PCI-E SLI
VID: PNY geforce 7600 PCE-E
HD: Maxtor 100Gig 7200RPM SATA

I Put it all together, reinstalled the OS from scratch and its all working great.

However, I am new to 64bit and PCI-E.

And I know there are some folks in here who could give me some pointers on performance tuning and what to look out for. (I.E. ASUS has these \"PEG\" parameters in the BIOS)

So thanks in advance for any pointers.

Im really not an over clocker, but I do want to know if there are some PCI-E tweaks to look out for.

I havnt ventured to far into PCIe tweaks, but try tightening RAm timings some, that will do good on its own, OCing is easy as hll, and Id recommnd it, a few hundred mhz are not going to hurt that chip.

I took Lobsters advice and locked down the memory timings to the Kingston specs on their web page.

But I still was getting occasional frameyness.

I verified all the chipset drivers were the latest, and the BIOS was only 1 behind the latest.

I ran memtest86 overnight. No problems.

But then I noticed certain programs dealing with sound, causing page fault BSODs.

I checked the Realtek driver that ASUS had on their site against what Realtek had on their own site and it was 12 versions behind. DOH!

I upgraded and it fixed a huge amount of problems.

this is why I love non-integrated sound