About the Asus P5B-VM SE motherboard

[MDog]

This is just an FYI post in case anybody is doing a search on this MOBO.

I upgraded to an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4ghz processor using this MOBO. It eventually works great, but I had some problems with the onboard SATA controller. It would basically spike the CPU to 100% and spit out some very unpleasant noise. After a lot of trial and error, I disconnected the SATA drives and ran a session off the PATA IDE "C:" drive. Voila! No problems. So I bought a cheap PCI SATA controller and everything works great now. It's possible I had a wrong setting (although I spent a LOT of time looking) or maybe my old SATA drives were incompatible. In any case, the $30 Syba PCI SATA controller did the trick.

Other helpful hints:

If you're using DDR2 800 memory, manually adjust the DRAM Frequency to 800 in the BIOS. You'll notice a big difference. It defaults to 533 in Auto mode.

The built in graphics worked fine for me, but I added a 16X PCIe card to run two monitors. Remember to disable the internal graphic controller in the BIOS if you do the same.

It may be obvious, but run the memory in dual channels. I installed the memory in the two yellow sockets.

My configuration:

Asus P5B-VM SE
Coolmax CX1-600B PCI Express 600W Power Supply
Corsair TWINX 2048MB PC6400 DDR2 800MHz E.P.P.
XFX GeForce 7200 GS supp. 512M PCIe graphic card
Syba SD-VIA-1A5E1IR controller card
Maxtor PATA ATA 133 "C:" drive (on the built in controller)
Maxtor SATA audio drive (on the PCI controller)
SIIG NN-440012 Firewire 3-port Pci Adapter
M-Audio ProFire 2626
Pro Tools 7.4cs5
Frontier Designs AlphaTrack