Setup, Installation and Stress Tests

When installing a tall cooler with a back plate like the Coolermaster Hyper 212 Plus, you have to mount it to the board before mounting the board onto the motherboard tray. While a little cumbersome, I still found it easier than straining with the Scythe Infinitys' little plastic push pins. The CPU fan header is located in the typical spot. It is nice that little annoyances like oddly located CPU fan headers is no longer present in most any enthusiast board. There is also a convenient fan header for the rear exhaust fan just below the CPU mounting socket. I have two front mounted intake fans, and thankfully there is two more fan headers at the front of the board that I could attach with a quick reroute of the fan power cables. While the bios has great CPU fan speed controls the system fan headers can only be set to 50%, 75%, or full power. I keep mine at 50%, which seems to be enough to keep the airflow in the case moving just fine. I'll go more into noise and temperature results later.

The front panel connectors come with a nice little adapter which you connect the pins to, then plug directly into the board. This is becoming more common these days, and I thank the great flying spaghetti monster every time I see one included. Nothing was more upsetting than connecting individual pins to the motherboard in the tight quarters of the case. USB headers are now standard, so that isn't an issue any longer.

SATA cabling, and 4+4 pin power connections are suited fine more me. Again, I would like the ATX power connector at the edge of the board, but it didn't impact this build. If you had an IDE drive though, you would have a hard time working with the cable buried under the fat ATX power connector. There was easily enough room for the memory I chose, despite the large size of the CPU cooler used. Even if ram with ridiculously large heat spreaders was used it wouldn't be an issue.

My biggest annoyance with this board, as still with many new boards, is the placement of the clear CMOS jumper. I've not yet had to use it, but it is buried under the cooler of the video card. Looking into the manual, it seems if you press the motherboard power button three times without allowing proper boot it will revert to default settings. I guess that is okay, but it's still a bit of a confounding annoyance with almost every motherboard. Some boards have a clear CMOS switch on the back plate. I don't know why more enthusiast boards don't have this.

Once cable running and organizing is complete, you'll be set to go.

Booting up from the Windows 7 DVD was no problem at all. And installation went flawlessly. I then commenced initial stress testing. I loaded on Prime95, RTHDRIBL, Realtemp, CPUz, and GPUz. Prime95 was run for 4 hours with small ffts, to stress the CPU. No problem. Then I ran a test stressing the memory for 4 hours using large ffts. Finally I did a blend test. Everything was looking good so far. Temperatures were maxing at about 54C when CPU was at 99% load. Not bad at all. Idle, it was sitting at a comfy 27C. To be sure the GPU was solid I loaded on the newest Catalyst Control Center and drivers, then let the 4890 chew away at RTHDRIBL for a few hours.

I declared it stable enough after this stress session and begin loading on all my 'crap'. Open office, games, and other various software utilities. Once complete a defrag is done. The stock running Core i5 system is now up and running.

...However, I've never been one to accept stock. As an adamant overclocker, I no sooner got everything complete before my overclocking senses started buzzing.

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