Anyone try an Intel i5-2500K + GIGABYTE GA-P67A-UD3 build yet?

[soarwitheagles]

I'll be using the Antec 300. Again, I'd like to go with something with more space (I really have my eye on the HAF 922) but the 300 is within my budget.

Baha,

That Antec 300 is a very nice mid tower case.  I wish some of the more modern mid tower cases were on sale for you now!  Every now and then you can find incredible deals on the cases [I was able to purchase Cool Master's Sniper cases last year for around $45 each and this year Fry's had the HAF 932 for $25 after rebate].  These types of deals are rare.  Perhaps you could build with the Antec 300 and then when a super deal comes around, upgrade to an even nicer case!

A couple of things about the Antec 300:

1. It does fit Cool Master's Hyper 212 plus
2. Has a limit of 11 inches for length of your GPU
3. More fans can be added if you need them
4. Absolutely stellar reviews!
5. Many, many system builders have used the Antec 300 over the last few years and love em'.

I hope you can find a good deal on the Antec 300 Baha!  It is a great mid tower case.

Enjoy!

Soar

[faizoff]

I assembled my PC a few hours ago with this combination along with 4 GB DDR3 1333 Mhz RAM, 64 GB Crucial Real SSD C300 Sata III Hard drive and Radeon HD 4680 with a 650 W power supply running Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit. Viewed on a 23" ASUS 2MS VH236H RT monitor.

I upgraded from a Core 2 Duo E4400 2.0 Ghz CPU, Gigabyte 81865GME-775-RH motherboard, 1.5 GB DDR PC3200 (400) Mhz  RAM, ATI 9600 XT self assembled computer made 4 years ago running Windows XP professional 32 bit edition. My old monitor was a 15" generic cheaply made brand with a max resolution of 1024 x 800.

Obviously thats a huge leap and currently enjoying the upgrade.

I have yet to test it's potential and so far am loving it from what I've seen. Complete Win 7 installation took less than 15 minutes. Shut down time is 4 or 5 seconds. Now the boot time is what is annoying me. Before I installed the Gigabyte drivers after POST it would directly start the windows startup and the whole process would take about 20 secs or so. I should add that the Hard drive light is not on during that time and I doubt it's reading it at that time, hard drive light starts after the windows loading screen starts.

After I installed the drivers and extra software that came with the CD and rebooted there's this annoying line that comes after POST that says "Loading Operating System..........................." and each dot is a second. That stays up for 20 secs or so and then windows loads. I've been racking my head for the past 2 hrs trying to figure out what prompted that screen to load.

Anyone have any ideas? I'll try playing around again tomorrow as it's late right now. I'd appreciate feedback on this.

The Bios version I have is the default one F4. I'll upgrade the BIOS sometime later. Haven't tried any overclocking as yet, will give it a shot later.

[Ziddith]

I also got that slow booting thing. It's when you set boot order cd-rom first and dont have a bootable cd in it. Have no idea why it does this, but the temporary solution is to always have hard drive first unless you are booting from cd.

[faizoff]

Holy crap you're right. Thanks a lot. Doing that has made my boot time exactly 30 secs. Now I need to figure out why my crucial ssd c300 is rated 5.9 on windows when almost everywhere I've read its rated much higher.

[Ziddith]

Are you running AHCI mode instead of IDE?

[Dark Mantis]

There is really no need to set your optical drive to primary boot device anyway as if you want to boot from DVD you can just press F12 as you are booting and it will take you to a boot option screen.

[faizoff]

Are you running AHCI mode instead of IDE?

Yes I am.

[Dark Mantis]

Your C300 is normally a fast SSD and as such would expect a better report from WEI. However WEI is extremely buggy and nobody takes any real notice of it. Try using a proper benchmarking program like Crystal Disk Mark or AS-SSD to give you an accurate reading.

[faizoff]

Yea I've read other people having the same issue on the same drive and they changed their drivers from the default msahci to some other driver. I haven't done that but might give it a try.

I did a benchmark and got around 330 MB/s

[Dark Mantis]

Well 330 isn't a bad speed. I have a Corsair Performance 256GB  SSD and I only get in the mid 200s.

[faizoff]

Oh absolutely, I'm not saying it's a bad speed. Just saying that windows is having trouble rating it higher when it's performing as such.

[PeterT]

Holy crap you're right. Thanks a lot. Doing that has made my boot time exactly 30 secs. Now I need to figure out why my crucial ssd c300 is rated 5.9 on windows when almost everywhere I've read its rated much higher.

Lol

I also get a 5.9 with a WD Caviar Black; a WDC WD6402AEX drive; 640 GB; with a buffer to host rated as 6 Gb/s. And yes... AHCI mode

[Dark Mantis]

Wel it is impossible to get a higher rating than 5.9 for any magnetic disk on WEI. Even two Western Digital Black SATA3 6GBs in a RAID0 configuration only scores 5.9. If you want any more you have to go solid state.

[faizoff]

So after a little digging around I found http://www.forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/HELP-Fresh-Build-with-C300-64GB-Low-WEI-Score/m-p/32562

on the Crucial forums of a person with similar circumstances as me with regards to the C300 rating. They changed the drivers that were the default installation by Win 7 from msahci to intel RST ones.

The link is in the last post of that thread to the Intel drivers. It's made a big differnce as far as I can tell, things seem to be a lot smoother and boot time is now under 25 secs. The Windows rating is 7.8 and I couldnt be happier.

Oh and I've overclocked the CPU to 4.4 Ghz at the moment and this thing is blazing fast even with the stock cooler.

[Dark Mantis]

You sound like one happy bunny now! Definitely seems more like what you would expect to get out of your system.