Well, after inspecting closely with a flashlight and magnifying glass, I'm able to see what the issue is. In this shot (close up of an LGA socket 775), you can see that each contact has a hooked end where it makes it's contact to the chip.


I noticed that three on mine are missing those tips, so there's no choice but to replace it. Luckily, the dealer is going to RMA it for me, and I'm waiting on the email with the authorization number so I can get this thing out of here and hopefully have the new one by the middle to end of next week. Looks like I get to wait some more.

Congrats on getting a new chip. Sorry to hear about the mobo issues. I just got a conroe myself yesterday. Even though I have never mounted an LGA 775 chip before I would say that it was the easiest part of the rebuild. However, pulling down the lever next to it had me a bit worried as did attaching the heat sink.

I believe that the motherboard is the same one that you bought (as mentioned here). It was a bit tricky getting both of my IDE cables, the floppy cable, a SATA cable, and the case connections in place because they are pretty much all right at the bottom of the motherboard (which is at the very bottom of my case) and they got in the way of each other. I did have few issues, for some reason it didn't want to recognize my DVD drive right away but after I manually set it up it had no problem. It was nice to be able to use my AGP graphics card and also my DDR400 ram, which work perfectly.

Yeah, that's the motherboard I got. As for how it happened, I guess it was just bad luck. I alos thought about it later that having th processor in the socket before taking that cover off would have been a good idea, that way if I'd slipped, I would have only hit the top of the chip. Anyways, too late for all of that now, guess I'll just get this thing sent back and replaced. By the way, I take it you're having to run the RAM at 4:3 ratio?

Yeah, I left the plastic cover on until the processor was in place (as per the instructions). I didn't think about it much.

The bios defaulted my ram frequency to 166 mhz but it was easy to change it to 200 mhz (DDR400). I don't know if this is what you meant by 4:3 ratio. I had to reinstall Windows XP since it wouldn't even boot, I tried it just to see if it would work (didn't really expect it to). I also installed Windows XP x64 which I am using right now (after downloading 49 updates, which were mostly security updates).

Well, what I mean by that RAM ratio, is since the Conroe uses a 1066 Mhz bus, and DDR RAM in dual channel can only achieve 800 Mhz, is that in order to make up the difference, the RAM speed would have to be on a different speed than the bus (which is what the ratio is about). And my mistake, it would be 5:4 (2x533 = DDR2 533 RAM speed (which is 1:1 with the bus) 1066 bus : 2x400 = 800 RAM (which is approximately a 5:4 ratio to the bus)). As for the instructions, mine mentioned nothing about having the processor in place first, but I should have thought about it I guess. Seems I was just a little too eager for my own good.

This post was last modified: 12-02-2006 01:05 AM by General Plot.

The page that I was following is equivalent to pages 14/15 of the online manual. Although mounting the processor seemed pretty obvious since it was only a matter of matching up the contacts of the CPU to the pins on the socket. I personally wasn't really sure what to do with the plastic cover at first since socket 478 didn't have such a cover (since the pins were on the processor).

I'd be curious to find out what bios version yours is coming with. Mine came with bios 1.80. I believe that version 1.5 is the version in which they added conroe support. I found it odd that newegg doesn't mention support for Core 2 Duos.

Using bios 1.80, I found out that Windows XP 32 bit (w/SP2) doesn't like the No-Excute Memory Protection enabled for some reason. When it is enabled it causes my computer to restart right after it starts to load XP. However, it doesn't cause any problems with Windows XP x64. I also noticed that the virtualization option is greyed out so I couldn't disable it even if I wanted to.

Hmm, hadn't seen that portion. Anyways, 1.40 is the BIOS version required to run Conroe's, so I'm sure I'm pretty safe there. Attached are shots of my CPU + cooler and another of the socket (it's very blurry, but you can see the damage area).

This post was last modified: 12-03-2006 12:26 AM by General Plot.

Wow man, now if only I would've had a S775 Pentium 4 instead of this S478, I would've gotten myself this one right away. I'm looking for a new mobo as well but I can hardly find any decent one. Hopefully Industrian's old board still works, will find it out this friday.

Congrats on the upgrade Plot, wish I had a nice conroe

Thanks Cid, although, until the new board is sent, all I can do is look at the pretty box.

hmmm.. I m interested in seeing how Plot keeps looking at a pretty box

hmmm.. I m interested in seeing how Plot keeps looking at a pretty box

Yeah, lets request a 24/7 Livestream of Plot starring at a pretty box. And then lets stare at him staring.

I always found videocard boxes more exciting

It would be interesting tbh, we could create a World Record that way , Staring at Plot stare a Box for 24/7
j/k

Well, not too worried about it. Tracking on the board I sent back shows it was delivered very early this morning, so it's just a matter of them sending a replacement out now.

OK, new motherboard finally came yesterday, and I've been having a great time testing this new toy. Here's some screens showing CPU benchmarks in SiSoft Sandra running the Arithmetic and Multimedia (SSE efficiency) tests. Also has comparisons to other chips. You can see it totally pwns the FX-62 in the second test. Also, a quick 1M test in SuperPI.
Edit: Managed to get a slight overclock on the chip (2.1 Ghz), so changed out screenshots to reflect new results. It's amazing what a small bump can do.

This post was last modified: 12-14-2006 12:30 AM by General Plot.