I bought from Eastluna.com. No special reason other than when I purchased they had stock and no one else had received them yet. A couple days later looks like many other sites had received their. Paid $350. I will say the Eastluna.com experience was fine, they shipped same day on a mid-afternoon order.
I had to go out of town this past weekend so I haven't had as much time to spend with the new rig as I was hoping. Initial results are positive:
- Manufacturing looks great. Very well laid out.
- Lots of room for the Tuniq Tower 120 to fit. Only real scrunch was getting to the CPU power plug on the mombo, but that's more the fault of my case than the motherboard. (The case has a slide-out mombo tray that has a corner brace support. Between that brace and the Tuniq it's tricky to get at the CPU power plug.)
- Had some initial trouble first getting it running but the problems were either simple or of my own making. Only notable thing on Abit's part is the mombo shipped with the CMOS clear micro-switch active on the back panel. Once I deduced that from the POST error code on the mombo LED display it was pretty easy.
- Note to dyslexic self: "8.3" is not the same as "8.E". Checked everything out on the bench with the stock Intel fan then reassembled in the case with the Tuniq. The system would power up then shut down with the 8.E message. Wasted a bunch of time trying to determine what's wrong with my power or concerns I damaged the CPU installing the Tuniq (8.3 = power to CPU problem). However "8.E" is "CPU Fan Problem", but the CPU fan was running. Note: don't plug CPU fan into the system fan power port, make sure it's in the CPU fan power port right next door so the motherboard can sense the power draw.
- Once I was through my own errors, the system came up fine on the first shot. No boot issues with memory or video on the shipping BIOS. Memory appears to have autodetected accurately.
Preparing to start experimenting with both OC and RAID, have not done either yet. Hopefully my retail copy of Vista Ultimate from the Intel deal will be here shortly, not sure when they're supposed to ship that.
Should be fun putting in a brand new OS on a brand new workstation and playing with OC. I fully expect to have no clue who to troubleshoot first if I do have issues. I saw someone from Anand on another thread say there's a BIOS FSB hole from 450-500 and they were awaiting a new BIOS rev. Will see if that's the case over the next couple days.
Silverstone TJ09 black/window
Abit IN9 32-MAX
Seasonic M12 700W
Tuniq Tower 120
EVGA 8800GTS
2x Raptor 74GB 16mb ver
E6300
Corsair 2GB PC8500 XMS2 Dominator
Windows Vista Ultimate