I was happy that Intel hasn’t changed anything in their architecture for reading the RAID and the ICH7 built RAID was recognized on the new motherboard using ICH9. I also gave it a try of just booting into Windows but the drivers weren’t compatible so I did a “dirty” refresh of XP. I grabbed the ICH9 drivers and did an XP refresh install with the drivers, added the motherboard drivers and brought it up. So far it’s running very well without a complete rebuild. I’ve not oc’d it yet but Crossfire is working great and I ran a few rounds of flawless UT3. I’ve also had it running Folding@Home without issue the past 2 days.

I typically rebuild with new hardware but this one went so smooth (and I really don’t have the time to rebuilt right now and the build is about 2 months old) that I think I’m going to keep it for now. When I do a rebuild, I’ll probably (and I hate saying it) go to Vista 64 to fully utilize the 4gb of RAM among other things.

I do have to say that this was one of my easiest and most flawless upgrades. Typically there’s always some small stupid thing I miss, forget or there’s something hardware related causing issues. I dropped the chip on the board, added the ram, attached the Zalman 9700 (a dream to attach compared to the Tuniq Tower), plugged in connectors and it powered on. I finished up with the cards and was booted in no time.That’s not to say it didn’t come without irritation or scars. The biggest irritation is fitting video cards and cabling inside of cases these days and avoiding fans. Part of it could be my Apevia PSU, a part the Antec Nine Hundred’s layout and a final part how they are making motherboards these days. The motherboard is nice but I hate having the SATA connectors on the side of the board rather than on the surface. This is, for the most part, an enthusiast board but Asus makes some of the pieces more difficult for that same crowd that swaps hardware more often. Having a CMOS reset switch on the back is also nice. At least you can keep the case closed while doing OC testing.

I’ll toss some pictures up of the upgrade, more information and some analysis of performance and overclocking differences between this and the Intel E6600 and Asus P5W Deluxe tonight.

I also added the Intel NIC but not installed the other card in my server or started using the 3Com switch as of yet.  I needed more than a 4 port switch (I don’t need my wireless router/switch with the Uverse RG) and I wanted gigabit so I went with the 3COM 3CGSU08.  I’ll get those up tonight as well.