Digital Home Thoughts: The Dynamic Duo: Intel's Core 2 Duo E6700 CPU & D975XBX2 Motherboard

The System I Had Built
I have a confession to make: I've never been particularly good at installing motherboards into cases. I've had a few bad experiences with the process in the past, and when given the choice of paying someone to do it for me or doing it myself, I always opt to get it done by a professional. Once the motherboard is mounted I can attach anything to it - I'm comfortable swapping out CPUs, RAM, etc. In retrospect, given the excellent instructions Intel provided, perhaps I could have done the motherboard install - but I was also travelling a lot in March and wanted to focus on using the system rather than fussing with a motherboard install. I had a local company - Memory Express put it together for me, and they did a great job.


Figure 5: Not the best picture in the world, but just like the Millennium Falcon, it's got it where it counts kid.

Since I was going to use some parts from my then-current workstation - a Shuttle SD11G5 - I ended up swapping out a few things. Here's what the system consisted of in the end:

• Lian Li PC-6070B Plus II Silent Aluminum Chassis;
  
• Zalman CNPS7700-Cu CPU cooler;
  
• Western Digital Raptox X hard drive (10,000 RPM, 150 GB);
  
• Maxtor 7200.10 hard drive (7200 RPM, 500 GB);
  
• 2 x 1 GB Kingston DDR2 667mhz RAM;
  
• Enermax NoiseTaker II 600 watt power supply;
  
• ATI Radeon X1950 Pro (256 MB);
  
• Pioneer A-108 16x DVD burner.

Not all the parts are cutting edge - the Pioneer DVD burner is pushing a year old - but the parts that really matter for day to day performance (CPU, RAM, hard drive, video card) are all up to snuff.

Driver Hunting Easier Than Normal
When installing an operating system on a new PC, the process tends to go like this: install the OS, it boots into a barely functioning mode with most on-board devices not working, then go and seek out all the proper drivers. With Windows Vista, things are quite different. Although I was unable to go all the way up to 1920 x 1200 screen resolution with the default Vista video driver, everything else on the system was working properly immediately after the install - I had Internet access right away, which is a big change from installing Windows XP. Windows Vista has far more drivers available to it than Windows XP, and it makes things much easier. Not surprisingly, the included Intel driver CD wouldn't work in Vista at all - the setup process wouldn't run (see my problems above).

I went to the Intel Web site to seek out the latest drivers, and after I quickly found and downloaded my first driver, I realized something: this was the first Intel motherboard I had ever used. I've always used Asus, Abit, Gigabyte, and Shuttle motherboards - and as a consequence, I've always suffered through their complex Web sites and slow/overloaded download servers. The other day I was looking for updated Vista drivers for an Asus motherboard, and it took me nearly 30 minutes of trying before I was able to download all the drivers. The reason? The Asus FTP servers - all of them - were overloaded with requests and it was nearly impossible for me to get the files I needed. The Intel server, on the other hand, was able to serve up all my downloads on the first try, and usually at speeds nearly 400 KB per second. I downloaded LAN drivers, audio drivers, chipset drivers, the Intel Viiv 1.6 software, and the latest BIOS (only two weeks old at the time of this writing).

Doing a BIOS update on the D975XBX2 was a joy compared to how I've had to do it on other motherboards - Intel offers an ISO download from their site with the updated BIOS on it. If you're not familiar with what an ISO is, basically it's a single image of a whole CD - when you burn the image as a single file using the proper software, the CD will contain all the proper files. In the case of the Intel BIOS ISO, it turned a CD into a bootable disk with the BIOS updating software and the BIOS itself. I rebooted the PC with the CD in the drive, it booted from the CD, and with a couple of keystrokes, I applied the BIOS update. It's unfortunate that Windows Vista doesn't have the ability to burn ISO files to CD - thankfully Intel offers no less than four methods of updating the BIOS (including using a USB Flash drive).

I did notice something peculiar though about the BIOS update: once the update was finished and the machine rebooted, when Windows Vista loaded the ATI video card driver, the ATI software was no longer functioning. I had to uninstall, reboot, and reinstall before it started working again. That's not something I've seen before - a BIOS update breaking video card drivers - but after re-installing the drivers, everything was fine. In retrospect I should have done the BIOS update before installing Vista. It might also be related to this ATI Blue Screen of Death problem that I immediately started having on this system after installing the ATI Catalyst 7.3 drivers.