Last week my house got hit by lightning. It was inevitable; I live in St Petersburg, FL which is the lightning capitol of the world. My house came out of it okay (mostly) and the current surge jumped through my cable box, through my router and toasted my PC, PS3 and wireless router. Somehow the RoadRunner/Brighthouse Networks cable modem toughed it out.
Originally I thought maybe it was just the power supply unit that failed (PSU) so I bought a new one on Amazon.com and had it shipped overnight by the UPS elves. Long gone are the days I have multiple spare computers laying around so I needed something to test. I plugged the PSU in and still didn’t have power, so my motherboard or CPU were toast. There were no tell-tale beep codes so it was a safer bet it was the mobo but you never know! Without being able to tell which, I ordered replacements for each component from Newegg.com.
Yesterday I busted out my screwdriver and had my 8 year old daughter help me do the rebuild. I swapped in the new motherboard and left all of my old parts in. It booted right up without a hitch. I opted to keep the new video card, a good bargain GeForce 220 GT which is a slight upgrade over my 8600 GTS that I’ve had since 2007.
The Asus P5Q SE Plus motherboard does everything my old Abit board at a smaller formfactor. There’s still six SATA ports, front and rear USB expansion ports, and also includes SPDIF jacks with a high-definition audio chipset in the event I feel like plugging my PC into a receiver. Windows 7 booted up like a dream and installed all of the proper drivers. The only hitch was the “open box” motherboard, which didn’t have the software CD so I ended up going to Asus’ website and downloading the proper sound manager software. Without it, Windows defaulted to the SPDIF outputs which did me no good and I didn’t have sound.
My current rig is not even close to “top-of-the-line” but it handles everything I do without issues. I’m an avid computer gamer (my PS3 was used more as a Blu-Ray player and media center) and I hobby with photo-manipulation and graphics design. I don’t need a rig with SLI and can’t justify spending thousands on a computer to eek out a higher frame rate. As long as I can pull off 30+ FPS on high or medium settings with 2x AA I’m happy.
Current Specs (for those who wonder)
- 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo (soon to be overclocked to 3.2 GHz once more)
- 4 GB Corsair RAM
- Galaxy Geforce 220 GT (1GB DDR2 RAM)
- Lite-On Lightscribe DVD RW drive
- 2x320GB SATA drives (7200 RPM)
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Just come across your page whilst looking for the software cd that should have come with the asus p5q se plus. I got if off ebay for £10 untested so it was a risk but a risk worth taking for the spec of the board. Great news it works too. I am 23 and this was my first build, well actually i used my hdd, cpu, upgraded my ram to 4gb 800mhz to rebuild my dell (blimey dell are hard to upgrade hence the massive overhaul) New case the lot.
Reasons: I am also a graphic designer and my current stock rig just didnt cut the mustard. I have always been a gamer with out the gear to game. now though thingsare going to change.
My new rig:
Asgard all black chassis mid tower
Corsair tx 650w
asus p5q se plus
intel e5200@ 2.5ghz soon to be 3.3/6(heard these are great chips for ocin) possibly higher but not sure how stable…still need to get my akasa venom cpu hsf.
640gb wd 7200rpm
msi hd 4850 1gb ddr3
4gb 6400 ram
tower came with intake fans 12omm 49 cfm
added 3 yate loon D12SM-12′s 70.5 cfm.
need the hsf and we are ready to make this baby move some ghz.
how well did your board oc your c2d, what model was your cpu?
regards lee
You should be able to get the drivers from the Asus website. I was able to download them for the P5Q SE Plus, but it was a little slow from Taiwan to America.
I have read some good stuff here. Definitely worth bookmarking for revisiting. I wonder how much effort you put to create such a great informative site.
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