Takaharu

Thanks again to HH for the prize - it was greatly appreciated

Where to begin...
Well I was over the moon when I received the motherboard. The box is HUGE; it's the largest motherboard box I've ever seen. I'd wager it's close to a full ATX motherboard's box size-wise.
Box and motherboard.

Taking out the old motherboard is always fun, especially when it's not really that old. Doesn't it look lonely? Before the E6 went in I decided to try and fit the front USB3 ports. I tried the adapter for the RV02 that allows you to put a 3.5" drive into a 5.25" slot and had no real joy. It seems that unless you have the top bay free (which was designed to house the adapter) you're out of luck with something like this as it really needs screw holes. Unfortunately for me, my card reader is taking up that slot. After much deliberating I decided to just change to the PCI panel and set aside the ports.
I transferred over the RAM, processor and HSF and managed to tuck away the power cables quite nicely by wrapping them round the bottom of the heatsink. RAM fitted. I then screwed the motherboard into place.
This is when the fun started. Because the SATA-2 ports are approximately 1cm to the right of where they're situated on the P6X58D-E, where the cables just reached, I had to re-situate where the drives were plugged in. I also replaced the disc drive data cables with 90° black cables (instead of red), which I can't figure out why I didn't do that before. Anyway, I also re-threaded the data cables for the optical drives next to the hard drives (I had tucked them in beside the hard drive cage before) and they just about reached.
The fans were also fun to re-postition. The left (looking from the window) fan was easy because I just popped it into the bottom (actual bottom, ignoring the rotation) of the motherboard. The middle fan I threaded - at a stretch - to the top-right hole in the case and round to three fan connectors at the left of the board. I did the same with the fan on the right. The top fan (now replaced with a Gentle Typhoon) quite happily plugged into the third vacant port.
The power cables were just plain mean; there is a molex port stuck on the far left of the board, above the top PCI-E slot with no chance of any case being able to have a cable tidy hole near it - you're having a power cable strewn across your motherboard whether you like it or not. As I had a power cable connected solely for the Xonar D2X I decided to use that and re-postition the power cable that I'm using (with an adapted) at the back of the case to power the soundcard. To my horror, I managed to bend the power pins on the soundcard in the process (though luckily, they still work after I semi-straghtened them). Somehow, somewhere along the lines, the soundcard moved without the power cable. So that was rather annoying.
I also established that as the E6 has USB3 they've only included one port for front USB so I can't use my top USB connections as well as the card reader (so, for the time being, I only have the card reader plugged in). I contemplated modifying the case to accommodate the USB3 panel (I'm not going to be using the front audio panel either) but I don't think I'll be able to fit it under the top part of the case - that section's rather thin and the USB3 panel is comparatively large.

It all worked out in the end though and I re-formatted my hard drive after backing everything up. I even managed to back up my SQL database, which I had forgotten to do before reformatting.
Semi-final installation - I'm still waiting for two spangly new graphics cards.
As you can see, I have replaced the top fan with a Gentle Typhoon (1450RPM) and I have two Akasa Apache Black fans on the 512 both facing in the same direction. I've connected them to the same port using a dual PWM cable.
There is a bunch of power cables strewn across the bottom of the case because I'm using a GTX 280 OC2 temporarily until my 570s arrive. That uses an 8-pin and a 6-pin so there's 5 PCI-E power cables (one of which is not plugged in on the PSU) and a SATA power cable because it won't fit around the back of the case to all 3 drives (I say all 3 because the SSD is completely separate and shares a molex power cable (with adapter) with the soundcard).
My system seems to be overall faster, which is probably more due to the fact that I have reformatted and don't have any Windows Updates yet. My two annoyances are that I had to download the USB3 drivers from the ASRock website because the one that I installed off of the disc apparently didn't work (very minor annoyance) and the other one hopefully someone can help me out with:

How do you get the motherboard to automatically adjust the fan speeds? I can set levels of fan speeds, which seems to be fairly manual or set "full on", which I have deduced does what it says on the tin - leaves the fans at full blast. There's a temperature threshold when I set a level but I don't really understand what that does. Also, setting the level at its lowest - level 1 - doesn't get the fan speed on the CPU down to as low as I had it on the P6X58D-E (700RPM using Q-Fan). Can anyone help with this?

Overall, I'm happy with the motherboard and its extra gubbings. Another mild annoyance is that if I do go over to SATA-3 I'll need to buy data cables too - the E6 came with 6 SATA-2 cables (none right-angle), 3 molex to SATA power cables, a 3-way SLI bridge, a 2-way SLI cable, an IDE cable, a floppy cable but no case sticker and no SATA-3 cables. I'm also surprised at their choice of colour for the SATA cables: yellow. A blue and silver theme on a black background and they've gone for yellow data cables... The IDE cables are blue, though.

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Veridian3

For the temperature/fans, from memory. You set the temp to be the level you want the component to stay below, then the fan speed to achieve it.

For example, setting the CPU to 50 will mean that the CPU fan runs at a low RPM until the CPU hits 50. Then the fan will kick in to maintain that level (at the speed you select).

For the data cables, from what I remember (again) those cables from ASRock will do SATA 2 or 3 fine. No need to buy additional cables, unless you get more drives than you have cables

Takaharu

Thanks for clearing those up.

For the temperature, I have it at the default level of 50 and the fan speed at level 1 though the fans are over 1,000 RPM with the CPU at about 35 degrees. Is that as low as it will go? It's acceptable, by all means, but it'd be odd if that's the lowest fan speed achievable.

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Veridian3

If I get the chance any time soon I will check and let you know what speeds I see.

Takaharu

Thread Necro

What's wrong with this picture?


I didn't notice until just recently as I've been using an ASUS Xonar D2X (still am). Is there anything that I could try to see if the onboard audio appears?
I've already installed the Realtek drivers from the ASRock website but nothing changed.

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Veridian3

Have you checked if it is disabled/enabled in the BIOS?

Takaharu

Occurred to me literally straight after posting. I rebooted, changed the onboard from auto to enabled but it's still not showing.

Added: I've also updated the BIOS for sanity's sake and marked the onboard as enabled again but still no difference.

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Veridian3

What happens when you try to install the driver from the ASrock website?

Takaharu

That was the one I used. It says it installed successfully then nothing changed after reboot. I haven't tried downloading it from the RT website as I don't have a week spare to wait for it.

Added: I re-downloaded it from the ASRock website for sanity's sake, rebooted and it's now there. Random.

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Veridian3